More Than Police Brutality

 “The Man Who Lived Underground” by Richard Wright, 1941/2021

He’s brown-skinned, 27, only 135 pounds and 5’7” tall.  He’s not a big guy.  He’s returning from mowing the lawn and other odd jobs at a light-skinned woman’s house, heading home to his pregnant wife.  He’s polite, goes to church, soft-spoken and somewhat clueless.  He’s a man who is forced to escape underground.

He is the focus of Richard Wright’s recently discovered novel, written in 1941.  The publisher at Harper & Brothers rejected it then because of the scenes of police cruelty and brutality in which it opens and closes. These scenes are hard to read.  In the 1940s, even as today, the police were sacrosanct.  3 very large white police officers accost and then handcuff him for a rape and murder that occurred near where they pick him up.  They have to ‘solve’ the crime and he’s the innocent ‘black’ patsy.  They and the local DA get him to sign a document he can’t even read after a long session of brutal torture, sleeplessness and lies.  It is a confession. 

After a somewhat unexplainable bit of kindness by one cop, he realizes his predicament and escapes down a manhole, into the sewer, into the dark.  He could be in any city, probably New York or Chicago or … Now if this escape into the sewer might remind you of Jean ValJean in Les Miserables, or the Jewish rebels of Lvov and Warsaw in WW2, part of which is reflected in the film Kanal, or Dostoevsky’s ‘underground man,’ or the homeless sleeping in tunnels in present-day New York or Bucharest or the inhabitants of Roman catacombs or the Hunger Games or Divergent films – you would not be far off.  Even the recent film Parasite forces a working man to go ‘underground.’

In the process this man, Daniel, loses his servile religion, sees the narcotic effect of entertainment and abandons his wife and new baby.  Instead of immediately going back above-ground, he becomes an exile.  Like a mole, he chisels through the city’s underground into brick basement after basement, from church to movie theater, from mortician to butcher to mortgage company – observing as a stranger.  He becomes like the ‘borrowers’ in that children’s story, taking things from the world above, but this time as trophies and relics.  He turns dollars and diamonds into their original fetish state. He taps an electric power line and begins to make a hidden underground home for himself.  In the process, he loses his head and rises back into the world with an odd vision of universal guilt.

This is a hallucinatory story, perhaps a horror one.  It is as modern as today.

The underground man

MEMORIES of MY GRANDMOTHER

This essay accompanies the story.  Like How Bigger Was Born, a reflection on Native Son, Wright reflects on how he wrote The Man Who Lived Underground, which he calls his most unitary and whole story. He describes his grandmother’s Seventh Day Adventist religion and how it finally drove him out of her house at 15.  She had no understanding of other people’s feelings or social life outside of her rigid Christianity.  No books or music except the Bible or religious songs were allowed in Granny’s house. No radios.  She was a person living in a sort of ‘underground’ too.  So she had an impact on this story, especially on the ‘useless’ and unconnected artifacts that Daniel finds and drags back to his underground cavern.  Wright discusses how his grandmother’s religious notions collected unrelated things in her mind, with no pattern or links, as she viewed the world from the 'other-worldly' position of the Old Testament.  In this essay Wright also touches on invisibility, his childhood memories, Gertrude Stein, surrealism, jazz and blues, dream theory and ultimately, back to his character-based fiction.  On crime, he says:  "A crime may be likened to a sharp rent in the social cloth that reveals the texture of all the strands..." He concludes that the book is really 'jazz prose.'  

In discussing the absence of literature about African-American religious feelings in this essay, Wright had evidently not read Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain, which was published in 1953.  But I can't really tell because this essay is undated. 

Mayday Books is located in a basement.

**  Wright’s story about his involvement and subsequent disillusionment with the Communist Party, “American Hunger,” was also rejected for publication early on and only published in 1977, many years later.

Prior blog reviews on this topic, use blog search box, upper left to search the 14 year archive:  “How Bigger Was Born” (Wright); “Go Tell It On The Mountain” (Baldwin); “Red Hook Summer,” “BlacKKKlansman” and “Da 5 Bloods” (all by S Lee); “Meridian” (Walker); “The Good Lord Bird,” “One Night in Miami,” “Souls of Black Folk” (Du Bois); “Black Panther,” “Things of Dry Hours,” “Go Set a Watchman” (H Lee), “Get Out.” 

And I got it at the library!

The Kulture Kommissar

June 15, 2021