The Man Who Lived Underground

Fred Daniels is the protagonist of “The Man Who Lived Underground.” Little is revealed about Fred in the story except that he’s a Black man living in an American city sometime in the 1940s. Biographical detail like his family or home is unknown, beyond the fact that he worked for Mrs. Wooten, a (presumably a white woman), who lived next door to Mrs. Peabody, a white woman who was murdered. For the most part, Fred is referred to only by third-person pronouns such as “he” and “the man.” This gives him an everyman quality, implying that Fred’s role in the world represents that of every Black man in American life: to be perpetually put upon by white people, as is clear in his interactions. For example, the couple at the butcher shop treats him like an idiot, the people on the street call him names and yell at him for disrupting traffic, and the police treat him like either an insane person or a criminal.

The accusations of criminality set the story in motion and haunt Fred throughout it. At the beginning, he’s on the run because he has been beaten into confessing to the murder of Mrs. Peabody. The police have no evidence that he did it—only a hunch based on racial prejudice. The same officers use the same routine to place blame for the jewelry store robbery on Thompson, the store’s security guard. After finding Mrs. Peabody’s real murderer, the police don’t even apologize to Fred for what they’ve done, assuming he’s crazy due to living as a Black man in a white man’s world. Throughout the story, Fred does start to lose his mind and becomes further detached from his sense of identity. He feels crushing guilt for things he didn’t even do as well as responsibility for Thompson’s death. This guilt leads him to his death, as he’s murdered by the police officers for knowing their secrets, a power no Black man is allowed to have in the America of the story.