“The Man Who Lived Underground” was first published as a short story in Edwin Seaver’s Cross-Section: An American Anthology of New American Writing in 1944, and again posthumously in Wright’s 1961 short story collection Eight Men (Literary Classics 22). This version of the narrative begins with an unnamed protagonist already on the run from the police. The audience is left to infer the circumstances that propelled his flight from the law as we are almost immediately taken into the darkness of the underground. The unnamed but racially marked protagonist undergoes an existential transformation in consciousness that propels him back to the surface, only to meet his death at the hands of the police and rot in the sewer. Understandably, this version of the story has been read as a pessimistic meditation on urban life in the 1940s and has not enjoyed the level of critical or popular attention as many of Wright’s other works. The relative lack of engagement with this text extends back to its original publication. Despite the enormous success of Wright’s best-selling work, Native Son (1940), editors at Harper & Brothers declined to publish The Man Who Lived Underground, finding the novel “an uneasy mixture of realism and allegory” with the protracted depictions of police violence against the Black protagonist to be “unbearable” (Literary Classics 223). While this may not be the only explanation behind their rejection, it seems likely that the publishers may have been concerned about how the story would be received by a white American audience amid Jim Crow.
However, in June 2021, at the request of Wright’s estate, the nonprofit Library of America published the novel in full which gives readers a look into circumstances that preceded the protagonist’s escape. He is not simply a mysterious and unnamed man on the run; rather, he is Fred Daniels: a devoted husband and soon-to-be father, a devout Christian, and above all, an innocent man. This full release, titled The Man Who Lived Underground: The Novel,follows Fred’s journey as he flees into the sewers after the police violently coerce a false homicide confession from him. Deprived of light and social contact, Fred’s sensory disorientation opens the possibility for a reevaluation of conventional meaning making systems. The absence of the white gaze allows Fred to occupy and move through otherwise inaccessible spaces such as the vault of an insurance office and behind the counters of a jewelry store. This new mobility reveals the arbitrary nature of socially constructed symbols of value such as money, jewelry, time, and, most centrally, the notion of freedom as an American ideal.
The novel troubles the meaning of freedom, in and of itself a vexed term. Many American studies scholars have worked to complicate abstract understandings of American freedom by tracing its genealogy from the nation’s founding. The possessive individualist conception of freedom is predicated upon racialized, gendered, and classed systems of exclusion and domination that are structurally embedded into our legal system. This leaves some subjects hyper-vulnerable to injustices on both the individual and structural levels. Legally vulnerable subjects are not simply excluded from the protections of the legal system, but rather, as Lisa Marie Cacho argues “form the foundation of the U.S. legal system” and are “imagined to be the reason why a punitive (in)justice system exists” (Cacho 5). That is to say that freedom, as it is understood in the context of the United States, was never meant to be extended to or exercised equally by all citizens. Wright explores the material reality of how freedom comes to be understood by legally vulnerable subjects, such as Fred, whom the law was not created to protect.
Once he reemerges, Fred implores the officers to see his underground cave papered with money and jewels as proof of his activity underground. Officer Murphy comments that “colored boys sure go off their nut easily,” and Officer Johnson replies knowingly that it is because “they live in a white man’s world” (Wright 154). As Fred frantically tries to get the officers to come underground with him, Officer Lawson shoots him and lets his body fall into the sewer and get swept away by the water, claiming that “You’ve got to shoot his kind. They would wreck things.” (Wright 159). The “things” the officers are bent on protecting are clearly not any kind of justice, but rather the established order of society that is threatened by Fred’s vision of freedom. Executing Fred and relegating him underground puts a stop to the potential for ideas like his to spread.
This is where the narrative ends, and it is usually read as Wright’s eviscerating critique of the structural injustices of society. While it is surely critical of the inequalities embedded into our supposed “justice” system, the ending does not foreclose upon the possibility for change. As Rebecca Fisher writes, Wright attempts to move “the reader toward a sense of moral outrage that would ideally extend beyond the act of reading and compel the reader toward constructive social action” (162). I agree with this reading and want to add that not only does Wright hope for readers to feel pushed towards taking constructive social action, but that they should move forward collectively when confronting systems of power. Fred attempts to confront the legal system alone, as one man with an enlightened vision, which ultimately fails. However, as he established at the beginning of the novel, he is not without kinship networks or community connections. His family, church, and employers, those who would have attested to the police of his character and innocence, may also have been allies in his struggle against such an unjust system. This is not to condemn Fred’s choices, as his trauma and positionality stack the odds so significantly against him in this larger societal conflict. Nor is it to suggest that working collectively is a utopian solution to issues of oppression, violence, and marginalization. The addition of the previously unpublished passages prompts a reconsideration of the entire text as an assertion of Black futurism rather than futility in the face of structural inequality. While these systems of power and domination work to create feelings of isolation and powerlessness, there are ways to work against these aims towards positive social change.
Works Cited
Cacho, Lisa M. Introduction: The Violence of Value. Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected, by Cacho, New York University Press, New York, 2012, pp. 1-34.
Fisher, Rebecka Rutledge. “Richard Wright’s Poetics of Black Being: Metaphor, Desire and Doing” in Black Intersectionalities: A Critique for the 21st Century, ed. by Monica Michlin and Jean-Paul Rocchi. Liverpool University Press, 2013, pp.158-176.
Literary Classics of the United States. Note on the Texts. The Man Who Lived Underground: A Novel, by Richard Wright, Library of America, 2021, pp. 220-228.
Wright, Richard, and Malcolm Wright. The Man Who Lived Underground: A Novel. Library of America, New York, 2021.
