The Man Who Lived Underground

by Richard Wright

Curiously, he felt these questions had the power of projecting him into a strange orbit where, though he was not guilty of a crime, they made him feel somehow guilty. He fought against this enveloping mood.

though he had done nothing wrong, he was condemned, lost, inescapably guilty of some nameless deed.

When he had sung and prayed with his brothers and sisters in church, he had always felt what they felt; but here in the underground, distantly sundered from them, he saw a defenseless nakedness in their lives that made him disown them.