Leon R. Harris
We next find him in Iowa, married; then in North Carolina, teaching school; then in Ohio, working in steel mills. This last was his employment until about two years ago. His short stories and poems are right out of his life. In the former the peonage system, prevalent in some sections of the South, and the cruelties of the convict labor camps are more powerfully portrayed than anywhere else in American literature. The following poem will represent his writings in verse:
THE STEEL MAKERS
Filled with the vigor such jobs demand,
Strong of muscle and steady of hand,
Before the flaming furnaces stand
The men who make the steel.
’Midst the sudden sounds of falling bars,
’Midst the clang and bang of cranes and cars,
Where the earth beneath them jerks and jars,
They work with willing zeal.
They meet each task as they meet each day,
Ready to labor and full of play;
Their faces are grimy, their hearts are gay,
There is sense in the songs they sing;
While stooped like priests at the holy mass,
In the beaming light of the lurid gas,
Their jet black shadows each other pass,
And their hammers loudly ring.
What do they see through the furnace door,
From which the dazzling white lights pour?
Ah, more than the sizzling liquid ore
They see as they gaze within!
For a band of steel engirdles the earth,
Binds men to men from their very birth,
Through all that exists of any worth
There courses a steely vein.
Steamers that ply o’er the ocean deep,
Trains which over the mountains creep,
The ships of the air that dart and leap
Where the screaming eagles soar;
The plow which produces the nation’s food,
The bars that keep the bad from the good,
Skyscrapers standing where forests stood,
They see through their furnace door.
They see the secretive submarines,
And the noisy, whirring big machines,
Grinding steel into numberless things
The people know and need;
The scissors that fashion wee babies’ clothes,
The beds where the pallid sick repose,
The knife that the nervy surgeon holds
O’er the wounds that gape and bleed.