{"id":4292,"date":"2021-10-06T12:30:47","date_gmt":"2021-10-06T16:30:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tempestmag.org\/v01_2020\/staging\/?p=4292"},"modified":"2021-10-12T16:12:36","modified_gmt":"2021-10-12T20:12:36","slug":"richard-wright-and-the-police-state","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2021\/10\/richard-wright-and-the-police-state\/","title":{"rendered":"Richard Wright and the police state"},"content":{"rendered":"

Note: This review contains spoilers.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Richard Wright would not have been surprised by police torture. Almost seventy years before disclosures<\/a> that Chicago cops had been shackling, beating, murdering, and disappearing people at Homan Square on the city\u2019s West Side, Wright published a short story about Fred Daniels, a working-class Black man snapped up by police on payday while walking home to his pregnant wife. The cops accuse him of raping and murdering a white couple near his workplace. He is dragged brutally to a precinct house. And then:<\/p>\n

Johnson yanked him up and clapped steel bands upon his ankles; then Johnson and Murphy lifted him bodily and swung him upside-down and hoisted his feet to a steel hook on the wall. The steel bands on his ankles were looped over the hook and he hung toward the floor, head first. Blood pounded in his temples and his heart and lungs sagged heavily in his chest. He could hardly breathe.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The 2021 edition of The Man Who Lived Underground<\/em>\u2014the unpublished novel upon which Wright\u2019s original 1944 story is based, and now available from Library of America\u2014feels like a blast from our present. It is capitalist history written in blood. Tempest readers should run to it.<\/p>\n

Richard Wright is probably best known to many as the author of Native Son<\/em>, his shattering 1940 novel about Bigger Thomas, a Black Chicago youth condemned to die after accidentally killing a rich white girl he is hired to chauffeur by his wealthy landlord. Wright\u2019s novel, based on the true story of Robert Nixon, a Black Chicago man condemned to death for murdering a white woman, was written in a white-hot rage: the book exposed the courts, the police, the law, the real estate industry, the media, and private property as an iron cage for working-class African-Americans.<\/p>\n

Wright had begun the novel while still a member of the Communist Party. The Man Who Lived Underground<\/em> was written just after Wright completed Native Son<\/em>. Despite the latter\u2019s best-selling success, the manuscript was rejected by Harper and Brothers.\u00a0 As several scholars have noted, at least one reader for the press described the scenes of police torture as \u201cunbearable.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Richard Wright, May 1943. Photo<\/a> by Gordon Parks.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Wright then trimmed the manuscript and published it as a short story in the journal Accent in 1942, setting aside the longer manuscript to welcome the birth of his first child, Julia.\u00a0 In a turn of poetic justice, it is Julia Wright who has years later approached New American Library with the full-length novel and convinced it to publish.<\/p>\n

Like Native Son, The Man Who Lived Underground is inspired by a true story, this time of a white unemployed sewer worker named Herbert C. Wright who tunneled into the backs of stores and shops in Hollywood while living underground. In many ways, the book is a deeper and more direct meditation than Native Son on what police abolitionists call the carceral state.<\/p>\n

The plot is stark: Daniels is falsely accused, tortured, beaten into a confession, and eventually murdered by police. Yet the book\u2019s genius is to distend this moment into a long nightmare of the Black social imagination. Halfway through his travail, Daniels escapes by crawling into an open sewer cover and disappearing into the underground. There Wright creates a phantasm of horrors meant to illuminate for Daniels, and the reader, something like the totality of the racist capitalist system within which he is both prisoner and fugitive.<\/p>\n

In the underground, Daniels hears the voices of an imaginary Black church choir; pokes a dead Black baby floating past in the sewer system; breaks into a realtor\u2019s cash-filled safe laden with cash; watches an imaginary war on earth; sees a brown woman\u2019s body laid out as if for an autopsy; and witnesses the cops who arrested him torturing a white man. The hallucinatory force of vision surfaces this flash of insight:<\/p>\n

And then a strange and new knowledge overwhelmed him. He was all people. In some unutterable fashion, he was all people and they were he; by the identity of their emotions they were one, and he was one with them\u2026He now knew too the expressible value and importance of himself. He must assert himself; he was propelled to do something, to devise means of action by and through which he could convince those who lived aboveground of the death-like quality of their lives.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In a powerful essay that is a postscript to the novel, Wright describes Daniels\u2019 psychic journey as influenced by his grandmother\u2019s devotion to Seventh Day Adventism, and by surrealism, jazz, Freudian psychology, and World War II (the underground, he reminds us, was also the place of antifascist resistance).\u00a0 All of these are by themselves fascinating interpretations. But I think the best explanation of the book lies in Daniels\u2019 observations that \u201che was all people and they were he.\u201d Daniels learns the mystery of his alienation, the necessity for human solidarity, and the burden of political awareness\u2014of being woke.<\/p>\n

Especially critical to his education underground is his revised understanding of capital.\u00a0 The money he steals from the safe he takes not to spend but in order to contemplate its abstract power over his life.\u00a0 It represents at once his social labor and his social being, and the need to transform both. \u201cHe now knew too the expressible value and importance of himself.\u201d<\/p>\n

There are many other reasons to read The Man Who Lived Underground. Fred\u2019s wife Rachel is pregnant with their child and is rushed to the hospital just before he goes underground. The dead children he sees in the underground are disappeared Black people prematurely killed and disappeared by the system. The police suggest Fred may be part of a \u201cFifth Column,\u201d reminding readers that during World War II the U.S. state feared Black insurrection and treason. The book is also written at a fever pitch as terrifying about the racial conditions of the modern world as anything Wright ever produced. At the end of his preface to Native Son, Richard Wright wrote, \u201cIf [Edgar Allan] Poe were alive, he would not have to invent horror; horror would invent him.\u201d\u00a0 It also invents Fred Daniels.<\/p>\n