Sewers and Mines in Richard Wright's The Man Who Lived Underground

Perspective is that part of a poem, novel, or play which a writer never puts directly upon paper. It is that fixed point in intellectual space where a writer stands to view the struggles, hopes, and sufferings of his people.
—Richard Wright, "Blueprint for Negro Writing"

Wright’s note about perspective in the quote above illuminates his approach to grappling with the normative ideological structures of industrial racial capitalism in his novel The Man Who Lived Underground. The story follows Fred Daniels, a Black man who is falsely accused of killing his employers and escapes law enforcement by hiding in the sewer. The novel represents Fred's descent underground as a physical departure from aboveground space. Fred repeatedly conceptualizes his position underground in terms of its distance from the world above, describing his descent "as though he had traveled a million miles away from the life of the world" (Wright 60), from where he listens to the "faraway [...] faint sounds of the life aboveground" (87). But this physical distance between Fred's position underground and the world above also provides an ideological distance which allows him to defamiliarize the everyday practices of aboveground social life. From his underground vantage point, Fred experiences "an illusion of another world with other values and other laws" which gives him a new perspective on the world he left behind (53). As Wright's biographer Michel Fabre writes, his descent offers him "an opportunity to scrutinize his culture from the outside" (Fabre 169). In Wright’s novel, the underground becomes an "intellectual space" outside of the social world, a place from which the "struggles, hopes, and sufferings" of Black Americans is rendered visible.

    This distinction in Wright's novel between aboveground and underground space is a result of the historic role of underground spaces in the modern era. Capitalism has long manipulated subterranean space for the benefit of those above by extracting ores and minerals from the Earth and disposing of sewage and nuclear waste back into it. This manipulation creates a spatial difference between the aboveground and the underground; everything compatible with capitalism remains above while everything incompatible with it is forced below. Fred's journey into the sewer is therefore a journey out of capitalism. His descent into the sewer reflects the disposability of Black life and labor under capitalism; however, his position underground also provides him a critical vantage point from which he identifies the flaws in the seemingly indisputable logic of a system which forced him underground in the first place. By reading Wright's underground within the context of the physical spaces excavated by capitalism—more specifically, within the context of sewers and mines—this paper will demonstrate how Wright's novel uses the spatial difference between the aboveground and the world below to defamiliarize capitalism as natural order and call attention to capitalism's dependency on the commodification of Black bodies and their expendability as waste.

    Capitalism is not the first normative system to legitimize its claim to aboveground coherency by forcing all incompatible elements below. Christian morality reifies its own binary distinction between good and evil through the creation of hell as a subterranean space. Under this system, aboveground values of piety and virtue can be understood in contrast to their belowground counterparts, and heaven is made holy by forcing everything unholy into hell. Literary critic David L. Pike argues that modern capitalism reappropriated the subterranean nature of Christian hell into a space that could account for the internal contradictions of capitalist logic. Wright's novel dramatizes this relationship between Christianity, capitalism, and underground spaces. The allusions to Christian hell reflect the lingering associations of Christian morality in modern conceptualizations of subterranean space. However, a reading of Wright's novel purely in terms of its Christian imagery fails to account for the literal conditions which forced him into the sewer. It was not a divine creator who forced Fred into the underground, but a racist legal system which sustains itself on the incarceration of innocent Black people. Furthermore, because Christian hell is a completely imagined place, a reading of Wright's novel as hellish metaphor will necessarily fail to account for the real themes of capitalism and racialized exploitation which pervade the novel. Reading Wright's underground within the context of real physical spaces created by capitalism will root my analysis of the text in the specific conditions of racism and capitalism which forced Fred underground.

    This is not a wholly novel approach to the text. Thomas Heise takes such an approach in his study Urban Underworlds. Richard Wright originally published the short version of "The Man Who Lived Underground" in 1945, in the midst of an ongoing conversation in America over Black social deviance. Heise describes how mid-twentieth century sociological discourse frequently used underground imagery to describe Black social unrest. He argues that images of “black underworld waste” solidified “a series of tightly interconnected issues and anxieties over property, collective violence, and delinquency” (129). However, as Heise notes, the systems of capitalism and racism which deemed Black people underground in metaphorical terms also forced them literally underground, causing "actual underground living as a response to a housing emergency rooted in racial segregation" during the Harlem housing crisis of the 1940s (129). Heise reads Wright's story as an embrace of racialized subterranean language that demonstrates "how Black life actually had come to be very much below the surface, and how underground space had become infused with race in the most literal of ways" (128). By reading Wright’s novel within the context of real underground living conditions instead of metaphoric or conceptual versions of underground space, Heise grounds his analysis within the racist systems which excavated those spaces and forced Black people into them. But Heise fails to consider that the industrial capitalist exploitation of Black subjects did not begin with the urban housing crisis at the mid-twentieth century; this process began nearly half a century earlier with the use of forced convict labor in industrial coal mines in the aftermath of abolition. Wright’s underground grapples with this long history of Black exploitation in subterranean space, as Fred’s character performs the role of a metaphoric Black coal miner. Like the basements of Harlem which Heise describes, the coal mine is a second example of a real subterranean space which capitalism has excavated and housed with Black subjects. However, as the archetypical space where industrial labor takes place, the coal mine metaphor extends Heise's reading of physical underground spaces into a discussion of the role of industrial capitalism in forcing Black people below ground. The interplay between the metaphoric coal mine and literal sewer in Wright's novel reveals the culpability of the industrial mode of production in the transformation of Black bodies into capitalist waste.

Fred's act of digging resembles that of a miner, as he tunnels through subterranean space in search of objects which he takes for personal gain. Like a miner, Fred uses tools to aid him in his digging: it isn't long after Fred enters the sewer that he acquires an iron pipe which he uses to dig (Wright 67). Like a miner, the logic which motivates Fred's digging is speculative, based on the potential acquisition of materials rather than their guarantee. The mere possibility of finding materials motivates Fred to dig: this is seen when he wonders to himself: "[i]f he loosened enough of these bricks, what would he see? Where could he go? What would he find?" (78), and again when he justifies his act of digging by saying "I'll just take a chance" (92). The case for Fred specifically as a coal miner is most clearly evidenced as he digs into a wall and a "tiny lump of coal tumbled toward him; he made the hole still larger and discovered that he was digging into a basement coal bin" (70). However, if we extend the notion of mining beyond the mere extraction of minerals and ores, we can see that Fred "mines" the sewer as he steals several objects to furnish his subterranean cave: a typewriter, a cleaver, a radio, tools, food, cigarettes, watches, diamonds, and several thousand dollars in cash.

    Fred's resemblance to a miner prompts a consideration of his character's struggles within the context of industrial capitalism. The narrator repeatedly conceptualizes Fred's act of digging in terms of labor: when Fred digs into a nearby basement, the narrator remarks that “he scraped for hours at the cement, working silently”, and later that he “turned feverishly to the job of loosening other bricks, only to find that they were not so easy." (Wright 78, emphasis added). The descriptions of Fred’s digging also evokes the harsh labor conditions in the mines. The narrator emphasizes the intensity of the work: “he began a quiet scraping; it was hard work”; along with the duration of it: “for two hours he worked in the darkness, loosening bricks” (83, emphasis added). This consistent framing of Fred's digging in terms of labor elicits an analysis of his character within the historical context of Black American miners during the mid-twentieth century. As I will show, the disposability of Black labor under American industrialization is reflected by Fred's descent into the sewer, where he resides amongst the literal waste of capitalist society. 

    The practice of mining has long stood as one of the archetypal industries of industrial capitalism. Mining played a key role in early industrialization by providing the raw materials necessary for mass production, but it also had ideological significance by abstracting the social processes through which objects are deemed with value. Lewis Mumford makes this argument in his 1934 history Technics and Civilization. He posits that mines, as inorganic and artificial spaces, played a key role in the abstraction of value under capitalism. Unlike agrarian workers who value objects for their immediate life-sustaining abilities, the miner can only value objects for their scarcity, and, by extension, the amount of labor it takes to extract them from the Earth. For Mumford, the artificial nature of the mine spurred the artificial processes of valuation under capitalism, through which objects are appraised by social relations rather than by their inherent use-value. Mumford's claim that "[t]he miner's notion of value, like the financier's, tends to be a purely abstract and quantitative one" hints towards the key role of mining in the development of commodity fetishism (Mumford 77).

    However, despite Fred's similarities to an industrial miner, his character notably subverts the process of value abstraction which Mumford describes. He does this by physically subverting the act of mining itself; while the miner removes objects from the earth in order to bestow them with value in an aboveground economy, Fred removes objects from the aboveground in order to strip them of their value in the world below. This is best evidenced in Fred's encounter with diamonds in the basement of a jewelry shop. Like a miner, Fred comes across the diamonds by digging through subterranean space: "[a]n hour's toiling in the darkness loosened two bricks; the others came easier then and soon he made a wide hole" (Wright 97). Fred's acquisition of diamonds by digging underground resembles a miner; however, unlike the miner, Fred does not deem the diamonds inherently valuable. In fact, he fails to recognize them at first. The narrator's description of the diamonds as "glinting bits" that "looked like pieces of glass" defamiliarizes the diamonds by stripping them of their economic connotation and reducing them to their material essence (100). The comparison of the diamonds to "pieces of glass" suggests the diamond's lack of inherent value, as the transparency of the diamonds parallels their lack of inherent worth. Just as Fred physically sees through the diamonds, he also figuratively sees through their supposed economic value. This comparison reoccurs at another moment when Fred questions the essential worth of the diamonds, as he comes across a sleeping guard in the jewelry store and laughs at the man for risking his life to “protect sparkling bits of stone that looked for all the world like glass" (104). Fred's subversion of the capitalist logic of mining is evidenced most clearly as he physically returns the stolen diamonds into the Earth: "He flung the diamonds more evenly over the dirt floor and they showered rich sparks [...] He went over the floor and trampled the stones just deep enough for them to be faintly visible, as though they were set delicately in the prongs of a thousand rings" (111).

    While Fred's subversion of the act of mining is most clearly evidenced through his acquisition of diamonds, his recontextualization of objects within underground space allows him to reject the fetishization of other objects besides those typically associated with mining such as minerals and ores. Like with the diamonds, Fred challenges the inherent worth of money as well by rehoming it in subterranean space. Fred's theft of several thousand dollars in cash parallels his earlier subversion of the act of mining, as he acquires the money by tunneling through stone into the basement of an insurance agency: "[h]e took out the crowbar and hacked [...] He soon had a dozen bricks out" (Wright 80). The narrator describes the stolen coins akin to a pile of treasure, as "gleaming pennies and nickels and dimes piled high in front of him" which Fred "sifted [...] through his fingers listening to their tinkle as they struck the conical pile". The description of the pile as a "bright mound of shimmering silver and copper" suggests a comparison between the coins and the rare metals which miners extract from the earth (94).    

    However, before Fred can steal the money himself, he watches another man steal a single wad of bills from the same locked safe which he was planning to rob. This angers Fred, as he sees an essential difference between this man's act of stealing and his own: "His stealing the money and the man's stealing the money were entirely two different things. He wanted to steal the money merely for the sensation involved, and he had no intention of ever spending a penny of it; but the man who was now stealing it was going to spend it, perhaps for pleasure" (Wright 88). Fred's perceived difference between him and the man stealing stems from the fact that only the latter participates within an economic network of exchange. While the man was "going to spend" the money within a market, Fred removes the money from the same market, thus removing it from the context in which it is valuable. As a representative inhabitant of aboveground space, the man's desire to spend the money reflects the capitalist value system embedded within that space. It is only through departure from the aboveground world that Fred becomes defamiliarized to this seemingly natural system and challenges it as natural order. Fred's rejection of the fetishism of money in this scene marks a sharp reversal of his attitude toward money at the beginning of the novel, which opens with Fred in a joyful mood having received his paycheck: "[t]ired and happy, he liked the feeling of being paid of a Saturday night" (5). While the novel opens with Fred counting his wages, in the sewer he had "no desire to count the money" he stole (94). Removed from the economy which instills money with value, Fred's underground position allows him to see the artificial nature of monetary value. This shift in his attitude towards money solidifies capitalism as a distinctly aboveground practice, as his descent underground allows him to reject the capitalist values which he used to wholeheartedly embrace.

    When considering Fred's character as a metaphor for Black industrial laborers, his forced descent into subterranean space by the American legal system resonates with the history of convict leasing, a system of forced penal labor which rose in the aftermath of the Civil War. Under the exception of the thirteenth amendment which outlawed forced labor "except as a punishment for a crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted", Southern prisons began leasing convicts to private companies, a significant portion of which were coal mining companies (Lewis 13). While some have viewed convict leasing as a legal extension of slavery post-abolition, convict leasing notably differed from chattel slavery by making Black labor immediately disposable. The abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in 1808 made the reproducibility and longevity of slaves economically profitable to slaveowners. This forced slaves into a category akin to livestock, and they were often tasked with work which posed little immediate harm to their physical bodies, such as agrarian labor and housework. However, the convict leasing system offered Black labor in abundance, so that the preservation of Black life was no longer necessarily profitable. This resulted in far worse labor conditions for Black convicts than under slavery, and the introduction of Black labor into more dangerous industrial work environments, such as mines and factories. While slavery commodified Black bodies, convict leasing made them completely disposable. Fred’s position in the sewer reflects the disposable status of black bodies under this new industrial mode of production.

    With convict leasing came the creation of Black Codes, a series of laws aimed to incarcerate Black men for trivial offenses and subsume them within the convict leasing system efficiently. Among these Black Codes were vagrancy laws, which criminalized Black unemployment. Fred's conviction for a crime he did not commit echoes this legacy of the Black Codes. His tactics to convince the officers not to arrest him rely upon his contributions to aboveground society—i.e., his job. After his initial confrontation with the police, he thinks to himself, "[h]e would make the policemen know that they were not dealing with a stray bum who knew nobody, who had no family, friends, or connections...." (Wright 10). Not only does Fred have to convince the cops that he is not a murderer; he also has to convince them that he does not belong in prison, and further, that he actively participates in capitalism as a laborer. As Fred is initially confronted by the officers, he reasons to himself that he will be able to justify his innocence through his social connections to his church and his employers: "After all, he was a member of the White Rock Baptist Church; he was employed by Mr. and Mrs. Wooten, two of the best-known people in all the city" (6). He appeals to these figures again in the middle of the interrogation scene: "If only they would call Reverend Davis! Or Mrs. Wooten!" (29) By seeking to verify his value through his church and through his employer, Fred notably appeals to Christianity and capitalism, the two institutions in the West which have historically determined what remains aboveground and what goes below.

    The flow of bodies under convict leasing—from free to convict to laborer to eventual waste—is reflected in the novel by the constant flow of water through the sewer. Capitalism has long disposed of excess into subterranean space, and the water that permeates Wright's sewer is the literal material of that waste, the physical stuff deemed useless in the world above. The violent, rushing flow of the water entering the sewer represents the progression through which materials eventually end up underground, the unidirectional process of exploitation through which capitalism manipulates raw material into commodity and disposes of excess. Immediately after Fred lowers himself into the rushing water of the sewer, he gets trapped in this violent flow as he "[f]renziedly [...] clawed the water, seeking some solid object to grasp. His body was whirled round and round; while spinning in the water, he gave up" (Wright 53). Fred's desire to tether himself to a solid object in the rushing water of the sewer resembles his more pressing desire to make his own life and body useful within aboveground society. Just as Fred literally grasps for a physical object in the water, he metaphorically grasps for a lifesaver earlier when he appeals to the arresting officer by citing authority figures who can vouch for him. His inability to anchor himself to a solid object in the flowing sewer water parallels his inability to resist the violence of the American legal system, as both force him into the underground.

    The image of Black bodies swept away by the current of rushing water reoccurs at other points in the novel, furthering the connection between Black life and capitalist waste. Like the earlier case, the water presents an irresistible force to Black bodies which subsumes them within the capitalist flow of materials. Fred's encounter with "a little nude brown baby snagged by debris and half-submerged in water" parallels his own submersion in the water earlier. Fred explains the babies' underground presence in terms of waste, thinking to himself "[s]ome woman's thrown her baby away...." (Wright 65). The implication here, that the woman threw her baby away because she could not financially care for her, places the baby firmly within the category of capitalist waste, as a body which could not be accounted for by the aboveground social arrangement. Particular attention is paid to the water that consumes the baby, first seen when water "streaked” about the baby’s body, “cracking in white foam and rushing onward", and again when the narrator describes "the little baby twisting in the current as it is washed from sight". The baby's "twisting" movement in the current parallels Fred's earlier disorienting movement through the water. The dead baby, which archetypically represents a loss of human potential, extends this notion of waste beyond Fred himself to Black subjects more generally. The metaphoric connection between the dead baby and capitalist exploitation of Black labor is strengthened through the baby's "tiny fists [...] doubled, as though in vain protest", which alludes to the communist raised fist, a symbol for communist resistance of capitalism by the working class. Fred is eventually washed away by the current a second time at the end of the novel when the police officers murder him because he threatens to expose their corrupt law enforcement practices. After Fred is shot, he "felt the grey water push his body slowly into the middle of the sewer, turning him about [...] his mouth was full of thick, bitter water" (159). Like the baby, Fred's body posits a threat to the aboveground political economy, and so he is forced underground by the current.

    Just as the materials which end up underground are first exploited and manipulated into commodity, so is Fred transformed into a legally guilty individual in a lengthy torture scene. As the officers beat, bruise, kick, and slap Fred in the interrogation room, they reduce his personhood to his body, which they treat as a material object which can be manipulated for a confession. Like in the sewer, Fred's progression from person to material to commodity to waste is accompanied by rushing water, as the officers torture Fred by punching him in the gut as he takes a sip of water: "he saw a white fist sweeping toward him; it struck him squarely in the stomach at the very moment he had swallowed the water and his diaphragm heaved involuntarily and the water shot upward through his chest and gushed forth at his nostrils, leaving streaks of pain in its wake" (Wright 18). The depiction of the officers in this scene as they torture Fred eerily resembles the Christian devil, a nod to the role of Christian mythology in shaping modern capitalist notions of subterranean spaces. Like the devil, the policemen have access to a forbidden and omniscient knowledge, seen when the narrator remarks that "he had the feeling that these men knew what he would be doing at any future moment of his life, no matter how long he lived" (11). Fred's eventual confession is framed as a Faustian bargain, seen when Murphy taunts Fred by saying "you made a bargain with us, remember?" (41). Like all Faustian bargains, Fred's confession ends with the officers eternally damning him to hell, as Officer Lawson shoots Fred, leaving him to drown in the sewer. By representing the police officers as metaphorical figures for the Christian devil, Wright's novel dramatizes the secularization and appropriation of Christian morality by capitalism and the American legal system. 

    Despite the recurring theme of waste throughout the novel, Wright's depiction of the underground notably lacks much of the traditional sensory images typically associated with waste, such as stench, filth, and rot. While Fred initially "gagged at the reeking odors" of the sewer immediately after he goes underground for the first time (Wright 54), it is only shortly later that "[t]he odor of fresh rot became so general that he no longer had the sensation of smelling it" (57). Throughout the novel, the usual repulsive quality of waste only comes to light when the sewer is portrayed in proximity to the world above. Take, for instance, this description of a puddle in the sewer:

He stood directly under the manhole cover and looked down to his left; a stagnant pool of sludge covered with a grey-green scum was lit to distinctness by the falling columns of light. At intervals the scum would swell and a balloon-pocket would rise slowly and spherically, filling with gaseous air, glistening with a greenish sheen, and then burst with a hissing sound. Ten seconds later another dilation would rise and burst. Then another. (67)

This fanciful imagery does not realistically describe underground space, nor does it align with Fred Daniel's own perception of the sewer throughout the rest of the novel. The description of a "stagnant pool of sludge covered with a grey-green scum" that bubbles with "gaseous air, glistening with a greenish sheen" and "bursts with a hissing sound" aligns more with comic book depictions of sewer spaces rather than the actual spaces themselves. This overly vivid image does not depict a realistic snapshot of underground space; instead, it reflects the ways in which aboveground society imagines those spaces. This description is enabled due to the "falling columns of light", which allow for visual imagery in an otherwise dark setting. The light in this scene represents the glimpse of the aboveground into the world below, the process through which the physical space which Fred inhabits is turned into the abstract space produced by aboveground ideology. This image, so different from other depictions of subterranean space throughout the novel, reveals the category of "waste" to be a capitalist construction, dependent upon the system of exchange which appraises some objects more valuable than others. In other words, the material of the sewer only becomes waste when it is perceived from the capitalist aboveground world. This theme occurs again when Fred exits the sewer in order to use a bathroom in an aboveground movie theater, as Fred "wrinkle[s] his nostrils against acrid wisps of vapor; though he had been tramping in the sewer, he was particularly careful to step back and not let his wet shoes come in contact with his urine" (73). 

    By spatializing capitalism in the aboveground, The Man Who Lived Underground makes possible a retreat from the ideology which permeates our modern world. As Fred retreats into the sewer, he exits the normative capitalist mode of thought which pervades all aspects of our everyday lives. Wright's distinction between the aboveground and the underground as separate spaces is made possible by the historic characterization of underground spaces in the West, from Christian hell to the industrial mine. While The Man Who Lived Underground dramatizes the defamiliarization of capitalism as natural order, the novel also calls into question our conceptions of space as static. As Fred's descent shows, our understanding of physical spaces, like our understanding of capitalist commodities, is just as subject to normative power structures which represented that which is constructed as natural.