“Mister,” he pleaded in a whisper.

Naw, it was no use. His feet dangled in watery darkness and he heard the rush of the grey sewer current. He turned and lowered his body and hung by his fingers for a moment, then he went downward on the steel prongs, hand over hand, until he reached the last rung. The three white faces hovered dimly near. He dropped; his feet hit the water and he felt the swift current trying to suck him away. Quickly, he balanced himself and looked back up at the policemen.

“Come on, you-all,” he yelled at them, casting his voice about the rustling at his feet.

He saw Lawson raise the gun and point it directly at him and there was a thunderous report and a streak of fire ripped through his chest. He was hurled into the water, flat on his back. He looked up at the white faces. The grey water was flowing past him, blossoming in white foam about his arms, his legs, his head, his body. His jaw sagged and his mouth gaped open soundlessly. A sharp pain seized his head, a pain that gradually squeezed out the light and let in darkness.

“You-all shot me,” he mumbled, breathing hard.

He heard excited voices.

“What you shoot ’im for, Lawson?”

“I had to.”

“Why?”

“You’ve got to shoot his kind. They would wreck things.”

He heard a metallic clank; they had replaced the manhole cover, shutting out forever the sound of wind and rain. A muffled roar of a motor came to him and then the heavy swish of a speeding car rumbled overhead. He felt the grey water push his body slowly into the middle of the sewer, turning him about. Feeling still lingered in his limbs and he whispered in amazement: They shot me. . . . He no longer felt the pain of the bullet that had violated his chest, and his mouth was full of thick, bitter water. The current spun him forward. He closed his eyes, a whirling, black object, rushing along in the darkness, veering, tossing with the grey tide, lost in the heart of the earth. . . .

Memories of My Grandmother

I HAVE NEVER WRITTEN anything in my life that stemmed more from sheer inspiration, or executed any piece of writing in a deeper feeling of imaginative freedom, or expressed myself in a way that flowed more naturally from my own personal background, reading, experiences, and feelings than The Man Who Lived Underground. In fact, I can say that, in the act of writing, for the first time in my life, I reacted as a whole to the material before me in an effort to create a simple but meaningful surface of prose. What I mean is this: In all of my other attempts at writing I felt that I was reacting in terms of many partial, limited, and incomplete concepts; but here, in this book, there is only one—expressed in many terms and seen from many points of view, but still one—far-reaching, complex, ruling idea-feeling hovering in the background, like the rhythmic beat of the bass in a jazz song, fusing and lending unity and meaning to the images and symbols and movements within the story.