by Patrick Chura, Ph.D,
University of Akron
Though all of Richard Wright’s novels are still relevant, some of his fans have wished he’d written one about the racial tyrannies of U.S. law enforcement. He did, and we now have it.
Wright, who died in 1960, completed The Man Who Lived Underground in 1941. The first copies of the book reached stores a month ago. The reasons for the eighty-year publication delay are revealing.
In 1940, with Native Son still on the bestseller lists, Wright’s editors at Harper & Brothers saw a chance to leverage his success. They had a hunch that an uplifting tale with Wright’s name on it would be a hit and pressured the celebrity author for a new book under the upbeat title Black Hope.
Wright agreed to the idea, but the Black Hope project languished. He immersed himself in 12 Million Black Voices, crafting a nonfiction narrative to accompany a collection of 147 photos depicting stark realities of Depression-era black life.
Wright was deeply affected by the images of grinding poverty in the North and “slavery by another name” in the South. Each of the faces in the photos–including lynching victims and chain gang convicts–could easily have been his face.
He dropped Black Hope to instead produce a novel about a crime more terrifying than the murder of Mary Dalton in Native Son but precisely equal in horror to the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
The Man Who Lived Underground was rejected by Harper & Brothers in early 1942. The disappointed editors found the book unsettling. They feared Wright’s story would be too shocking for white readers, who might tolerate a message of Black Hope but not one of Black Lives Matter.
The new Library of America edition of The Man Who Lived Underground lays bare the nightmare of race-based police brutality. Officially published on April 20, the exact date of the verdict in the Derek Chauvin trial, the novel is already being called the most relevant book of 2021.
Part One takes place on a sweltering Saturday afternoon in an unnamed city. Fred Daniels has just received his weekly pay in exchange for his labor at the home of the Wootens, an elderly white couple. “Tired and happy,” Daniels puts the money in his pocket and sets off on a homeward walk, looking forward to an evening with his wife, services the next day at the White Rock Baptist Church, and returning to work “renewed” on Monday.
When Daniels notices three policemen observing him closely from a patrol car, he feels no fear. He knows he has done nothing wrong and that the Wootens and his church minister will vouch for him.
What follows is an atrocity of a type only now being publicized by bystander cellphones.
“Come here, boy.”
“Yes, sir,” he breathed automatically.
The life of 29 year-old Fred Daniels is now in the hands of the state. Accused of murdering a white couple in the home next door to his place of employment, he is police property.
In the bloody next stages of the encounter, Daniels is driven to the precinct, locked into an interrogation chamber and beaten to unconsciousness. When the DA arrives, the prisoner’s limp body is tortured back to cognizance so he can sign a confession. He is too weak to hold the pen and the DA directs his hand across the paper.
In a later moment of police carelessness, Daniels seizes a chance to escape. Now a fugitive, he sees a half-open manhole cover and lowers himself, plunging into the darkness of a subterranean world.
As Part Two begins, Daniels is nearly asphyxiated by a flood of filth and a rotten stench. A dead infant floats by him. A blind rat is batted away. In the sewer, Daniels must steal to survive. But this surreal existence is after all not categorically different from that of Bigger Thomas in Native Son or the lives photographically depicted in 12 Million Black Voices.
The key difference is that Daniels’s underground life gives him insights into the aboveground world.
Foraging beneath the city for three days, he acquires a hoard of symbolic objects that he carries magician-like in a kind of bottomless sack. He steals food, a typewriter, a radio, tools, a meat clever, a gun, gold watches, jewels and diamonds, sensing that these objects have meaning: “They were the toys of the men who lived in the dead world of sunshine and rain he had left, the world that had condemned him.”
Daniels robs the safe of a real estate firm that makes obscene profits off the poor, then subversively uses hundred dollar bills as wallpaper for his underground hideout. Realizing that aboveground life is “something less than reality,” he defies the economic order by making a heap of diamonds on the floor, then besmearing them with the sewer slime oozing from his shoes.
His suffering gives him self-respect and a feeling of solidarity: “A strange new knowledge overwhelmed him; He was all people and they were he; by the identity of their emotions they were one.”
Suddenly it seems imperative to Daniels that he surface and share his new knowledge: “He would rise up . . . walk forth and say something to everybody.”
Richard Wright often said that The Man Who Lived Underground was his favorite among his novels. An essay included in the new edition suggests that the reason was personal: “I know how it feels to be accused without cause. . . . It is one of the most agonizing, devastating, blasting, and brutal experiences conceivable. The man who has been accused of a crime he has not committed . . . is trying to fight for his status as a human being.”
The new edition also includes an afterword by Malcolm Wright, the author’s grandson, who enlarges this significance by explaining how the black body is still destined to “serve the needs” of the police: “Should they need to mock and feel superior, he serves that purpose. Should they need a culprit for a murder, he is there. Should they need to erase evidence of their corrupt behavior toward him, his skin is there to be perforated with bullets.”
The resurrection of Fred Daniels from the underworld, in an attempt teach truths to the very law officers who abused him, prompts reactionary violence. The state requires that the messenger be silenced. At the novel’s close, the white policeman insists, “You’ve got to shoot his kind. They would wreck things.”
