The Man Who Lived Underground

by Richard Wright

“Don’t do this to yourselves!”

As he lay upon the bed of pipes, he knew this: His life had somehow snapped in two. But how? 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. A physical distance had come between them and had conferred upon him a terrifying knowledge. He felt that these people should stand silent, unrepentant, with simple manly pride, and yield no quarter in whimpering. He wanted them to assume a heroic attitude even though he himself had run away from his tormentors, even though he had begged his accusers to believe in his innocence.

Pain throbbed in his calves and a deeper pain, a pain induced by the naked sight of the groveling spectacle of those black people whose hearts were hungry for tenderness, whose lives were full of fear and loneliness, whose hands were reaching outward into a cold, vast darkness for something that was not there, something that could never be there, churned within him. Good God!

He flushed with a nameless shame and involuntarily took a step backwards and his lips moved in an effort to utter angry words against the whole configuration of the senseless world. This thing was his enemy; it condemned him as effectively as had those policemen. It made him feel guilty. But, at the same time, he felt that his guilt was futile, for what could he do in the face of this?

He stood in a box in the reserved section of a movie house and the impulse he had had to tell the people in the church to stop their singing seized him again. These people were laughing at their lives, at the animated shadows of themselves. Why did they not rise up and go out into the sunlight and do some deed that would make them live? Compassion translated itself into actuality; in his imagination he stepped out of the box, walked out upon the thin air, walked on down to the audience; and, hovering in air just above their heads, he stretched out his hands and tried to touch them. His tension lessened, and he found himself back in the box, looking down into the sea of faces. No; it could not be done. He could not awaken them. He sighed; yes, they were children, sleeping in their living, awake in their dying. . . .

He had triumphed over the world aboveground. He was free! He remembered how he had hugged the few dollars Mrs. Wooten had given him and he wanted to run from the underground and yell his discovery to the world.

And that was how the world aboveground now seemed to him, a wild forest filled with death, stalked by blind animals.

He was filled with reflection, experiencing again that high pitch of consciousness, gazing like an invisible man hovering in space upon the life that lived aboveground in the darkness of the sun.

What a fool! A man with a gun risking his precious life each night—the only life he will ever have on this earth—to protect sparkling bits of stone that looked for all the world like glass. . . .

He passed a manhole and heard rumbling noises of traffic above him, but paid it no heed; life aboveground was now something less than reality, less than sight or sound, less even than memory. . . .

And then a strange and new knowledge overwhelmed him: He was all people. In some unutterable fashion he was all people and they were he; by the identity of their emotions they were one, and he was one with them. And this was the oneness that linked man to man, in life or death. Yet even with this knowledge, this identification with others, this obliteration of self, another knowledge swept through him too, banishing all fear and doubt and loss: He now knew too the inexpressible value and importance of himself. He must assert himself; he was propelled to do something, to devise means of action by and through which he could convince those who lived aboveground of the death-like quality of their lives. He did not think these things; he felt them through images. While lying prone on his face in the dark on the cold dirt floor, with waves of song battering at the cliffs of his consciousness, he knew that at some time in the near future he would rise up from this underground, walk forth and say something to everybody. He did not know what he would say or how; but he had no doubt that he would soon forsake this haven and emerge again. He could not question what he felt, for he was it and it was he.

He held the watches and heard their awful ticking and he hated them; these watches were measuring time, making men tense and taut with the sense of passing hours, telling tales of death, crowning time the king of consciousness.

Maybe anything’s right, he mumbled. Yes, if the world as men had made it was right, then anything else was right, too. Any action a man took to satisfy himself—theft or murder or torture—was right.

When the spell left him he found that he was standing on his feet, staring in horror. His hovering in midair and looking down upon the reasonlessness of human life made him understand that no compassion of which the human heart was capable could ever respond adequately to that awful sight. Outside of time and space, he looked down upon the earth and saw that each fleeting day was a day of dying, that men died slowly with each passing moment as much as they did in war, that human grief and sorrow were utterly insufficient to this vast, dreary spectacle. His failure to summon up feelings that could do justice to what he saw and felt, his sense of emptiness in the face of this stark tragedy, culminated in an all-powerful passion of guilt; his own weakness when confronted with this supreme challenge condemned and consumed him with a boundless sense of contrition. Yes, the only being who could possibly gaze down upon such a hopeless spectacle and encompass its meaninglessness would have to be a god. That was it! Maybe men had invented gods to feel what they could not feel, and they found comfort in the pity of their gods for them . . . ! For men were overwhelmed with shame and guilt when they looked down upon the irremediable frailty of their lives.

Glad, glad, glad, oh, so glad I got Jesus in my soul . . . The song lashed him to impotent fury. Those people were pleading guilty, wallowing sensually in their despair. He gritted his teeth. How could one ever get used to this thing? Overcome with wonder, he felt suddenly that he knew, that he had snared the secret! Guilt! That was it! Insight became sight and he knew that they thought that they were guilty of something they had not done and they had to die. The song beat on: Glad, glad, glad, oh, so glad I got Jesus in my soul . . . They feel they’ve done something wrong, he whispered in the lyrical dark. He felt that their search for a happiness they could never find made them feel that they had committed a great wrong which they could not remember or understand. He was now in possession of the feeling that gripped him when he had first listened to the singing. It came to him in a series of questions: Why was this sense of guilt so seemingly innate, so easy to come by, to think, to feel, so verily physical? It seemed that when one felt this guilt one was but retracing in one’s living a faint pattern designed long before; it seemed that one was trying to remember a gigantic shock that had left an impression upon one’s body which one could not forget, but which had been almost forgotten by the conscious mind, creating in one a state of external anxiety. The singing surged: Glad, glad, glad, oh, so glad I got Jesus in my soul . . .

Murphy went to the back of the watchman’s chair and jerked it from under him; the dazed watchman pitched forward upon his face. He, too, had been dumped upon the floor, so closely did he identify himself with the watchman; but it was not an identification stemming from pity; no, he felt that this was somehow a good thing; it would awaken the watchman from his long sleep of death, would let him see, through the harsh condemnation of Murphy, more of the hidden landscape than he would ever see in any other way.

He wanted to yell: He’s innocent! I’m innocent! We’re all innocent! The thoughts came to him so hard that he thought he had actually yelled them out; but he had not spoken; his teeth were clenched. The words had screamed inside of him, hot words trying to burst through a tight wall. And again he was overwhelmed with that inescapable emotion that always cut down to the foundations of life here in the underground, that emotion that told him that, though he were innocent, he was guilty; though blameless, he was accused; though living, he must die; though possessing faculties of dignity, he must live a life of shame; though existing in a seemingly reasonable world, he must die a certainly reasonless death.

The foremost thing that puzzled me about my grandmother’s religious attitude was her callous disregard for the personal feelings of others and her inability to understand—and her refusal to even try—anything of the nature of the social relationships obtaining in the world about her. Yet this callousness toward others, this disdain of things relating to the life of society as a whole, was united with an abstract, all-embracing love for humanity.

Religion as such never deeply interested me; I have never felt it deeply enough to be swayed to believe, for my sensibilities were too much claimed by the concrete externals of the world I saw. (At the age of twelve or thirteen I did try to feel some of the things I’d heard in church, but I never could.)

To this day, when I look upon my grandmother’s life, it seems to me to have been utterly meaningless; yet, to her, I know, her faith tied all of the disparate items of her environment into one meaningful pattern of value. And it was this bringing from somewhere else a code of meaning and imposing it upon her home and its life that made life an exasperation to those who lived with her, unless they saw and felt as she did.

What I mean by “abstract” living is simply any way of life that does not derive its meaning and sanction from the context of experience, a way of life that is lived distantly from the environment even though it subsists on the environment, a way of living that allows or enables or forces the organism to superimpose judgments and values upon their experiences borrowed from somewhere else.

Being a Negro woman, she had more than her share of handicaps to keep the daily, meaningful world in which the majority of people lived from her; and, knowing that such a world was not for her, she gave it up. But, having once surrendered the things of this world, she had perforce to keep it from her. She had created a world in which to live and whenever the world before her eyes intruded into her created world, she drove it out with all of the savage vehemence of one who felt that life itself was endangered.

This tendency of freely juxtaposing totally unrelated images and symbols and then tying them into some overall concept, mood, feeling, is a trait of Negro thinking and feeling that has always fascinated me.

At the time when I noticed the juxtaposing of unrelated things in the mind and actions of my grandmother and in the Negro blues songs, it never occurred to me that some day, many miles distant from my hometown, I would encounter a “theory” imported from Europe that would enable me to see and understand what those disjointed items meant when they were tied together by the mood, faith, or passion of a personality. What this “theory” was I shall explain later and link it with The Man Who Lived Underground.

Then I discovered that during all of my childhood I had lived among people who believed in invisible men, who believed that God, though invisible, actively regulated the most concrete and commonplace happenings of life. I think that it is but natural that I should have become excited over the question of how it would feel to stand outside of life and look at life.

Why should not the idea of invisibility intrigue me inasmuch as almost every day in my childhood someone reminded me solemnly that invisible angels were guarding my destiny? And the people who said this were willing and anxious to leave this world—for dying was but a transfiguration!—and go to Heaven where they could look down upon the sorrows of the life of this world without being a part of it, without being subject to its penalties and limitations.

Especially did Mark Twain’s What Is Man? intrigue me by the manner in which Twain stood outside of human life and gazed at it; in reading that book my mind and feelings were swept back to the teachings and attitudes of my grandmother.

No; in school I was made to study the English of England, not the English of my environment; for every word I used in daily speech, my school urged me to use others on the grounds of correct grammar. That kind of instruction may be all right for a man longing to be a school teacher, or a man aspiring to be a bank teller; but it is death to a man seeking to determine the nature of his experiences, for he is taught to shun the very things—words used by his closest friends!—that may open the door to the vast world of feeling existing about him.

surrealism

It seems that there has grown up in people’s minds a concept of just what the Negro is, and anything that smacks of something which they do not want to associate with the Negro, for one reason or another, they will brand as alien. There is an unjustified but powerful tendency to regard the Negro as simple, unspoiled, childish, distantly removed from the debilitating experiences or art products of the city sophisticate, so says one school of the “friends” of the Negro. Therefore, they say, do not mix the Negro with any such thing as surrealism. There is no such connection, they assert, and if you insist that there is, then it exists only in your own mind, meaning, of course, the mind of the fellow who declares the contrary.

As I see it, surrealism is not an art form or an art movement manufactured by individuals or sets of individuals; I believe it makes its appearance when certain social relations are manifested in society, social relations that separate men from the context of productive process in a vital sense. This may occur at the “top” of the social structure as well as at the “bottom,” among the sons of the rich as well as among the sons of the poor. One of the marked characteristics of surrealism is a certain psychological distance—even when it deals with realistic subject matter—from the functional meanings of society. This distance may derive from excessive wealth which enables one to live psychologically distant from the realistic processes of society, or it may come through an enforced severance—through unemployment, oppression, etc.—from the functional meanings of society. How does this psychological distance manifest itself? Primarily, I think, in the oblique vision which finds relations between objects which are seemingly unrelated. Hence, though qualitatively different, there are elements of surrealism in “Dink’s Blues” that link them with the wild canvasses of Dalí. . . .

What I’m striving to do is drive home a function of a certain phase of the creative process, that is, the ability to take seemingly unrelated images and symbols and link them together into a meaningful whole.

In fact, I encountered the surrealistic theory of art at about the time I encountered the theory of psychoanalysis.

if you should read the words to Bessie Smith’s “Empty Bed Blues,” you would find no logic or progression between the verses; they are merely a series of incidents of domestic discord and defeated love thrown seemingly carelessly together. But they have a relationship stitched through their inner structure, a testimony to reality seen through Negro eyes that look at life from a position of enforced severance. What takes place, therefore, is a seeming and relative confusing of values; there is displacement, intensity, transference, inversion, condensation, over-determination, and all of the other processes that go to make up the strangely familiar reality of a dream. All the details in blues songs have poured into them through sheer emotional intensity of the participants a degree of that overemphasis that lifts them out of their everyday context and exalts them to a plane of vividness that strikes one with wonderment.

From my earliest attempts at writing I discovered that I was striving to get to a certain point in my story; what I mean is this: I’d start out to tell a story, but I’d know when that story really started. The story would start at that point when my character was broken. What does broken mean? Well, in a good story, I think, there comes a point where the character is rendered fluid, where, through a combination of events, he is lifted to a point of tension where the author can do anything with him, where everything fits.

it is that point in a story where the character, hard put upon from within or without, forgets his habits, his backgrounds, his censor, his conditioning and, feeling free, acts with a latitude which he could not and did not possess in the narrow context of daily life. I feel that something of the same thing happens in a jazz song; when the beat establishes itself sufficiently, all kinds of surprise rhythms can be introduced. In fact, you expect them as you hear the music or read the story. Of course, you do not know what is coming next. That uncertainty about what is coming next is the drama of the thing. . . .

From the character’s point of view this breaking, in my opinion, represents a point in life where the past falls away and the character must, in order to go on living, fling himself upon the face of the formless night and create a world, a new world, in which to live. To me—rightly or wrongly—the hallmark of good writing resides precisely in this sense of creating the new, the freedom and the need and the desire to create this new.

Obviously, such opportunities do not come often to us who live in this slow, real, hard world of ours. Change comes slowly. But in art we may reap our share of change—in as real a sense as we get it in life—in a few hours. Why is this? Maybe it is to prepare us for changes when they come in life? Maybe it is to compensate? Maybe it is to simply exercise ourselves in enjoyment? I don’t know and I don’t think it’s important to find an answer. We have the freedom to make of it what we will.

In The Man Who Lived Underground the spot where improvisation take...

A dream is tense and tension is the prelude to action.

Fred Daniels’s roused and tense sensibilities register everything he sees in terms of a man about to make a decision.

What shore any man returns to depends upon what he saw while swimming and the kind of shore from which he first took off. . . .

His crawling around in sewers might be linked to anyone’s sense of groping through the days of one’s life.

In other words, none of the images and symbols in The Man Who Lived Underground have any meaning in themselves; the meaning is only to be found in relation to other things, in relation to themselves as they appear in certain sequences; their total meaning represents the totality of all these symbols and images put together and their relationship to Fred Daniels and his fate.

Well, I think the meaning comes from our contemplating the entire act as one whole. There is a value in disclosing a human mind at work upon its destiny. Once we grasp Fred Daniels, we surely ought to know more about ourselves. The abstract dance of Fred Daniels is our dance on whatever plane we live, even though our decisions may differ from his as widely as chalk differs from cheese. It seems to me that a serious mind would want to know how some of the basic movements of any mind work, for in knowing, it will know how its own mind works.)

(I think the history of crime in the United States is as much a part of our important history as any other phase of our lives; I know of no other act or group of actions that so gathers together the threads of personal, social, political life of the nation as crime! A crime may be likened to a sharp rent in the social cloth that reveals the texture of all the strands out of which our lives are woven.)

What I was concerned with was extracting from my grandmother’s religious personality a certain way of looking at the world and putting this “way of looking” into operation in an environment. So, at once, when I heard that a man had lived underground, it occurred to me that there was where I could make what made my “grandmother tick” live and breathe, be the character a man or a woman. And, of course—the moment I thought of my grandmother—the old invisible-man idea surged up; yes, I thought, here is where I can put a man outside of life and yet let him live within life, just as my grandmother had done.

(Later, while in the actual process of writing, I found that I could make the whole theme of stolen knowledge ironical by having Fred Daniels discover knowledge whose utmost value he would not exactly understand and on the basis of this contrive his death for a knowledge he possesses which is not of the highest value. Actually, Fred Daniels is not killed for the really dangerous knowledge he thinks he possesses, but for fear that he might betray secrets of the police department!)

It is only when something is worth dying for that life really becomes precious. I felt that to have my hero killed for this dubious knowledge he possessed would be a way of affirming his value; in short, I strove to make the basic theme, or ideology, of the book mean: an assertion of human hope and tenderness in a world drenched in brutality.

The one thing that Fred Daniels accomplishes and exhibits is the freedom of action! As long as men have that right, the results of action will justify any attempts to save it, to protect it.