Word: neils
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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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...
...While Neil is innocently advancing toward this discovery, Author Lewis is sentimentally setting the stage for it. Neil is shown to have a lovely white wife, a little daughter "with [a] skin of strawberries and cream," a high-class home in a "restricted" residential district. Posed before Neil Kingsblood is the agonizing moral question: must I admit "my touch of the tarbrush" when I know what misery this admission will create for my wife and child...
...Black & White. Neil finds the answer 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...
...crusading Author Lewis plays against the white community with loaded dice, and his chief means of supporting the colored is to go all-out in 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...