Kingsblood Royal, Sinclair Lewis, 1947, Random House, Inc., New York

I picked up this book because I was out of reading material and it was sitting in our bookcase. It turned out to be a very interesting read, although it was a bit harsh at times.

This is the story of an officer, Neil Kingsblood, who was wounded in WWII, returning to pick up his civilian life in a good-sized town in Minnesota. He works at a bank, belongs to an exclusive club, and lives in an upscale new housing development. He lives an ordinary, somewhat boring life until his father asks him to investigate whether the family is descended from royal blood. What he finds instead is that his great great great great grandfather is a black man who married a Chippewa Indian maiden.

In 1947 it was common to consider that if one had any black ancestry at all, then the person was tainted and was considered “colored.” The story recounts Kingsblood’s fall from favor in the white community, the loss of his job, his forced resignation from his club, and, finally, the attempt to oust him from his home. Meanwhile, he begins to develop some close relationships with members of the small, but growing, black population in his home town.

Reading the story in 2005 is interesting and also somewhat challenging. The racism that is evidenced by many of the characters is so much more blatant and it is hard sometimes to believe unless I think about the segregated bathrooms I encountered when I was a youngster visiting Texas and Oklahoma. The characters do sometimes seem like stereotypes but they could have been very real in 1947.

I also found it difficult to believe that Kingsblood would so quickly find close friends within the black community, even with those whose social status was so different from his own. He naturally is much more at ease with the persons who are more highly educated, but he even develops some empathy toward some drug pushers and the black night club crowd. This seemed a bit of a stretch.

I also found myself thinking about what Sinclair Lewis would think of our current racial situation 58 years later. While many of the solid barriers that Lewis writes about no longer exist, we still can’t seem to overcome the racial and cultural divides that exist today.

Lewis is obviously a good writer and the book flows very well. I would recommend this book to anyone who would like to look back at another time that was perhaps not so nice and reflect on both the progress and lack of progress we have made since that time.