Conclusion: Feeling Shame

The “laws of King Cotton,” wrote Richard Wright in the midst of the Popular Front–era, “rule our lives” (38). True to a materialist motif, 12 Million Black Voices told the story (in picture and in prose) of the lives of a black working folk. “Black lives matter” was essentially the argument Wright made more than a half a century before the phrase was popularized by a hashtag. But the pervasive focus on materialism set poor black experiences apart from mainstream American feeling even though Wright attempted to render visible the depths of black humanity....

Feeling in the Light

Much of Eudora Welty’s writing during the Popular Front era shows a writer with an eye turned toward black workers and their centrality in southern American life, from the ordinary everyday to major political events. Welty’s use of fear and desire reconfigures discourses about black workers, including myths of rape in the midst of Popular Front anti-lynching efforts. With the case of Scottsboro and others whispering in the background, her interrelated vignettes and short fiction engage the failures of the New Deal to address the painful occurrences of lynching and labor oppression experienced by African Americans. The Golden Apples (1949) and other short stories offer a sense of racial terror, fear, and desire —feelings that not only challenged perceptions of blackness but also questioned the role of white feminine agency.

Steel Feeling

William Attaway understood the ways workers were being absorbed into a military-industrial complex by way of two world wars and the Wagner Act. With the controversies over a worker’s right to strike in the backdrop, Attaway troubles the American masculine ideals of war and work through “steel feeling.” Attaway’s great skill is in using steel feeling to allow the reader to sense masculine pressure everywhere as the Moss brothers move from the red hills of Kentucky to work in the Allegheny mills. Steel feeling emerges when the inevitable accidents of work in a pressure furnace happen alongside the freak actions of men under all sorts of other pressures: the pressures to be black, to be American, to be free, to be male.

Feeling Rejected

Sarah Elizabeth Wright was a radical writer committed to leftist, anti-racist and feminist politics. Her novel draws on these commitments to imagine the layers of rejection experienced by southern black women workers in Maryland. Climates of rejection problematize the exclusionary legacies of the New Deal’s Aid to Families with Dependent Children Program. The narrative affects challenge social discourses that pathologized poor black women’s reproduction in order to deny them a place in the national body politic and the national family. When the novel places the laboring mother and her family in the laps of readers, Wright therefore poses crucial questions for her time: how responsible are we for inherited conditions and will we continue to reject our kin?

Cultivating Feeling

Ollie Miss brings together the labor politics of Alabama, reflecting George Wylie Henderson’s personal connections to the state. With this unique perspective, Henderson subtly intervenes in a labor crisis brought on by the Depression and the New Deal-era Agricultural Adjustment Act. What’s more, Henderson shifts from the focus on male workers that dominated the period, suggesting black women workers’ feeling as a central issue of his day. Setting the affect of a single migrant woman’s erotic stirrings in tension with agricultural toil, Henderson rethinks dominant labor narratives. Ollie’s real work —transcending confining labor circumstances by cultivating the pangs of erotic feeling —generates what we may call “cultivated desire.”

Introduction Black Folk Work

In the 1930s there was a sharp uptick in the reference to and articulation of an American working class. This surge was in no small part because the New Deal–era Popular Front relied on the idea and the romance of the worker. This working class became the centerpiece of a range of artistic expressions. New Deal–era images are perhaps the clearest examples of a national focus on everyday people at work. Representations of laborers appeared in a variety of mediums, at times to signal a united nation on the brink of a brighter tomorrow, and at other times to challenge the nation....