Most analysis of Richard Wright’s long short story (or short novella, depending upon your perspective) focuses on the time that titular protagonist spends actually living out his role as a man forced to live underground. An argument can be made that the story could well have ended without Fred Daniels ever arising from the filthy bowels of the sewer and still remained a powerful parable. Removed from the context of the short period in which he re-enters the world above, however, Fred’s experiences underground cannot be fully understood. Indeed, it is the final section of the story when the man the reader meets on the lam from the fuzz as he descends through a manhole that finally transforms Wright’ hero from “The Man Who Lived Underground” into Fred Daniels.
Only within the context of his reappearance from underground does the story’s opening line take on its full meaning. As he hides in the shadows, tired and crouching in an attempt to elude the police hot on his tail, the Fred desperately thinks to himself, “I’ve got to hide.” Terrorized by the malicious justice meted out by crooked, racist cops serving the interest of the town’s elite by punishing the killer of a white woman named Peabody regardless of whether he actually did it or not, Fred is a man thinking of only of himself with survival being at the top of the list.
This is the way the system works. Certain crimes are committed which take precedence, the police jump to the most obvious conclusion and then doggedly pursue evidence which align with that conclusion. As the three cops put it after they have driven the innocent night watchman of the jewelry store to commit suicide following a failed attempt to beat yet another confession out of an innocent man:
“Our hunch was right. He was guilty, all right.”
“Well, this ends the case.
“He knew he was licked.”
Under these circumstances, the system can be proven to an anxious public to have work perfectly. The crime is solved, the criminal is dead, the owner of the jewelry store can collect on his theft insurance and the insurance can cover the cost by raising premiums on everybody else. Even the two actual thieves enjoy the system under this scenario: both Fred and the employer with the sticky fingers get away with it, proving that justice is not the true aim of the judicial system. Only one thing could possibly wreck this perfectly realized example of just well-oiled the system really is: if Fred decides admit to his own guilt and act as witness to the police brutality.
To do that, however, would require that Fred come out of hiding. And that is precisely what makes the part of the story in which he is no longer the man who lives underground so vital. Fred’s experiences have changed him in many ways, but the most fundamentally important transformation is to turn him into a man who now realizes he’s got to quit hiding. As a man whose ordeal in the underworld has allowed him to see things and as things which taken together have become an experience which has enlightened Fred on the just how widespread the corruption of the system reaches—right into the lives of those who are not even aware they are an essential part of it through their blind acceptance that it must be working—Fred has become the most dangerous element any corrupt system faces.
Which brings the story almost right up to its last line. Indeed, it is the last line of dialogue quoted and that last line is linked to the story’s opening line. “You’ve got to shoot his kind. They’d wreck things.” Based on previous dialogue the implication, of course, is that by “his kind” Officer Lawson is merely referring to Fred as a black man. When viewed from the perspective that this line is inseparable from Fred’s opening thought of self-preservation and hiding, however, it takes on a much broader and fully encompassing meaning. Notice that Lawson doesn’t just end his thoughts at his “his kind” which would have definitely have limited interpretation to the racial component. By adding that this extreme prejudice in judgment was made because of the Fred’s potential to “wreck things” allows the meaning to be applied beyond the decision to kill a black man and fully justify the cop’s trust that he has been invested with the authority to protect the system at all cost.
