Daniels’s attempts to bring back his discoveries tell a compelling story of the excruciating waste of human potential within modern society. Daniels’s mind is clearly broken by his ordeal. His Othering is a sacrificial rite, rather than one of becoming.

Daniels returns to the police officers bearing a gift he cannot articulate. One that they do not deserve and could not possibly understand. And these officers of the law are the very people who physically tortured him in a relentless pursuit to affirm their own false sense of superiority and aboveground reality. That reality requires that his brown skin envelops a life destined to serve their need of the moment. Should they need to mock and feel superior, he serves that purpose. Should they need a culprit for a murder, he is there. Should they need to erase evidence of their corrupt behavior toward him, his skin is there to be perforated with bullets.

Mortally wounded, Daniels falls back and away into the mysteries he wanted to share with them. The water carries him away to be “lost in the heart of the earth,” among the elements of that same natural world that vision questers ventured into, but traditionally returned home from, to a hero’s welcome.

Richard Wright put aside the novel-length The Man Who Lived Underground in 1942, the year in which his daughter Julia came into the world. She in turn gave birth to me another thirty-two years later. Wright was preoccupied with the kind of world he was bringing a child into, and the novel-length The Man Who Lived Underground, even more than the short story version, paints a picture of that world: one in which race is supremely deterministic, eclipsing notions of Truth and Justice.

On one level, it is this message for his descendants that captivated my mother, and then eventually me. After all, I was aware from a very young age that I owed a great debt to my grandfather: my growing up in Europe rather than the Deep South. He had done what few African Americans dared or could afford to do: he had left not only the South, but the North and its own brand of racism, for France. All with the express goal for his daughter to grow up with as much human dignity as possible.

Repulsed by the virulent Othering of Black Americans, he embraced a different Otherness found on distant shores. A better one, he hoped. As Daniels fled the aboveground world and its calculated cruelty, so did Richard Wright go into exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry.

My sixteen-year-old self felt that in his story of Fred Daniels, Wright was telling us, his children and grandchildren, what he had left behind by leaving America. What he had allowed us not to experience. I held no illusions about France’s own version of racism, but I could only feel profound gratitude. In France, brown-skinned people faced low glass ceilings in terms of opportunities within society, and varying degrees of social exclusion within certain spheres, but physical violence was a more rare occurrence.