Neil's movement between the poles of romanticism and idealism, then, happens at a conservative place where his midwestern humility could, dialectically, guide his radical decision-making. Thus his first move is to attend an African American church service. From here Neil's open defection from the "white race" is just a matter of time, and in that time Neil learns more about his white friends and family than he does about the African Americans to whom he has never, up till this very moment, given a second thought. This has to do, I think, with Lewis's treatment of race as a historical question, not simply a social construction.

For instance, Neil's first visit to the Ebenezer Baptist Church ends not in his re-education about black Christianity but instead in a coming-to-consciousness about his own moral formation in relation to black Christianity. "This is my history, thought Neil; this is my people; I must come out" (92). In other words, Neil's response to his first real social contact with African Americans is a politics of identification rather than identity politics. In keeping with Lewis's inversion, Neil's movement is not integration but rather re-integration: he discovers that it is the African American people who have given him his morally placed humanity. Thus his journey will not be a re-staging of racial self-performativity but instead a rediscovery of his own complex humanity. He will learn that the white identity is an incubus, for if it were merely a social construct, then his role reversal would be a matter of switching masks, from white to black and back again, as in a minstrel number. In fact, Lewis anticipates this limitation of the constructivist concept of race by having several of the African American characters in the novel treat Neil's defection as a case of "a white man who only pretended to be a Negro in order to get in on the policy racket" (265). Their suspicions are based on the historyless character of such role reversal: that with any social construct, no matter how transgressive it happens to be, there is always the possibility of returning safely to where one began.

There is a crucial moment in Neil's journey, early on his path to defection, where Lewis inserts strategically a testimony to counter the reversibility trope, which has been central to many U.S. writers, most notably Mark Twain in Pudd'nhead Wilson and Charles Chesnutt in The Marrow of Tradition. It comes shortly after Neil solicits the attention of the Woolcape family at the church service. Flirting with the reversibility option, Lewis presents Neil's counterpart, Captain Emerson Woolcape, who was Neil's classmate in high school. As they walk together after the service, Neil tries to establish an intimacy with the Woolcapes by approaching Emerson as an old-schoolmates-together buddy.

"Do you remember that funny old hen we had in algebra, Captain?'"

Emerson chuckled. "She was a crank, all right."

"But she had a good heart. One time after class she said to me, 'Neil, if you would do your algebra better, you might become Governor of the State.' "

"Did she, Captain?" Emerson spoke with a drawl that was on the insulting side. "What she said to me, one time after class, was that she was considering only my welfare, and for a boy of my race to learn algebra instead of short-order cooking was 'my, such a waste of time!'" (97).

The possibilities of a racial reverse frozen, Neil pushes forward with the Woolcapes anyway, his thoughts on a much larger question: "Shall I, who am Negro, become a Negro?" (98). Neil is welcomed by the Woolcapes back to their home, not to lunch but rather to a dramatic testimony delivered by Captain Emerson's mother, Mary. The testimony she gives is spontaneous, prompted by Neil's utterance of one of the main shibboleths of northern white racial apologetics- "but here in the North there's certainly no prejudice" (101). Speaking of her granddaughter Phoebe, Mrs. Woolcape explains to Neil:

"That child is just beginning to learn the humiliation that every Negro feels every day, particularly in our self-satisfied North Middlewest. In the South we're told we're dogs who simply have to get used to our kennels, and then we'll get a nice bone and a kind word. But up here we're told that we're complete human beings, and encouraged to hope and think, and as a consequence we feel the incessant little reminders of supposed inferiority; the careless humiliations, more than our Southern cousins do the fear of lynching. Humiliation! That's a word you white people ought to know about!" (102).

Mrs. Woolcape then relates to Neil several recent episodes in Phoebe's life. One incident is when a fifty-year-old white garage attendant told Phoebe that "he would be willing to sleep with her, if he could only get used to her being a nigger"; and the other is when Phoebe's drama teacher in high school denied her a chance to try out for the school play, saying the cast was already chosen (103). "But that won't break her bones, as it did her father's," Mrs. Woolcape continues. Her testimony is unexpected, and the power of it forces Neil straight out of the "white race" in an equally unexpected turn. "I understand," he says at the close of Mrs. Woolcape's testimony, "because I've found out that I am part Negro myself." What elicits Neil's sudden defection in front of the Woolcapes is Mrs. Woolcape's account of the murder of her son.

"He went to teach in a Negro college in Georgia, where his great-grandfather had been a slave. The first time he saw that hideous sign 'For colored only,' he wrote me, he felt so angry and so scared, as if a man were coming at him with a knife, that he had to draw the car up beside the road and be sick.

"But he tried to do what his Southern acquaintances advised and to 'play the game'-a game in which the other side always makes the rules. Then when he'd been there only a month, a policeman stopped his car and acted as if he'd stolen it. This man had seen Bayard around the college-he knew that though he was so pale, he was classed as 'colored.' He was so vicious that Bayard forgot and talked back, and they took him to the police station and said he was drunk-he never even touched beer-and he got angry and they beat him. They beat him to death. My son.

"They beat him a long time. Till he died there on the cement floor. He was a handsome boy. And they told his wife that she'd better keep still or she'd never get to bear her baby-who was our Phoebe.

"After the baby came, she escaped North, all day and all night in the jimcrow coach, and she died within a year. He really was a handsome boy; and they kept kicking his head, on the cement floor, all dirty and bloody, and he died there" (104).

With Neil's defection from the "white race" in fast motion, Lewis's denouement of the novel becomes the question of the day. If Neil's whiteness is merely a social construction, then he might re-invent himself accordingly, and perform it differently this time. In other words, Neil could begin to negotiate his whiteness with his white race hometown. But if Captain Kingsblood's whiteness is a vital element of social control in "Grand Republic"-Lewis's familiar synecdoche of U.S. society-then his defection will have an immediate, irrevocable political effect on the whole community. In the latter scenario, there will be no negotiating, not because Neil rejects negotiation but rather because white supremacy cannot have it. As Lewis's transplanted Mississippi businessman Wilbur Feathering has it:

"Me, I have never in my whole life called any colored person Mister, or Miss, and I never shall, so help me God! Here's what you might call the philosophy of it. The minute you call one of the bastards Mister, you're admitting that they're as good as you are, and bang goes the whole God-damn White Supremacy racket!" (184).

Thus the "veteran millionaires" of Grand Republic take center stage to begin the second half of the novel. They have organized themselves into a white supremacist social group, the "Federal Club"-a new, more accurate synecdoche of U.S. society. Jews, women, and African Americans are barred, but so too are poor whites. Neil had been elected only because of his wife's father, a wealthy businessman of Grand Republic. Every Christmas the Federal Club's Auld Lang Syne Holiday Stag is the most significant social event of the year. "The whole affair resembled a bachelor-dinner given by J.P. Morgan the Elder to King Edward VII," says the narrator (204). This year's event would feature a speech on the "disappointing" role of Jewish and African American soldiers in the war, delivered by Neil's boyhood friend Major Rodney Aldwick. "'Those minority laddies like to dish it out, in their seditious press,'" Aldwick asserts, "'but on the field of honor, those bellyachers can't take it, especially the darker brothers. If you will permit a rude soldier to use the expression-they stink!'" (205). It turns out that Aldwick's biggest fear is that African American civil rights activists in Grand Republic are fighting to eradicate the white-only membership rules for joining the city's labor unions. "'On my own initiative,'" says Aldwick, "'I have been having an investigation made of some Negro agitators who are trying to corrupt our labor picture'" (207). In all events, Aldwick's white supremacist manifesto brings Neil to his feet. And after contradicting laconically Aldwick's account of African American participation in the war, he repudiates in front of the veteran millionaires of Grand Republic and the Federal Club his own white-skin privilege by announcing his African ancestry as well as his affinity with the African American political leaders maligned by Aldwick in his speech. Neil is promptly expelled from the Federal Club; and when he returns to work at the bank after New Year's, he is summarily demoted. Very soon the news of Neil's defection from the "white race" is all over the papers and on the local radio. There is no return for Neil and his family-no negotiating with whiteness. Instead, their lives are now on the line every day. In a matter of weeks his daughter is racially denigrated at school, he is forced to resign from the bank and search for work, his dog is shot and killed on his family's front lawn, and he receives death threats in the mail and on the phone.