Morning Is a Long Time Coming

Morning Is a Long Time Coming is a 1978 novel by Bette Greene, a sequel to her award-winning Summer of My German Soldier (1973). The story follows Patty Bergen, who was twelve years old in the preceding novel. The novel opens as she graduates in 1950 from high school in Jenkinsville, a town modeled after Greene’s native Parkin (Cross County), and follows her as she travels to Europe. The novel mirrors Greene’s own experiences as a young woman, leaving Arkansas for Paris.

As the novel opens, Patty is already something of a professional writer, working as a stringer for the Memphis Commercial Appeal while still in school. But she finds Jenkinsville stifling, especially due to the townspeople’s widespread remembrance of her protecting the German soldier Frederick Anton Reiker, who went by the name Anton, six years prior, for which she spent nine weeks in a reform school; or as she puts it: “Once a penalty is called against a player it is in effect for the duration of the game.” Her grandparents give her a check for $1,000, intending that she use it for college, but Patty has other plans, and on a trip to Memphis, Tennessee, to visit her grandparents, she confesses a desire to travel to Europe. On August 15, 1950, she finally tells her parents of her intentions, and her father insists that he will not only disinherit her but will also sit shiva, reciting the Jewish prayers of the dead over her. Before leaving, Patty goes to visit Ruth, the African American housekeeper who was her closest confidant in the previous novel.

The second half of the novel opens with Patty aboard the ship taking her to France. On the ship, she makes new friends and attends a poetry reading by Katherine Anne Porter. In Paris, she is given some guidance by her new acquaintance Arlene Hollander, who is working on a master’s degree in French, and enrolls in a beginner’s French course herself.

She meets a photographer, Roger Auberon, who also teaches French on the side and who takes her on a tour of the city. They soon become lovers, and Patty recalls that “for at least once in my life, I am both loved and loving.” However, a few months into their love affair, she grows weary of not being able to work in France. Her mother writes to urge her to return home, and she responds to say that she could never live in Jenkinsville again, especially as she has had to undergo treatment for a peptic ulcer and has been told to avoid all sources of extreme stress.

She vows to go to Göttingen, Germany, the home of Anton’s family, while she still has money for the trip, but Roger responds angrily when she tries to explain her reasons for doing so. Remembering that Anton’s father was a professor, she tracks down Professor Erikson Carol Reiker in the phonebook and visits the house, where she meets Anton’s father and sister, Hannah, but learns that his mother, Deborah, died the previous June. She leaves the house without telling them of her relationship with Anton.

Back at her hotel, she is enraged at being billed for a second night and consequently ends up in jail. The police discover her train ticket to Paris and take her to the station. In Paris, she returns to Roger and tells him that she loves him. He compares her venture to climbing a mountain, and she assents, saying that she “saw—clearly saw—that there was more than one mountain in my life.…But what was climbed was already climbed, and I understand now that I’ll never have to chase that vision or scale that particular mountain again.”

In a review for School Library Journal, Jack Forman wrote that Greene’s “portrayal of a Southern Jewish family…is strong and honest, but the depiction of Patty’s relationship with Roger is strangely forced and detached. Despite this central flaw, however, the novel will attract teens because of its sensitive treatment of the loosening of familial bonds.”

For additional information:
Forman, Jack. “Review of Morning Is a Long Time Coming.” School Library Journal 24 (April 1978): 93.

Greene, Bette. Morning Is a Long Time Coming. New York: Dial Press, 1978.

Staff of the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas