That late Richard Wright’s novel The Man Who Lived Underground, rejected by publishers in the 1940s, was finally released in full this week. Pivoting from realism to surrealism and back, it tells the story of a man who escapes into a sewer after police torture him into signing a confession to a double murder he didn’t commit.
A new/old book
by Richard Wright …
I read it all night,
then started to rave …
In an afterword,
his grandson invoked
Plato’s cave …
I saw Invisible Man
in this underground tale.
Blue like jazz,
it drew on the church
and reputations
fatally besmirched
in the Red Scare daze
that more often than not
left a Black-white haze
of an impossible dream
and deferred the scream
of Ferguson
of Garner, of Taylor,
of Cup Foods …
When Wright wrote this book
he was proud.
But his tale was too “loud”
to be published in full.
Today we have it all,
from the subterranean crawl
to the brutal
futile
guilt of innocence,
shattered,
splattered …
But, yes, it mattered:
The Man Who Lived Underground,
by a native son
whose American hunger
will move anyone
who dares to peer into darkness
revealed as light.
A master’s endeavor
that will shine forever,
better late than never.
LOA
Richard Wright.