Kingsblood Royal

 At some point along the way it became fashionable not to take Sinclair Lewis quite seriously as a novelist or social prophet (Nabokov, for instance, once mocked the whole genre of novelistic social criticism to which he belonged as "Upton Lewis"). It becomes clearer by the day, though, that this was a terrible mistake. We need him more than ever. 

His 1947 "race" novel Kingsblood Royal is one of those books I've lugged around on my shelf from apartment to apartment for the last twenty years without actually reading it. I knew roughly the premise of it, and therefore thought I knew its contents—which I found intriguing but not relevant enough to actually bother reading until now. 

I'm glad I never made an attempt upon the novel in prior years. Because if I had read this book at any earlier stage of my life, I would have thought it perhaps a bit hyperbolic; or—more fairly—just a product of a bygone time that our country has thankfully superseded since then. 

I needed to save it for this summer, this year, of racial retrogression to appreciate both its perpetual relevance and its sublime horror. 

The basic conceit of the novel is easy enough to summarize. Suppose you take a young red-blooded American, just back from the war and newly installed in a banking job in Middle America, with a lovely home and family and all the casually racist attitudes of the typical white ex-GI in the 1940s. 

Then imagine that this person finds out one day that he is one thirty-second Black by ancestry. What would learning this fact do to this person's life, in the midst of a white supremacist society? 

I think the reason it would have been harder for me to take this premise seriously, if I'd read the novel a few years earlier, is two-fold. I would have thought: (1) how could being one-thirty-second of anything be a big deal? Wouldn't it be easy to disguise it anyway? Couldn't you just never mention the fact to others? And (2) How could others possibly care if you did tell them? 

The miracle of Lewis's achievement is that he unfolds his story and explains his characters in such a way that these seeming absurdities come to seem not only plausible, but inevitable. 

On the first point, Neil Kingsblood comes to realize that he probably could hide the truth about his ancestry and "pass" as fully white—but he doesn't want to. Once he knows the reality of his background, he gradually loses his ability to feel anything but contempt for the racial superstitions and idle sneering of what had hitherto been his caste. 

And on point number two, Lewis shows how—yes—as implausible as it should be and should seem—it really would have been a big deal for a person to make this discovery about themselves in 1947—and possibly still today—or at least to announce it to the world. 

Ultimately, Neil's sin in the eyes of his former white friends is not so much that he discovers an uncomfortable fact about his ancestry—but that he doesn't have the decency to be ashamed of it and try to tuck the fact away as a dirty secret. It's not just the fact that he is now "Black" according to the "one drop" rule of the "color line"—it's that he's proud of it. 

I think one of the reasons I didn't touch this novel for so many years, despite its presence on my shelves, was that I assumed it would be just another "Tragic Mulatto" story—the kind of protest novel from a bygone era that, even as it argued against the artificiality of the "one drop" principle, actually embraced some of the same racist assumptions on which it rests. 

I couldn't have been more mistaken. Kingsblood Royal is actually a comprehensive assault on the tenets of racism whose ultimate conclusions could—in my view—survive any racial justice seminar.* Neil's half-willing and half-coerced decision in the novel to participate in Black life brings him into contact with people of every shade of the community. 

And ultimately, this experience forces him to the conclusion not only that it is wrong to treat the one-thirty-second part of a person as the whole person—but that it's even more wrong to treat that one-thirty-second part, or that one-quarter part, or that one-half part, or that whole part, as a "taint" in the first place. 

Neil Kingsblood learns of his true ancestry, after all, because his father sends him on a genealogical expedition to find out if their last name comes from some actual royal lineage in the distant past. When Kingsblood learns the truth, he at first inwardly mocks at his father's pretensions—here's our royal bloodline for you, dad!

But in one of the more poignant developments in the novel, he eventually comes—as he learns more about his forgotten Black forebear—to see that he was in fact a more worthy ancestor than any Tudor or Stuart. "There is blood royal for Biddy to be proud of," he at last concludes.  

As recently as just a few years ago, if I had read the novel then, it would still have been possible for me to think: how horrid that people used to have all these racist attitudes and superstitions about the "color line"; glad we've overcome it!

It is no longer possible even for someone like me to think that. Not this year. Not this summer. One of the biggest culture war episodes of the season was set off by pundits who literally and publicly believe that Black people are genetically and statistically inferior, after all.

One could write a pretty powerful novel even in our own time exploring what would happen to a person who holds these beliefs who one day discovered that they were partially Black themselves. 

Meanwhile, the world's richest man has been having a full-on public meltdown all summer over the idea of Helen of Troy being portrayed as a Black woman, and has been talking about making his own all-white "historically accurate" version of the Odyssey instead. 

Who dares pretend the superstition of the "color line" no longer exists?

Plus, our own executive branch is right now trying to erase the history of racism and slavery from our public memory and routinely fires or derides Black civil servants with the sneering assertion that they were mere "DEI hires." 

Trump himself reportedly uses these same racist snubs in casual conversation: deriding his Black political opponents as "Equal opportunity hires," according to Maggie Haberman's paraphrase. 

Our Supreme Court this year empowered white state legislatures across the country to dilute Black voting power, gutting the protections of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and effectively ensuring the restoration of one-party white majoritarian rule across the South. 

And just this morning, I awoke to news that a right-wing MAGA pundit—someone close to the White House and influential in many of its internal policy and personnel decisions—has just made headlines by openly using racist slurs against Black members of Congress. 

I won't repeat the phrases she used here; but let's just say they were worthy of a "Rev. Dr. Jat Snood," a character in Lewis's novel who leads a neo-fascist revivalist movement—or any upstanding member of the "Sant Tabac"—a criminal organization in the novel dedicated to using KKK-style tactics to expel Black people from Northern cities to the South. 

Many of the white characters in Lewis's novel are blithely committed to a certain complacent "kettle logic" on the topic of race that we still find among some of our numbers today. On the one hand, they are convinced that racism has ended, or at least that there has never been any discrimination in the North. On the other, they go on openly practicing discrimination and expressing racist attitudes every day themselves. 

I wrote in a recent post about Albion Tourgée's forgotten 1879 novel A Fool's Errand, about Reconstruction. One of the Northern Republicans in the novel at one point prophesies that Black Americans—fleeing Jim Crow and KKK terrorism in the South—may some day "attempt an exodus" to the North that will "test, at our very doors, the humanitarianism of which we boast." 

Obviously, that exodus really occurred a few decades later. It was called the Great Migration. 

Kingsblood Royal is in some ways the chronicle of how Northern cities that had once boasted of their freedom from de jure discrimination and segregation responded in practice, once their "humanitarianism" was put to the test. The novel deals with topics such as restrictive covenants and de facto discrimination—the various tricks and devices white employers could use to evade their legal obligations, even in states that nominally had civil rights laws on the books. 

These are of course tactics the new racism of our time still uses today. The White House and the Pentagon may not fire Black civil servants overtly for being Black. But if they fire them, or refuse to hire or promote them in the first place, for being "DEI hires," I'm not sure it makes any practical difference. 

And what is worse, perhaps, even than the newly-confident and self-assertive racism of the Right is the soft racism of the Left, which says: we got ourselves into trouble by talking about this stuff too much during "woke 1"—isn't it better to just ignore racism and talk about gas prices if we want to win elections? 

And so, the new right racism is left on the field practically without a challenger. 

And our whole society may really be entering another long winter when it comes to racial progress—such as we experienced in the wake of the return of white racist minority rule in the South after Reconstruction, or in the period of Northern white racist backlash to the Great Migration in the period Lewis depicts. 

How was Lewis himself so miraculously free of the default racism of the other whites in his time? I don't know, but he was; and his interest in the topic was not merely a product of the wave of post-war liberalism in the 1940s which would ultimately give rise to the civil rights movement. Rather, he was even writing about the same issue much earlier in his career.

I recall as a teenager when I first discovered Babbitt, and it became for a time my manifesto. I remember that Lewis includes even in this 1922 novel a scene in which a Black railway porter returns a straightforward answer to a group of white passengers, without any gratuitous bowing and scraping, and the passengers proceed to dissect this as evidence of a new conspiracy to overthrow white supremacy. 

That one passage may seem like a small thing—but it meant an extraordinary amount to me as a teenager—to a degree that may be a little hard to understand now. I suppose it made such an impression on me because it was proof that a white author even in the 1920s could transcend the default attitudes of his environment enough to mock and satirize white racism and white racial paranoia.  

And if Lewis could do it, there must still be hope for us all. 

His novels still give me this hope today. 

That's why we need him so much.

__

*At the risk of revealing spoilers, I will say that the novel even manages to resist the Bulworth trope of the white savior finding sexual redemption in the arms of a Black mistress—though you think for a time this is where it's heading.