The Long Dream by Richard Wright

First published: 1958

Type of plot:Bildungsroman

Time of work: The late 1930’s and the 1940’s

Locale: Mississippi

Principal Characters:

• Rex (Fishbelly) Tucker, the central figure of the novel
• Tyree Tucker, Fishbelly’s father, a prosperous black entrepreneur
• Gladys, Fishbelly’s mistress
• Dr. Bruce, a black doctor, co-owner with Tyree Tucker of a dance hall
• Gloria, Tyree Tucker’s mistress
• Cantley, the white chief of police of a small Southern town

The Novel

The Long Dream is set in Clintonville, a Mississippi town of twenty-five thousand people, ten thousand of them black. The narrative is told from the point of view of Rex Tucker, nicknamed Fishbelly, a name his friends have shortened to Fish. The story begins when Fishbelly is a young child. He is the son of a prosperous black businessman whose undertaking business provides a front for his other enterprises, including ownership of many dilapidated rental properties, a bordello whose prostitutes and customers are black, and coownership with Dr. Bruce, a prosperous black professional, of The Grove, a dance hall frequented by blacks.

As a child, Fishbelly accidentally sees his father in a compromising situation with Gloria, his father’s mistress. Fishbelly is intrigued by what he sees. He does not want to look, but he cannot make himself turn away. The event causes the boy to have a highly symbolic dream, which strongly suggests that Fishbelly has a castration complex, a problem that is to figure significantly in his later life.

Fishbelly is relatively protected in his early youth. He knows little of the racial tensions that characterize the Mississippi of his youth. His parents have a comfortable existence, as secure an existence as black people in the Deep South of the mid-1930’s could have. Thus, only gradually does the boy become aware of the underlying dangers that face blacks in a racist society.

Fishbelly is first brought face-to-face with these realities when the body of Chris Sims is brought to his father’s mortuary. Chris had been caught alone in a room with a white woman, and a mob of enraged white men killed him. As Fishbelly sees Chris’s body on the embalming table, he notices that the genitals have been cut from it. He winces and puts his hand to his own genitals.

Richard Wright and other black writers often drive home the point that blacks living in subjection to whites are emasculated by their subjection, but nowhere is the point more poignantly made than in this scene from The Long Dream.

Fishbelly’s castration complex is heightened by this traumatic experience, which brings the boy to his first adult understanding of the society in which he lives and in which he has been brought up.

The incident also leads to another step in Fishbelly’s perception of his world, because shortly after it, he is arrested for the quite innocuous crime of trespassing on a white person’s property. While he is being held, the police threaten his genitals with a knife, and Fishbelly is so completely panicked by this threat that he passes out. Tyree Tucker comes to the police station and grovels before the white policemen in order to have his son released. Fishbelly loathes his father’s subservient attitude to these ignorant, unfair captors. He loathes even more his own terror in this threatening situation. Through this episode, Fishbelly gains a new awareness of what his father is, and this awareness does not lead to his having increased respect for him.

Despite his unfortunate brush with the white authorities, Fishbelly loves the white world because it represents to him a world in which people can progress according to their abilities, a luxury that he believes is not available to American blacks. The next crucial event in Fishbelly’s coming of age occurs when The Grove, the dance hall his father and Dr. Bruce own, burns down. Forty-two people die in the fire, among them Fishbelly’s mistress, Gladys. This event, based on an actual dance hall fire at the Rhythm Club in Natchez, Mississippi, leads to a revelation of far-reaching consequences for Fishbelly.

It is revealed that through the years, Tyree and Dr. Bruce have been paying regular monthly bribes to Chief of Police Cantley so that he will overlook fire-code violations at the Grove. They have paid the bribes by check, and Tyree has had his mistress, Gloria, hold the canceled checks so that he might use them against Chief Cantley should the need ever arise. Chief Cantley has also been Tyree’s partner in the bordello that Tyree owns, so he is deeply involved in illicit activities that Tyree can document. Tyree decides that he must make public the bribes Cantley has been taking, and he turns the canceled checks over to a white reformer, who decides that he must deliver them to a grand jury. Cantley, however, has the checks snatched as they are on their way to the grand jury, and Tyree now fears that Cantley will take from him everything he has worked his whole lifetime to acquire.

Cantley, however, wants more than Tyree’s money. Knowing that he can never have peace of mind while Tyree is alive, he sets up an ambush, and Tyree is killed. As he lies mortally wounded, Tyree expresses his relief that at least his holdings have not been taken from him.

Fishbelly inherits his father’s property and has the financial means to leave Clintonville if he so desires. He finds that he cannot bring himself to leave behind the thriving enterprises that his father has developed over many years, however, and he decides to replace his father as head of these businesses. Fishbelly was never one to admire his father’s business tactics or his subservience in dealing with whites, but now he is willing to become like his father, a role that will necessitate resorting to Tyree’s exploitative and hypocritical tactics.

Fishbelly, however, is not destined to serve as his father’s replacement. In the novel’s final section, “Waking Dreams,” he comes into possession of some of the incriminating canceled checks that Gloria had been holding. Gloria and Dr. Bruce flee to Memphis, and Chief Cantley, fearing that Fishbelly has evidence that could incriminate him, trumps up a rape charge against Fishbelly, who serves more than two years in prison.

Upon his release, Fishbelly leaves not only the South but also the United States. He goes to Paris to join his childhood friends, Tony and Zeke, who are there serving in the American military. Wright leaves his readers with the message that salvation for the American black does not lie in leaving the South and going to the North but rather that the black’s only realistic solution is to leave the country altogether.

The Characters

Most of the characters in The Long Dream are overshadowed by Fishbelly and his father, Tyree Tucker. Fishbelly’s story, like that of most protagonists in a Bildungsroman or in an Entwicklungsroman, concerns loss of innocence. A black child from a prosperous family in a small town in the Deep South, however, endures more than a typical child does in coming of age. Fishbelly has the identity crises and the sexual adventures of any adolescent, but superimposed upon them is his coming to realize what it means to be a second-class citizen, a person who enjoys neither the opportunities nor the basic protections afforded white citizens. Fishbelly’s illusions are chipped away steadily as he comes to realize that white human beings are capable of castrating and murdering black human beings and that their society will protect them from retribution for having committed such acts. Even after Fishbelly sees Chris Sims’s mutilated corpse in his father’s embalming room, the boy has some illusions left. His father, after all, is a prosperous and successful businessman. He presumably has some standing in his own community.

Fishbelly comes to see Tyree’s real standing in the community, however, when his rather humiliates himself in order to reclaim the boy after his arrest. Simultaneously, Fishbelly realizes how the terror of physical mutilation, of castration, has turned him into a coward. In this scene, Fishbelly begins to see himself as a person who will eventually be forced into being the subservient black that his father of necessity has become. Finally, Fishbelly is totally co-opted when he decides to replace his father after his murder. Fishbelly and all the blacks with whom he associates have been forced by the dominant society to hate themselves. The only way that they can feel any sense of human superiority is by demeaning someone inferior to them, and early in the book, they find this person. Angie West is an effeminate black boy whom Fishbelly and his buddies, Tony and Zeke, humiliate. This humiliation is a foreshadowing of the kind of humiliation that Tyree perpetrates upon his black tenants, his whores, and his customers in the various enterprises that are making him rich.

As interesting as Fishbelly is, Tyree is even more complex. In Tyree, one sees a man who has been so corrupted by the system, which he has in his own way joined, that he has lost every shred of dignity and self-respect. He has sold out to such an extent that he prefers death to losing his material possessions. His spiritual emasculation is total, and for Wright, Tyree is the symbol of every black man who benefits from cooperating with and supporting a racist society. Tyree has bought the American Dream, but this dream, Wright seems to be saying, is for blacks the most terrifying nightmare imaginable, because they can achieve their dream only by allowing themselves to be totally demeaned and only by demeaning other members of their race who are less affluent than they.

Critical Context

The Long Dream was Wright’s fifth novel and was preceded by his enduringly popular Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945). Wright wrote The Long Dream when he was a decade into his exile in France, and he was somewhat out of touch with his sources at that time. His growing remoteness from his American roots is evident in the book’s language, particularly the slang, which is somewhat dated, reflecting usages of the middle and late 1940’s rather than those of the late 1950’s.

The Long Dream is angry, born of incredible personal pain, as many of the books of the protest movement of the 1960’s were to be, but for the most part Wright allows the events of the novel to speak for themselves, rather than using fiction as a forum for polemics. Wright’s work anticipates some of the black fury that was represented in the protest literature of the 1960’s: Works such as The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son (1955), and the LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) plays Dutchman (1964), The Slave (1964), and The Toilet (1964) owe much to the spirit of social protest that Wright exemplifies.

Bibliography

Baldwin, James. The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948-1985. New York: St. Martin’s Press/Marek, 1985. The essays “Everybody’s Protest Novel” and “Alas, Poor Richard” provide important and provocative insights into Wright and his art.

Bloom, Harold, ed. Richard Wright. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. Essays on various aspects of Wright’s work and career, with an introduction by Bloom.

Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. Translated by Isabel Barzun. New York: William Morrow, 1973. A thoroughly researched biography of Wright by a French scholar. Unlike many of the early reviewers of The Long Dream, Fabre admires the book for the strength of its narrative, comparing it favorably to Native Son.

Fabre, Michel. The World of Richard Wright. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985. A collection of Fabre’s essays on Wright. A valuable but not sustained full-length study.

Felgar, Robert. Richard Wright. Boston: Twayne, 1980. An introduction to the fiction, nonfiction, and poetry of Richard Wright. Felgar considers The Long Dream to be primarily a derivative work, repeating but not improving upon material introduced early in Wright’s career.

Gayle, Addison. Richard Wright: Ordeal of a Native Son. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1980. An analysis of Wright’s career as a writer and his troubled relationship with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency, using many released government documents as source material. Gayle associates Wright with Tyree Tucker and not with Fishbelly, as many other critics have.

Hakutani, Yoshinobu. Richard Wright and Racial Discourse. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996. Chapters on Lawd Today, Uncle Tom’s Children, Native Son, The Outsider, and Black Boy, as well as discussions of later fiction, black power, and Wright’s handling of sexuality. Includes introduction and bibliography.

Kinnamon, Keneth, ed. Critical Essays on Richard Wright’s “Native Son.” New York: Twayne, 1997. Divided into sections of reviews, reprinted essays, and new essays. Includes discussions of Wright’s handling of race, voice, tone, novelistic structure, the city, and literary influences. Index but no bibliography.

Kinnamon, Keneth. The Emergence of Richard Wright. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972. A study of Wright’s background and development as a writer, up to the publication of Native Son (1940).

Margolies, Edward. The Art of Richard Wright. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969. An early but extremely thorough analysis of Wright’s work. There is an extended essay on The Long Dream, despite the author’s feeling that the book is a disappointment.

Moore, Jack B. “The View from the Broom Closet of the Regency Hyatt: Richard Wright as a Southern Writer.” In Literature at the Barricades: The American Writer in the 1930’s, edited by Ralph F. Bogardus and Fred Hobson. University: University of Alabama Press, 1982. Concentrates on Wright’s Southern background and on his adaptation of the conventions of naturalism to Southern writing.

Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Warner Books, 1988. A combination of memoir and literary analysis by the well-known African American author, a close friend of Wright. Special emphasis is given to Wright’s early years in Chicago, where the two met. Walker considers The Long Dream to be a failure but concludes her book with a quote from the novel.