Fred Daniels
Fred is young, black, and on the run from police who have beaten a false confession to murder out of him. He escapes down a manhole and spends the bulk of the story exploring the dark world of the sewer and the opportunity for furtive observation and entrances into the world situated directly above. His odyssey in the sewers is a trek that ironically leads him to social illumination of how unfairly the world above really operates.
The Dead Baby
The dark underground world just below the bright sunny world above where people go about their lives buying fruit from a local grocer and congregating to have their emotions manipulated inside the cinema is surreal, but inescapably connected to that brighter place above. It is a place expectedly populated by rats, but also home to the unexpected; the most horrific being the naked body of a dead baby trapped in place by debris.
The Corpse
Another dead, naked figure receives better treatment. From his perspective underground, Fred is often granted voyeuristic opportunities to peek into the world still going on as before without any more recognition of his existence below ground than when he was above with them. One of these opportunities present another surreal and shocking sight of a naked man on a white table with a tube running from the corpse to a glass container. Further observation quickly reveals the scene is not as sinister as it first appeared: he is looking into the lab of an undertaker.
Thompson
Fred may not have committed the murder he confessed to in writing, but opportunities underground have afforded him the chance to engage in criminal activity. Most have been minor thefts for the sheer purpose of survival, but having stumbled over an opportunity to rob a jewelry store, he takes it. Later, he sees the same three cops who beat a confession out of him trying to pin the jewelry robbery on Thompson, store’s night watchman. Thompson later commits suicide.
Lawson
Lawson is one of the three cops whose idea of law enforcement is beating confessions out of men like Fred and Thompson. When Fred attempts to serve justice by sacrificing his safety beneath ground to tell him of all the guilty acts he has witnessed, Lawson becomes judge, jury and execution, shooting the man dead and sending him back down into the darkness just like the dead baby trapped in the debris.
