The Man Who Lived Underground by Richard Wright

He had lived within the narrow
grooves of habit so long that he
had learned to see in his dark world
without the aid of eyes

I let my brother borrow my copy of this book shortly after he’d been made homeless and had washed up in our kitchen on a camp-bed. This was short-sighted for two reasons: firstly, his track record of borrowing my books is very poor – my copy of The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart has never resurfaced, and I had to confiscate The Sellout after finding it covered in tea and tobacco on a damp surface – and secondly, it seemed to trigger something in him which sent him off to find strong, cheap dark ale at Lidl and saw him sleep through more hours (and general kitchen noise) than he probably should have been able so to do. Not that it takes much for him to consider alcohol the principal solution. When I asked him about it, he said it was just like his life, only substitute the sewer for Bridgend and being tortured into confessing a double homicide for getting drunk and having a domestic which resulted in him being booted out of his girlfriend’s flat, as it turns out semi-permanently.

I guffawed at the obvious irony in his words. If there is one thing this book is markedly not about, it’s a drunk white man moaning about being misunderstood whilst abusing the hospitality and patience of his long-suffering family. It is of course the follow up to Wright’s most famous work, Native Son, but a book that didn’t see the light of publication in full form until now, after a 10-year campaign by his daughter Julia and perhaps only because of the high profile of recent (we’re talking 2021 here, so peak George Floyd) deaths in the US at the hands of police. Legend has it that his editors at the time found the depiction of police brutality too discomforting to publish.

The story follows Fred Daniels, a poor black man whose wife is expecting a baby and who is identified as the only suspect in a brutal double murder. Fred is scooped up by three white police officers and tortured, horrifically, into confessing his guilt. In a state of near catatonic mental retreat, he somehow spots an opportunity when, unguarded, he can escape custody and finds himself below ground in the city sewers.

So far, so Ralph Ellison, right? Well, let me tell you! I’ve just found out (although I should have known before now) that Wright was a mentor figure for both Ellison and James Baldwin and had to rebuke Ellison for copying his work. Imani Perry in The Atlantic writes that Ellison (and Baldwin) eventually found Wright’s work “too ideological and not sensitive enough to nuance,” even though Ellison was copying him to learn how to write well like his mentor. While I think I remember Invisible Man pretty well, it doesn’t appear on this blog so it must be over 15 years since I read it. I assume it would have been a set text for an English degree module I took. This book totally rang all the bells attached to Invisible Man in my mind, so maybe he didn’t listen to Wright when he told him off.

In any case, the metaphor is certainly bold. Above ground is white privilege, below ground everything above looks absurd. Not very far into his journey underground a dead black baby floats past. He finds the basement of a black church (I very nearly wrote an underground black church but that might also be true), and escapes detection by another worker only because the man toils uncomplainingly in complete darkness. He forgets his pregnant wife. He stumbles onto a stash of money his theft of which gets another man into some serious trouble. And he decides in the end to return to the surface to face up to his guilt, because he comes to realise that he is guilty – of being black, and by extension guilty of anything the white world decides.

Powerful stuff, and hyper-relevant in a world where this story is constantly on repeat in the news cycle. In retrospect it is bizarre to think that this book could have been considered far-fetched by publishers, but then many a prophet has been dismissed in his or her own time as a fantasist. It’s just a crime that the narrative around inequality is unchanged nearly three quarters of a century later – even typing that makes my head spin. In a mind-space where I’ve been reading Paul Beatty and Percival Everett, my brother’s misery is small fry, even if it is uncomfortably close to home. Wright’s ‘undiscovered’ novel brings home so much more.

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