Man Who Lived Underground, The

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As the underpinning of a sociological study of racism in America 80 years ago, the book is of considerable interest; as a novel, the story fails to succeed. While it is good to celebrate the life of a gifted writer and further, to admit that such a travesty of justice is ever-present in the U.S., the reader still has every right to ask that The Man Who Lived Underground succeed on its own merits. After stealing a number of items, Fred tunnels into the basement of a real estate office that “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” From his hiding place, he watches someone enter the combination to a safe. When that person leaves, Fred opens the safe himself, thinking to steal the money in it. But something unusual happens: 19

Fred is reminded of the emptiness of what awaits after death. His religious ideas about afterlife are provide a jarringly dissonant comparison to what he is looking at (“he knew that she had died expecting to reap a rich harvest of eternal happiness and there was for her now only this coldness and endless time”). his arrest, then freer when he descends into the sewers and forsakes his faith but also adrift and lonesome. Neither life offers a full measure of humanity, When he falls asleep, he has a nightmare of being in a body of water and seeing a woman with a baby asking for help. He takes the baby from her just before the woman disappears under the water. Holding the baby, he’s unable to dive to save the woman. Finally, he puts the baby down in the water to find that it floats. He goes into to save the woman, but cannot find her. When he resurfaces, he sees the baby is gone too. Then, he realizes he can no longer stand in the water and is choking on water as well.Yet his time in the subterranean world has defamiliarized the world aboveground, such that the street comes to seem as surreal as the sewers once did. “A strange thing was happening. Traffic stopped, but no one rushed forward to challenge him.” As Fred stands in the middle of the street, the cars swerve around him and the drivers yell at him for disrupting traffic. He sees a police officer and briefly wonders, “Was this real?” Then he walks past a mirror, inspects his sullied appearance and eyes glaring “oddly,” and laughs. He is nearly as unrecognizable to himself as the simple happenings of life on the street are. 26 Fred Daniels is an honest upright man. He is a husband and soon-to-be father. Then one day he is rustled up by the cops and accused of a crime he did not commit. He is beaten, brutalized and forced to sign a confession. When he sees his chance he escapes and runs underground. Down in the darkness he is able to see more as a man apart from the world. Julia Wright said she sees in those chapters the inspiration for her father’s future work. “To me it is a sort of a reflection on what creativity is. It’s creativity on creativity. It’s a rehearsal for all the creativity that’s going to follow.”

The representation of Rachel (and, let us not forget, their newborn child) as crowding out more important matters is troubling enough on its own. But in The Man Who Lived Underground, Fred’s isolation from Rachel is caused, at least in part, by the state and by the alienation and dislocations created by the violence to which it arbitrarily subjects its citizens. After all, had Fred remained in police custody at the hospital, he would have been incarcerated and separated from her anyway, and he flees his wife only because the cops tried to frame him for a crime. For Wright, the casualties of police violence include not only the person assaulted but also the families broken by criminalization and incarceration. 33 There is a strong existentialist and nihilistic bent to the character of Fred once he is underground and no longer within the grasp of society. The injustice he experiences forces him to question his morals, his values, his perception of what is valuable in the world and his religion.

The Man Who Lived Underground reminds us that any ‘greatest writers of the 20th century’ list that doesn’t start and end with Richard Wright is laughable. It might very well be Wright’s most brilliantly crafted, and ominously foretelling, book.”—Kiese Laymon