The Man Who Lived Underground

by Richard Wright

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 . . .