Richard Wright (1) (1908–1960)

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: A major literary event: an explosive, previously unpublished novel from the 1940s by the legendary author of Native Son and Black Boy.

Fred Daniels, a black man, is picked up randomly by the police after a brutal murder in a Chicago neighborhood and taken to the local precinct where he is tortured until he confesses to a crime he didn't commit. After signing a confession, he escapes—or is permitted to escape—from the precinct and takes up residence in show more the sewers below the streets of Chicago.

This is the simple, horrible premise of Richard Wright's scorching novel, The Man Who Lived Underground, a masterpiece written in the same period as his landmark books Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945) that he was unable to publish in his lifetime. Only small parts of it have appeared in print, and in a significantly redacted form it would eventually be included in the short story collection Eight Men (1961). Now, for the first time, by special arrangement with the author’s estate, the full text of the work that meant more to Wright than any other (“I have never written anything in my life that stemmed more from sheer inspiration”) is published in the form that he intended, complete with his companion essay, “Memories of My Grandmother.” Malcolm Wright, the author’s grandson, contributes an afterword.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Richard Wright was one of the twentieth century's crop of Great American Storytellers, a writer whose entire life of creation was a gift to a country that did not deserve his passionate voice calling into the face of its indifference that we can be better, do better, and must in order to survive.

People my age were required to read Native Son in high school English, and I am so very glad we were. I wouldn't have picked up the book any other way. It needed to be shoved on me. And wonder of wonders, the Austin (Texas) Independent School District of the early 1970s did. It was a tough thing to let myself believe, that people simply but sincerely hated for no better reason than someone was a different skin color than they were. I assumed all those yahoos were just performing their snotty, hateful idiocy like they did their fake homophobia; it seemed to me that racism against Black and Hispanic students was the same. Anything to look cool, after all, and these were teenagers whose ideas of Cool were neither self-reflective nor rebellious enough to have progressed from the 1950s their own parents were stuck in.

Then we read the equally astounding true-crime (I call racism a crime and am not likely to stop doing so) Black Like Me, an account of a white man passing as Black in the Jim Crow South. It too was gut-wrenching, but was different in kind than the novel Native Son. A factual report...well, I am quite sure that my own racism got hard, hard knocks that year. (I am fully aware that I'm complicit in racist society, that in no way am I "not a racist" just because I support Black political candidates and so on.) It's a pity we couldn't have read this jaw-dropping, intense, visceral evocation of the Other as refiner and perfecter of his Othering. It is the apotheosis of Otherness and Othering that this intense story tells its readers.

Anyone who's paid me any attention knows that I can be run off from continuing a read by child abuse, by use of the n-word, by cruelty to animals...the list goes on...and not a few unfriendlies are smirking in anticipation of taxing me with this book's abusive, rage-filled, n-word-bombing ethos...how can I give this five stars and still abandon ship with content warnings in other, arguably less offensive cases? Because Richard Wright never does a single thing to make the awfulness of PoV character Fred Daniels's world sensational. The author isn't kidding around, bedizening a story with nastiness to provoke a response. He is telling a story about how Othering a man will, over time, after many small and large blows and much deliberate infliction of every kind of pain, turn him in to the thing that he was not, did not want to be, and could not bear to know that he now was.

It worked, in its honesty and its clarity of purpose. I left the sewer Fred lived in without regret, without revulsion, and with the most horrified, profound acceptance of Fred as he was abused and neglected into being. Acceptance of his re-creation, transformation.

In the inexcusably hate-filled twenty-first century, we are fighting the battle that Fred lost all over again. There are wins...the conviction of Ahmaud Arbery's murderers...there are defeats, the gerrymandering cases standing out to me as disasters to Black people...but the trend is towards, as it ever was, the endless and pointless perpetuation of hate based on stupidity among the haters and truculence among the hated.

Books like this are strong medicine against both ends of the spectrum. Fred, a victim, sees what the System does to people, and ultimately still surrenders to it. Not to fight against the dehumanizing and brutalizing actions and inactions of the system that allows Fred to exist in the literal sewers is to acquiesce in the process of creating more Freds...and that is a moral wrong and a societal tragedy. Author Wright doesn't allow his readers the luxury of redemption. This book remained unpublished for seventy years because it is the most hopeless document of degradation's triumph I've ever read. White people of the 1940s would've been offended by the clear-eyed assertion of police violence as it happened...nowadays that illusion is gone...but they wouldn't have wanted to read about a good man surrendering his humanity regardless of that knee-jerk response. The accusing fingers pointing back at them as they called out Author Wright for his bleak treatment of Fred (theirs was the system he succumbed to, after all) were simply too on-the-nose.

There is an extended essay included with the novel entitled “Memories of My Grandmother” that enables our appalled eyes to see where so much of the story we've just read originated. The fact that Christian religion played such a big role in Wright's formation into a man capable of the kind of wordsmithing he does isn't a big surprise. I'm very grateful that the author's daughter required the essay to be published within the book containing the novel...it's a long piece and, even if you're on the fence about reading the novel, I hope you'll consider procuring it to read the essay alone. It is a marvelous explication of how each generation forms the next, for good and ill.

What Author Wright isn't, in the writing of this story, is subtle. The metaphors defining it simply aren't debatable: Whites own the sunshine and consign the Blacks to the literal sewers to eke out whatever existences they can. A Black man who's innocent of any crime is shoved into the sewer with the rest of the leavings because he's never had a place in the sunshine that was truly his. As he copes increasingly poorly with the sewers, he's not allowed to leave them; he's run away from the white police, deprived them of their fun of torturing and eventually killing him, so they say "stay there and die."

The author doesn't, then, offer Redemption to either side. It's a very uncharitable and un-Christian thing to withhold. But he's got a reason, does Author Wright: "Chickens come home to roost, don’t they?" his daughter quotes him as saying.

They very much do. The perch they roost on is, in this rare and exquisitely painful read, your complicit soul. show less

Have you heard the name Trayvon Martin? If you have, good. If you haven’t, look him up. Open a tab, search up the name, T-R-A-Y-V-O-N etc, and read. Familiarize yourself with the exact definitions of the atrocity, the scope of the repercussions throughout the US, the up and currently running process of rectification that in a fair and just world would not be as excruciatingly slow and painful as it’s turning out to be. In a fair and just world, he would not be one of countless mown down show more for everything but a valid reason.

This is not a fair and just world.

No, this is a world where we have those who profess to be not only good writers deserving of literary rewards, but good teachers of writing to boot, despite bigoting their scope of literature down to the basic principle of whom they identify with based on parameters such as gender, sexuality, and color of skin.

Do you know what that sort of mentality would leave me, reading this book? Do you know which character I was expected to perfectly align with, the one most feasible for the goal of sewing myself up in the skin and riding around in perfect harmony? The young white girl, so filled with highflown aspirations of social justice, so loaded with easy income, so filthy with white privilege, who is suffocated and mutilated and burned up into a few fragments of bone and a single earring.

Tell me, then, oh wise teacher, keeper of books and innate sense of good literature, white, middle-aged, heterosexual, the banality of character, the default of personalization, the one archetype for whom nearly the whole of literature has been customized for and has never known what it means to eke out an empathetic terrain on the basis of understanding, not physicality. Even here, in this book written by a black man, you have an overwhelming majority in terms of representation, what with your Buckley, your Max, your multitudes of Klu Klux Klan and crowds and judges all in a big fat white male world. While I have a single soul, a Mary Dalton.

What the fuck am I supposed to do with her, this small, pretty, idiot girl who knows nothing of the agony she is sustained by, and thinks herself kind and generous by reaching out to those her very skin tone persecutes and compromising their existence with a single moment of stupidly inane trust? What am I supposed to do with this pompously fulfilled imbecile, this suicidally naïve prat who innocently frames her words out of what she perceives as an intention of kindness, treating the other as an animal when she notices their plight and accessory ensuring her comfortable existence when she returns to her natural state of self-righteous ignorance?

For you know, teacher, in spite of all that deficiencies on her part, there is a case to be made when it comes to the casual abuse and even more casual conformation of mind and soul of countless women in the history of both reality and literature. Saintly virgin, blighted whore, girlfriend in a refrigerator, all objects used with unconscious persistence of augmenting the male reality, the male realization, the male point of view. You may not know, teacher, with your blatant refusal to even consider reading literature on the other side of the curtain of your all too male sensibilities, but that is not how woman are. That is not how I am, and as such it would be all too easy to resonate with Bessie and Mary above all others, young women there and gone in a swift spending of their use in the pursuit of a story of a young and violent man.

Tell me, in light of that, should I hate Bigger Thomas? Should I spit on him and his indomitable pride of living, one that will not be blinded to the misery of him and his people no matter how much they beg and plead? Should I ignore his anger, his shame, his fearful panic in the face of living cut and dried at every second, every year, every century that his ancestors were first wrenched away from their homeland and have suffered in inhuman bondage ever since? Should I withhold my empathy for someone who looks the reality of his existence in the face, dregging out his life in a country that rapes him into a corner and sees that as the way it ought to be? Should I refuse to recognize the effects of a neverending amputation of the self’s expression onto the wider plane of life and living, the horrible consequences that can and will result so long as oppression stamps its broken and bloody way across ethics and humanity?

Should I close my ears to the integrity of Max, the manipulation of Buckley, not chase the slightest bit of critical analysis of the two and their diatribes, all because I cannot relate in terms of simple physicality? Above all, should I have not even embarked on this book written by Richard Wright, because somehow I ‘knew’ that I wouldn’t relate because of the differences the author and I have in terms of skin and gender?

Tell me, teacher, although it’s unlikely you would ever deserve the title no matter how much writing you did. Would you have me stuff myself into a box that will cradle me with familiar blindness forevermore? Would you have me tie myself down to the identity of someone like poor Mary Dalton, the little fool, and rightfully suffer for it? For I will never know what it means on a visceral level to be black, male, and in the United States, pushed past the farthest boundaries of humanity by centuries of systematic oppression of an entire people into a barren void where right and wrong squeak along with the voices of ghosts. But I do know how to read, as well as listen. I do know how to write, as well as think. I do know, in the fundamental ache of my self, what it means to be a human being.

Do you know that last one, teacher? I doubt it. show less

Summary: The story of Bigger Thomas, whose unpremeditated murder of Mary Dalton and second murder covering up the first, fires rage and fear in Chicago, and in a strange way gives meaning to a young man who felt himself imprisoned in Chicago’s Black Belt.

This is an uncomfortable book to read from the moment Bigger Thomas wakes up until the last pages. It is uncomfortable to view the rat-infested tenement room a family of four share, where Bigger’s first act is to kill a giant rat with a show more pan.

It is uncomfortable to hear Bigger’s mother nag him about going to the job set up by the relief program. He already has a record for theft, some of which he’s involved his girlfriend Bessie in.

It’s uncomfortable to hear him plot to rob a white jeweler with his three friends. Then when one doesn’t show up on time, he nearly slits his throat in anger.

It’s uncomfortable to go to the Daltons and be treated so well by the family and other household staff. Mr. Dalton has an interest in the companies operating the tenement housing Bigger lives in, confining Blacks to one area of south Chicago known as the Black Belt. He also gives lots of money to charities for the uplift of Blacks and employs people recommended by the relief agency who sent Bigger–an uncomfortable tension of interests that emerges as the story unfolds.

It’s uncomfortable to see Bigger on his first chauffeuring job, supposedly taking Mary Dalton, the Dalton’s only daughter to a lecture, but in reality to a rendezvous with a Communist lover, Jan. We sense Bigger’s discomfort as he takes them to a south side restaurant to eat “his kind of food,” and invited to socialize with them while proselytized into the Communist cause. We sense his discomfort as Jan drives with all of them in the front seat, then as they drink while he drives.

It’s uncomfortable to see Bigger having to help the drunken Mary into the house, and up to her room, getting her to bed, only to have her blind mother come in to this incriminating scene. We sense his discomfort as he tries to silence her so her mother won’t discover his presence and think Mary asleep in a drunken stupor, and when Mrs. Dalton leaves, to find he has asphyxiated her and she is dead.

It’s uncomfortable to witness Bigger’s desperation which leads him to stuff her in the trunk she’s taking to Detroit, to haul it to the basement and stuff her body into the coal furnace, hacking off her head so it would all fit, and then feeding the fire but fearing to remove the ashes for what he might find.

It’s uncomfortable as Mary’s disappearance becomes known to watch Bigger deflect suspicions toward Jan while involving his girlfriend in a ransom plot, ultimately telling her what he’s done, and then as Mary’s bones are found in the furnace ashes, fleeing with Bessie to an abandoned building where he has sex with her then kills her with a brick and throws her down an airshaft, where she did not immediately die.

It’s uncomfortable to see the police cordon close around him, then the final futile efforts to elude capture. It’s uncomfortable to hear the racist vitriol, of crowds who would lynch him and a prosecutor who charges him with rape as well as murder.

It’s uncomfortable to hear him tell his communist attorney, Mr. Max, how, for a brief moment, when he killed, he felt his most free and alive, how in these moments, he found meaning, a momentary escape from the destiny to which his birth and race, in his own mind, had imprisoned him.

His relationship with his attorney, who made an impassioned plea before the court for his life, is the one shining moment. Someone who asked him questions, and listened, and treated him as a man. No one understands more of his life than this man. But he is not a confessor. While Bigger tells the truth of what he had done, there was no remorse, no repentance.

We want to argue that Bigger could have made different choices. Yet the sense is of a human being trapped–in a tenement, into reliance on white charity, in an awkward social situation with two people with no clue who “mean well,” in Mary Dalton’s bedroom where no good explanation could be made for his presence. We’re rightly horrified by the murders, but also at the logic by which Bigger finds meaning in them.

We’re left uncomfortable with social structures that the execution of this young killer will not change. We’re left uncomfortable with the thought of how many other Biggers lurk in such structures–also wanting to do things with their lives, also questing for meaning, perhaps in distorted ways that will end badly for them and others. And this is as it should be. A minister friend of mine once remarked that he believed the gospel not only offered comfort to the disturbed but also disturbed the comfortable. This book does the latter. Don’t read it if you want to remain in comfort. show less

""There he is!" the mother screamed again.

A huge black rat squealed and leaped at Bigger's trouser-leg and snagged it in his teeth, hanging on.

"Goddamn!" Bigger whispered fiercely, whirling and kicking out his leg with all the strength of his body. The force of his movement shook the rat loose and it sailed through the air and struck a wall. Instandly, it rolled over and leaped again. Bigger dodged and the rat landed against a table leg. With clenched teeth, Bigger held the skillet; he was

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afraid to hurl it, fearing that he might miss. The rat squeaked and turned and ran in a narrow circle, looking for a place to hide; it leaped again past Bigger and scurried on dry rasping feet to one side of the box and then to the other, searching for the hole. Then it turned and reared upon its hind legs. "

Chicago’s South Side, sometime in the 1930s. This is our introduction to Bigger Thomas and his family. They live in a rat-infested room in a tenement building, Mrs. Thomas, Bigger, and his younger brother Buddy and little sister Vera. They've just been woken up by a loud alarm-clock in the dark hours before dawn, and the long-tailed terror has made its appearance, scaring the women who screech and stand up on the bed, while the brothers, equally terrified, must deal with the foot-long vermin. Eventually Bigger gets the better of the beast and squashes it dead with the heavy skillet. Then he grabs it by the tail and dangles it in front of his terrified sister's face, just for the fun of it, and she faints. We are made to understand that this is normal behaviour for Bigger, who is normally sullen and temperamental and given to ignoring his family and seeking ways to amuse himself with regular trips to the cinema and occasional gigs robbing black neighbours with his little gang of friends. But on this morning, Mrs. Thomas is pressuring Bigger to go to a job interview. They need the money badly, and if he doesn't take the job, the family will be cut off from government relief payments which they rely on to put food on the table. But Bigger wants to do things his own way, and he's got a big plan to rob a local Jewish grocery shop owner for a really big payoff. He's scared though, as are his three partners in crime; this would be their first time targeting a white man, and they know the consequences if they get caught will be dire. But Bigger, conscious of his own fear, decides he won't be seen as a coward, and his solution for avoiding the whole plan that day is to violently assault one of his friends on the merest provocation.

We've just begun the story, and already Wright has made us hate this 20-year-old boy. The reader is made uncomfortable. Here is a book denouncing racism, but our protagonist is violent, cruel to his own family and friends, and prideful to the point of murderous impulses to protect his sense of self. He seemingly has no redeeming features; is he a psychopath? Perhaps. At this point, I go back and read the introduction by Arnold Rampersad I had avoided initially, fearing the all too frequent spoilers usually found there. I find my feelings towards Bigger are vindicated. There are Biggers of every colour, everywhere in the world, he says. That's the part that sticks to my mind anyway, and now I feel freed from any obligation to sympathise with him.

Bigger goes to the job interview. He meets Mr. Dalton in one of the nicest neighbourhoods in the city. An impressive house. They are very wealthy. Mr. Dalton is one of the most respected citizens of Chicago, a multi-millionaire who owns real-estate and thus incidentally and indirectly, the tenement building Bigger and his family live in. Mr. Dalton and his blind wife have a social conscience though, and they've given millions of dollars in aid to the city's black citizens. Bigger is to be their chauffeur, to replace the last black chauffeur, who was encouraged by Mrs. Dalton to attend night school in order to get a better job. Bigger is suspicious. He is suspicious of all white people, who have always held him back, crushed him down, prevented him from attaining his dreams. But the Daltons are different, and this troubles him deeply. Their daughter Mary barges into his interview with his future employer and starts demanding whether he is with a union; calls her father a capitalist. Bigger decides he hates the young woman. She is pretty, very pretty, but she is already making trouble for him. He's not quite sure what capitalism or communism is, but he's pretty sure she is one of them and he fears Mr. Dalton won't give him the job if he thinks Bigger is one of them too. But he does get the job, and his first task is to drive Mary to university that evening. But Mary doesn't want to go to university. Instead, she wants Bigger to drive her to her boyfriend's, who as it turns out, is a notorious Communist agitator. The couple wants to befriend Bigger, encourage him to call them by their first names, they are curious about his life, they want to better the condition of blacks in America. That evening, they force him to sit down and eat a meal at a local black hangout and get drunk with them. Things turn out badly. By two in the morning, Mary is dead, and Bigger is responsible. To cover up his tracks, he makes the situation much worse. Now he's on the run for murder. Being responsible for the death of a white woman means capital punishment for him, so he must stay in hiding, and by the evening after Mary's death, he's murdered another woman to prevent her from denouncing him. This is all terribly dark and his acts are abominably violent. But Wright has formed a taut, stark tableau that reads like the best kind of suspense thriller. You can't keep racing along to find out what will happen next.

Bigger is caught, of course. You figure this out before you've even begun to read the book. Book 1 is called Fear. Book 2: Flight. Book 3: Fate. Nothing so far has given any indication that Bigger is on the right track or likely to see the light. This part of the book was the most problematic for me. The physical violence in Book 2 was revolting, sickening. But now in Book 3, Wright shows us racism in full force, and Bigger finally starts to become human. His defences are broken down, and he isn't a mere brute anymore, he questions himself, he seeks to be understood by someone. But the problematic part here is that this is also were Wright gets preachy in his attempt to drive home his point about the kind of world the blacks have been living in till now and what few choices and hope they've been given since their arrival in America, and now, in a Jim Crow nation. We are given to understand that Bigger is the symptom of a sick society. Of course, an enlighten reader can only agree with this. But there is too much rhetoric here. There is a long speech, many pages long, and if we already know that Wright was an active member of the Communist party, we can't help but feel that he is advancing Communist theories. I have nothing against Socialism, or even Communism where these ideologies meet with humanitarian concerns, in that sense I feel they are a powerful and necessary forces in the world, but for the problem that these ideologies go so deeply into the fabric of life and reframe everything in the light of us vs. them. Bigger doesn't understand a word of this speech, but he understand it's intent. I understood a little bit more than he did, but mostly I felt like I'd been hit over the head with a lot of theoretical jargon that only distanced me from what until then had been a visceral experience. No matter. This is an essential novel. It was relevant and necessary and groundbreaking when it was first published, and though many black writers have expressed their individual voices since then, it remains an essential novel today. This is the kind of book that marks you for life. I can't say I'll necessarily want to read it again, and for that reason it probably won't make the list of my favourite books this year, but it was an important read and a challenging one, and frankly, pretty gripping too, and one I feel has made me grow as a person and as a reader. show less