Yet my grandmother did all of these things without ever really understanding the world in which she lived; I’m quite certain that she did not know the relationship of one thing in her environment to another, that is, in an objective sense. The only relationships they had were wholly in terms of her attitude, an attitude borrowed from the pages of the Old Testament. She brought her meaning to the world, but the world never gave her any meanings that she could accept. That was the strange thing about my grandmother.

Yet, in many respects, a schizophrenic personality operates in very much the same way; it is withdrawn from the world; whatever meaning there is in the environment is brought there by its own temperament. The schizophrenic personality sees the world wholly in terms of its own feelings; it imagines things that do not exist; dangers are always lurking; it hears voices. My grandmother heard voices; she imagined things, too. I imagine that the reason no one ever called her crazy was that everyone who lived around her was acting more or less the same way. When I, in my childhood, told my grandmother that I could not see things or hear voices, I was branded the crazy one in the environment. Well, I survived that accusation. Perhaps, in fifty or a hundred years from now, someone may look back upon the environment in which I am now living and compare its tensions to some form of religion or psychopathic tendency. If so, okay; I hope they learn a lot, at least as much as I learned through studying the memories of my grandmother.

There is still another theme treated suggestively in the book, that is, the Christ legend; I’ve already mentioned Christ in the sense of a man returning to the sun of authority that first gave him eyes to see; but the theme I’m now speaking of is the brutal treatment of the superior man by his inferiors. I deliberately wove faint suggestions of this theme into the story in a rather ironic mood. I’m not insisting upon it or stressing it, but I did feel that Fred Daniels, when he emerged from the underground, was certainly talking a lot of good sense and yet in the context of the environment in which he spoke, he certainly was talking a lot of nonsense. For two thousand years the world has been killing people like Fred Daniels for saying what Fred Daniels was saying, perhaps for saying less guilty things than those Fred Daniels tried to say.

Still another theme, suggested in a rather muted way, is the problem of the Negro. After all, Fred Daniels is a Negro, and Negroes in America are accused and branded and treated as though they are guilty of something. They don’t know what they’ve done to be treated so; all of which has made a lot of Negroes write a lot of impassioned books saying: “Look, here, I ain’t done nothing. Give me a break, for Christ’s sake!” So much for that theme.