Let Me Breathe Thunder by William Attaway

First published: 1939

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Naturalism

Time of work: 1930’s

Locale: Northwestern United States

Principal Characters:

• Ed, a young, white migrant worker in his twenties
• Step, a young white man in his twenties
• Hi Boy, a nine-year-old Mexican boy abandoned by his family
• Sampson, the owner of Four Mile Farm, an apple and sheep ranch
• Anna Sampson, a blonde teenage girl who likes film magazines; she falls in love with Step
• Mag, a fifty-three-year-old black woman, a former prostitute who owns a brothel
• Cooper, Mag’s companion

The Novel

Let Me Breathe Thunder is a terse tale of three hobos in the western United States during the Great Depression. William Attaway’s novel quickly builds to its tragic climax of racial brutality by depicting the social and economic desperation of the times. Step, Ed, and Hi Boy ride the rails looking for work and adventure. They sleep outdoors, travel both by day and by night, and eat when and where they can. They are at the mercy of the elements, the train “bulls,” and the town police, who harass migrant workers.

Step and Ed have traveled the Southwest and West for years. Like thousands of other unemployed men during the Depression, they know no other life. A week before the novel starts, they meet up with Hi Boy, a Mexican boy who has ten dollars and does not speak English. Step takes the money. They travel to Seattle, where Step gets drunk, fights with a bartender over a woman, and knocks the man out. They flee from the town, buying tickets with the last of Hi Boy’s money. Uncomfortable in the train, Step insults the conductor and other passengers. They eat in the dining car but cannot pay for the meal. As they are about to jump from the train to avoid their bill, a stranger pays for their food. The stranger, Sampson, offers them a job on his farm in Yakima. Step laughs at first at the job offer, but they follow the farmer after Step flips his lucky dog tail to decide whether to accept it.

They travel in a boxcar with three other hard-luck drifters with no jobs or homes, two of them white and one black. The hobos talk of wandering desperately in search of work and discuss their inability to settle down. Whites and African Americans suffer the same indignities and poverty of the unemployed. Step gets angry at Hi Boy for complaining about the rain and cold, since such complaints violate the “code of toughness.”

In Yakima, they visit Step’s old friends, the black couple Mag and Cooper. Hi Boy gets a gun and punctures his hand with a fork to prove his courage to Step. At Sampson’s farm, they get jobs and a place to sleep. Anna, Sampson’s young daughter, likes Step, but Step sees all women as trouble. Ed warns Anna away from Step, but she pays no attention.

The farm sits in the cool clear air of the mountain desert. A family of rattlesnakes lives under the front porch, and wild pheasants feed with the chickens. Mount Rainier towers over the landscape, and thunder cracks on its snowy head even in clear weather. According to Indian legend, a trapped wandering spirit breathes thunder at its loss of freedom. Step and Ed castrate lambs and cultivate apples, but apples are left to rot on the trees because there are no buyers for them. Sampson begins to think of guns and revolution. His four sons died in World War I, and his wife died from her grief over their deaths.

Ed hints to Step about staying on the farm, but Step, afraid of growing soft, makes fun of him. Ed fears Step’s control over Anna and forces Step to promise not to touch her. After Hi Boy’s hand becomes infected, they go into town to see the doctor. The climax of the novel occurs rapidly as Step, Anna, Ed, and a girl he picks up get drunk at Mag’s house. Step sleeps with Anna, who is destroyed by the loss of her virginity. Ed wants to run, but Step brings Anna home and lies to Sampson.

They decide to stay until payday. Sampson wants Hi Boy to remain. Step and Ed prepare to leave Hi Boy, and they try to evade Anna. Anna sneaks into town to say goodbye to Step. At Mag’s house, she is attacked by Cooper and mistakenly shot in the arm by Mag. Anna is rescued by the white townspeople, who return to lynch Cooper. Cooper flees on the same train as Ed, Step, and Hi Boy. Ed saves Cooper from Step’s wrath. They ride in an open boxcar at night in the freezing rain. Hi Boy’s infection gets worse; he passes into a coma and dies. Ed and Step hide the body in a train heading for the Southwest. Lost in darkness, not sure where to go next, Ed and Step watch the train’s lights disappear over the horizon.

The Characters

The characters in Let Me Breathe Thunder are described in simple, direct language. The hard-nosed Step fights his desires and often acts kindly. His affection for Ed and Hi Boy is subtle, in contrast to his tough exterior. He keeps an old dog tail for good luck. Step wants to be good, but his basic desires and economic conditions prove his undoing. With no past and no future, Step lives for the moment.

Ed is the narrator and principal character. He tells his tale in plain, everyday English. He does not reveal his age, background, or family history. Ed and Step live for the road. As traveling buddies, they share a past of trains and jobs and an affection stronger than any in the novel. At one time they had a dog named Butch that was killed by a train. They are irresponsible and happy until they run into Hi Boy, a Mexican boy whose family has been arrested for breaking into a train to steal food. Hi Boy tries to fit into their wandering life, but Step thinks the boy is not tough enough to make it on the road.

Ed, Step, and Hi Boy go to Sampson’s farm and confront the issues of family, work, and responsibility they had neglected for so long. Sampson’s loneliness is relieved by the presence of the boys, and Step and Ed fall into a routine. Anna falls for Step and shatters the calm. Step is torn between sexual desire and fear of commitment to Anna. Ed gets Step to promise to leave Anna alone, but Step breaks his promise. After sleeping with Anna, Step wants to flee immediately but stays to get his paycheck and meet his fate. Anna sneaks away from the house and runs to Mag’s to meet Step.

Ed fears that the wandering life will destroy him, the way it destroyed the three hobos they met in the dark rail car. The fact that one of the hobos is black and that Mag and Cooper, old friends of Step, are black does not register negatively on either Ed or Step. Step had saved Mag from being run out of town by outraged whites years before. Mag claims that the West is more tolerant than the South. Until the final racial incident, Ed and Step seem remarkably free of prejudice for white men of this period. Step has told Ed about Mag but never mentioned that she was black. This integrated balance is shattered when everyone thinks Cooper raped Anna.

Ed is attracted to Mag. He respects her strength, her independence, and the fact that at the age of fifty-three she still wants a man. He is impressed by her business sense and her property. Even though Mag and Cooper’s life is far from easy, it offers the prospect of a settled existence. Mag is the strongest character in the novel because she does not live a life of illusion. Her generosity and deep understanding of human needs represent the power of folk people. The union of Mag and Cooper is destroyed when dormant racial hatred shatters the peaceful town. Even Step succumbs to insane racial rage against his old friends.

Sampson tries to maintain order, but all of his good luck symbols are destroyed. The high mountain breathes thunder into the clear sky, implying the coming forces of fate. None of the characters can change behavior soon enough to avert disaster. Cooper pretends to be attracted to Anna to make Mag jealous. He does not hurt or rape her, but Mag overreacts and shoots at Cooper, wounding Anna. Townspeople believe that there has been a rape, and Mag’s carefully balanced existence is destroyed. Step and Ed rip Hi Boy out of the only home he might have. Everyone acts against his or her best interests, caught in a tragic vise of social, economic, and biological conditions.

Critical Context

William Attaway is best known for his novel Blood on the Forge (1941), a novel with black characters about migration to the industrial North. Let Me Breathe Thunder shares many of the themes of proletarian struggle and economic determinism demonstrated in his later work. Most critics comment on the oddity of a black author writing what some call a derivative novel with white characters. Certainly, the influence of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (1937) can be seen in the work. Let Me Breathe Thunder contains three African Americans and one Mexican, who share a merciless fate with the poor white characters. Attaway demonstrates an understanding of both white and black consciousness and shows through the final climax the power and destruction of racial hatred. Written from the viewpoint of a white character, the book shows how white prejudice lies waiting to attack. The central theme of social and biological determinism applied to a novel about migrant workers establishes a democracy of the lost driven by race, class, and economic dysfunction. Let Me Breathe Thunder belongs to the proletarian novel tradition exemplified by such novels as Jack Conroy’s The Disinherited (1933) and Tom Kromer’s Waiting for Nothing (1935).

Let Me Breathe Thunder is a novel that can stand on its own. As a first novel, it successfully produces a compelling tension between characters both black and white, and environment. Its hard-bitten style is suggestive of the work of Ernest Hemingway and of the popular hard-boiled detective genre. Its blend of psychological and symbolic detail creates a moving depiction of characters swept up in forces beyond their control. The despair of characters locked in dark cattle cars hurtling through the night to nowhere resonates as an apt metaphor for Depression-era angst.

The motivations of and scenes between characters, both black and white, show an acute sense of human behavior. The plot structure tends toward the melodramatic, but the bleak tragedy of the characters’ existence provides a sweeping indictment of America’s cultural and economic state during the Great Depression. The novel shows a powerful authorial voice with an understanding of the complicated interactions of America’s class and racial systems. Black critics of the period such as Ralph Ellison and Ulysses Lee urged the author to apply this understanding to a novel addressing African American themes. Attaway responded with Blood on the Forge, one of the most powerful novels about black migration and black working conditions ever written. Unfortunately, Attaway’s achievement was overshadowed by the publication of Richard Wright’s Native Son in 1940. Attaway was a member of the Federal Writers Workshop, which aided unemployed writers in the 1930’s. He went on to write for film, radio, and television and published important work on black music from Barbados.

Bibliography

Bell, Bernard W. “Richard Wright and the Triumph of Naturalism.” In The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987. Bell illuminates the naturalist tradition in terms of black writing and analyzes Attaway’s writing closely in terms of class and race consciousness. Sees the roots of Attaway’s work in the interplay between Freudian psychology and Marxist social analysis. Stresses the biological and socioeconomic conditions that control Attaway’s naturalistic style and theme. Bell also outlines the historical and political themes of the early part of the twentieth century, including the Great Migration, the Depression, Communism, and the Chicago School of Sociology.

Bone, Robert. The Negro Novel in America. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1958. Examines Attaway’s connection to the Federal Writers Workshop. Sees the novel as unoriginal and too closely based on Steinbeck, making no new contribution to the proletarian novel of the 1930’s. Gives Attaway only a small place in the annals of black writing during the Depression.

Margolies, Edward. Introduction to Blood on the Forge, by William Attaway. New York: Collier Books, 1970. Critical and biographical survey of William Attaway, concentrating on Attaway’s second and last novel. Provides valuable information about the black migration from the South to northern urban areas that began in the 1890’s. Traces the influence of World War I and its need for war armaments and munitions in giving work to many blacks, who fled from the repressive South only to end up entrapped in another kind of living hell. Sketches Attaway’s life and demonstrates that the author’s own hobo existence provided much background for his novels.

Yarborough, Richard. Afterword to Blood on the Forge, by William Attaway. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1987. Biographical and critical essay on William Attaway, with a generous review of Let Me Breathe Thunder that places it in its literary and historical context. The statistical analysis of the Great Migration and the black working class helps to orient the reader to Attaway’s underlying themes. The first novel seems a likely start for a writer with Attaway’s history of work on ships and his wanderings as a migrant worker and hobo.

Young, James O. Black Writers of the Thirties. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973. Describes the novel as a picaresque proletarian novel that is naïve and sentimental in its search for universalities among the alienated working class. Attaway has a firm position in the ranks of black writers of the period because of his understanding of African American themes in relation to race, class, and working-class conditions.