Books: Tract in Black & White

THE LONG DREAM (384 pp.)—Richard Wright—Doubleday ($3.95).

From his first (1938) book of long short stories to his latest novel, Richard Wright has given proof that anger can sometimes command more attention than art. He has one string to his bow: the shameful plight of the Negro in the white man’s world. His writing is graceless, and he uses it with the subtlety of a lynching. It is doubtful for just how many of his fellow Negroes he speaks. But it is impossible to read him without sharing his indignation.

In his autobiographical Black Boy (TIME, March 5, 1945), Author Wright described how, from a horrible childhood in the South, he fled first to Chicago, then New York, finally to Paris.* He was an easy mark for the Communists but eventually saw through them and earned their lasting enmity. In The Long Dream the Mississippi Negro boy is called Rex “Fishbelly” Tucker, but so far as the story’s essentials are concerned, his name might be Richard Wright. Fishbelly’s father, an undertaker, once taught him an important truth as he buried the mutilated body of a young Negro who had accepted the sexual invitation of a white woman. Said Tyree Tucker: “One more black dream dead . . . a dream that can’t come true.” As Fishbelly sees it, growing up in the black belt of a small Mississippi city, every black man can dream, but the white world will see to it that the dream becomes a nightmare. Fish despises his own father for whining and debasing himself when he talks to whites, for becoming rich by running a string of brothels as a sideline. He has also, as undertaker, patched up dead black bodies beaten up by the police and made himself the indispensable Negro contact in the black belt. Gradually Fishbelly sees that the old man is using the white authorities as surely as they are using him. The alliance disgusts him, and when the whole nasty business blows up, Tyree is ruthlessly killed by the police, and Fishbelly spends two years in prison on a trumped-up rape charge. Freed but still fearful, he flees to Paris.

Within the bare outlines of this sordid story, Author Wright hammers away at the brutality, based on fear and hatred, that the white world visits on the Negro. By this time, even Expatriate Wright should know that his picture is too crudely black and white: he writes as if nothing had changed since he grew up in Mississippi. But there is still so much truth in his crude, pounding, wrathful book that no honest reader can remain wholly unmoved.

* Where he now lives with his white wife, Ellen, and two daughters.