Word: granded
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Grandpa Kenneth Kingsblood, dentist and solid citizen of Grand Republic, Minn., had summoned the family to a conference. Ranging from oldsters to younglings, but all equally curious, they assembled "beneath the pictures of the Pilgrim Fathers and sleigh-rides and Venice, sitting on the imitation petit-point chairs, on the egg-yolk-yellow couch, on the floor, looking at one another and at souvenir ashtrays and an Album of the New York World's Fair." When they were settled, Grandpa Kingsblood informed them in a trembling voice that his son Neil had something on his mind "which he will...
Then up rose redhaired, freckled Neil, wounded officer-veteran of World War II, and a man likely some day to be president of Grand Republic's Second National Bank. He said: "I have learned that my mother . . . is descended from . . . an ancestor . . . who was . . . a full-blooded Negro. Which makes every one of us, technically, either a Negro or the close relative of one." Neil's announcement is followed by screams of denial, rage and panic...
Thou Art the Man. Such a dabbler, at first, was affable, average-man Neil Kingsblood. Like all his friends in Grand Republic, Neil simply took for granted that Negroes were unfit for racial equality because they were lazy, dishonest and incapable of intellectual development. And in this comfortable state of prejudice Neil remains-until he reads the old letter which proves to him that he is one-thirty-second-part Negro himself...
...when, for the first time in his life, he visits the local colored section and finds out that Negroes are human beings. This revelation also gives Author Lewis a wonderful chance to employ his most sneering and dramatic satire-through the simple device of ranging the struggling Negroes of Grand Republic on one side of the stage and the "Babbitts" of the white community on the other. Author Lewis' Negroes are not idealized-in fact some of them are shoddy and worthless characters-but most readers are likely to agree with Neil that they, as Lewis presents them...
...discriminating against the white. When Neil publicly confesses his Negro blood, and associates with Negroes, he loses every single one of the friends he has known since boyhood, his wife is the only woman who will stand by him, and there is not one employer in Grand Republic who will defy the outraged city fathers by giving him a steady job. Only in the last, melodramatic chapter-which reads like a climax by James M. Cain-does Author Lewis feel the need to range a couple of whites at Neil's side, when he is almost lynched...