Taking the reader along with him on a journey of discovery as he teases out facts, [Edward Ball] engages in speculation and shares his emotions about the sad saga of Constant Lecorgne, an unsuccessful carpenter and embittered racist who was a great-great-grandfather on his mother’s side. The result is a haunting tapestry of interwoven stories that inform us not just about our past but about the resentment-bred demons that are all too present in our society today." —Walter Isaacson, The New York Times Book Review
“[Life of a Klansman] is brave, revealing and intimate, as well as an exploration of how one family’s morally complicated past echoes down to the present. This is a story for our cultural moment, as Americans begin to engage with and acknowledge the ways that white supremacy endures in our society . . . Ball is movingly philosophical about what responsibility his generation holds for the sins of its fathers." —W. Ralph Eubanks, The Wall Street Journal
"Ball’s use of the historical present not only illuminates a Klansman’s thinking but lends an immediacy to the writing . . . Ball writes with great sensitivity about the black victims of appalling atrocities such as the massacre in New Orleans on July 30, 1866 . . . Ball’s writing is suffused with a generosity of spirit; it has an unusually clear-eyed and quiet quality that often defies the tumult that it is depicting. His humility is palpable as he searches for and interviews descendants of some of those injured or killed in the atrocities that Constant likely took part in." —Colin Grant, The New York Review of Books
"Ball tells his story with curiosity, disgust, and a sweeping lamp of novelistic imagination, making his tale all the chillier for being so intimate, so intensely realized . . . This is an important work of America’s collective history—one whose ghosts are most undead." —John Freeman, Literary Hub
"In writing a microhistory about [his great-great-grandfather], [Ball] builds a psychological portrait of white supremacy, which then radiates outward and across time, to explain the motives and historical background behind racist violence . . . Ball offers a particularly piercing psychoanalytic reading of the present, even though his subject is the past." —Josephine Livingstone, The New Republic
“Captivating . . . An intimate origin story of the white-supremacist movement . . . [Edward Ball] reconstructs his ancestor’s world and moral insight in a work of novelistic expansiveness . . . Ball refuses to ‘disown’ the past, believing it crucial for white Americans to acknowledge that ‘marauders like Constant are our people, and they fight for us.’ Accordingly, he approaches his ancestor’s story with shame, but also sympathy and imagination.” —Julian Lucas, Harper's
"Edward Ball’s Life of a Klansman is filled with life stories that could have come from William Faulkner’s pen." —Nathan M. Greenfield, Times Literary Supplement
“Ball’s direct but nimble prose cuts the contours of Constant Lecorgne’s life and grapples simultaneously with the coherent outline and structure that whiteness imposes . . . Though he claims Life of a Klansman is an investigation of his matrilineal ancestor, Ball has engineered another kind of coup: a public reckoning with white supremacy . . . Ball’s book is about the postbellum US and the US in 2020; it’s looking both directions at once.” —Walton Muyumba, The Boston Globe
"In [our] severe but potentially transformative times, Life of a Klansman implicitly asks how White Americans can meaningfully confront their relationship to enduring white supremacy, whether they are directly tied to enslavers or terrorists, as Ball is, or linked less detectably by reaping the inescapable benefits of a deeply embedded racial privilege that is slavery’s lasting consequence . . . Ball succeeds in the delicate task of conveying empathy for Lecorgne while expressing his utter repulsion . . . Life of a Klansman is valuable as a self-searching profile of ancestral atrocity." —Erik Gleibermann, The Washington Post
"[Life of a Klansman] is a book designed to discomfort its reader . . . Society could view [Klansmen] as though through the wrong end of a telescope: they were tiny, and far away. Ball, though, refuses to allow his readers that distance . . . All of which makes [his] eventual point so much more powerful." —Matthew Teague, The Guardian
"This is a story of horrors, albeit of a tragically widespread kind . . . The brazenness of these crimes, which included mass murder and treason, and their perpetrators’ more or less complete impunity, cannot fail to shock even readers familiar with the period . . . [Lecorgne] is a looming spectre in a book that is really a portrait of his time." —The Economist
"Provocative and painful . . . What emerges is a harrowing reckoning with one family's past, as well as a nation's past in miniature." —Susan Larson, The Times-Picayune/The New Orleans Advocate
"Cinematic . . . Far less common than white supremacy is the willingness of its successors to explore their connections to it. Ball’s family memoir runs counter to the tendency to disavow the unsettling history of whiteness while maintaining its attendant privileges . . . Life of a Klansman is an absorbing record of the hardening of racial categories and the inner workings of white supremacy . . . Perhaps Ball’s greatest success in this book is his utilization of family biography and historical events to examine whiteness as a construct." —Andru Okun, 64 Parishes
"Through exquisite research and with the help of a file maintained by a schoolteacher aunt, Ball has managed to re-create the life and times of Polycarp Constant Lecorgne (1832-86), a New Orleans ship’s carpenter and the author’s great-great-grandfather, who was a Confederate soldier and a devoted white militant supremacist during Reconstruction . . . Here he meticulously describes a Confederate ancestor’s role in helping to re-establish white supremacy in Louisiana after slavery’s abolition . . . Ball sifts through the uncertainties, fills in gaps using inference and implication, and successfully renders a disturbing story of a Klansman." —Joseph Barbato, Star Tribune (Minneapolis)
"[A] resonant tale . . . [and] a self-searching meditation . . . An illuminating contribution to the literature of race and racism in America." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"A violent legacy stirs a deep meditation on the nature of racism in this anguished study of Civil War–era New Orleans . . . [Edward Ball] vividly reconstructs the mindset that propelled [his great-great-grandfather]—a resentful, working-class striver nostalgic for his family’s formerly privileged position atop New Orleans’ complex racial hierarchy—into racist activism . . . The result is a clear-eyed work of historical reclamation and an intimate, self-lacerating take on memory and collective responsibility." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“The author of the National Book Award–winning Slaves in the Family returns with a powerful, horrifying history of a family and a nation . . . Ball assembles a compelling, nuanced story . . . [Life of a Klansman] is sober, dominated by a deep sense of shame and outrage, and intentionally disquieting. It won't be a comfortable reading experience, and it's not meant to be, but it’s a necessary one.” —Margaret Quamme, Booklist (starred review)
"Spanning most of the 19th century, Life of a Klansman is a nuanced case study of one cog within a machine of terrorism and oppression . . . [a] nuanced biography . . . In flexing his imagination, Ball creates a dynamic space for challenging reconciliation, breaking from the narrative periodically to reflect with empathy for family members acting in ways he abhors, yet never absolving them." —Shelf Awareness (starred review)
"There is no other writer of nonfiction about race writing today who has taken us deeper into our greatest national and familial dilemma than Edward Ball. Life of a Klansman is a deeply personal history, a brave work, and a lodestar for how we have arrived at yet another reckoning about white supremacy. Ball demonstrates here, for all who wish to try, just how to face, narrate, and understand our past even when we find ancestors and stories we might wish away. In his work, he allows for no looking away, and he does so in lyrical prose." —David W. Blight, Sterling Professor of History at Yale University and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom
"In this compelling narrative of the life of a klansman, Edward Ball reckons with the history of whiteness that has shaped the U.S. and which is his personal inheritance. Ball confronts the violence and hatred at the foundation of white authority and privilege by recounting his great-great-grandfather’s worldview and acts of brutality. It is easy to recoil from the ugliness documented in these pages; much more difficult is the task of acknowledging that murder and terror are the bedrock of the nation. Life of A Klansman is a must-read, now more than ever." —Saidiya Hartman, professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University and author of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments
“If you are a white American, Edward Ball calculates, the odds that you have a Klansman in your family tree are one in two. In this singular work of imaginative reconstruction, Ball brings his own family's Klansman out of the closet and into the light. With a detective’s tenacity, Life of a Klansman personalizes the terror of white supremacy as it builds toward a crescendo that sears the soul.” —Nancy MacLean, William H. Chafe Distinguished Professor at Duke University and author of Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America and Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan
"Edward Ball’s fascinating Life of A Klansman escapes genres. His art combines imagination and history to tell the story of the sometimes brutal, often mundane, life of his ancestor, a New Orleans carpenter who became 'our klansman.' Delicately balancing empathy and disgust, he examines the chokehold whiteness and white supremacy have fastened on public memory." —Richard White, Margaret Byrne Professor of American History at Stanford University and author of The Republic for Which It Stands
05/01/2020
Ball, winner of the National Book Award for Slaves in the Family, returns with a book about his family history. This time, he writes about an ancestor on his mother's side, Polycarp Constant Lecorgne of New Orleans, with whom Ball has long been fascinated due to the family's legend of his association with the Ku Klux Klan. Admitting that he has virtually no sources from Lecorgne himself that explain his thoughts, feelings, or his life in general in his own words, Ball instead turns to threadbare bureaucratic sources and histories of racism in Louisiana and New Orleans and often veers into histories of other families that have seemingly no association with Lecorgne. What results is a book that is almost entirely historical context and speculation on the many reasons an ordinary French Creole white man would join the Klan and other racist organizations and participate in violence against newly empowered blacks after the Civil War (although to what extent he did, Ball can't really say). VERDICT Ball is thoughtful about incorporating new theories of whiteness and the implications for descendants of Klan members, but the lack of solid evidence about Lacorgne may leave readers wanting more. [See Prepub Alert, 12/2/19.]—Kate Stewart, Arizona Historical Soc., Tuscon
★ 2020-03-15
The National Book Award winner continues his investigation of his Southern roots.
Where Slaves in the Family (1998) and The Sweet Hell Inside (2001) explored the author’s ancestors’ relations with the people they enslaved, his latest potent exploration of the past is a study of an even more willful evil. The man whom Ball refers to as “our Klansman” had a “pretty name,” or so his mother said: Polycarp Constant Lecorgne. The author, a consummate historical excavator, has known this “family story” since childhood, but it took a long while to face; it’s a story that “begins with a woman making notes and talking about family and ends with a lot of people dead in a ditch.” Lecorgne was a product of his time, to be sure, but worse than most, drummed out of the Confederate Army for his part in a drunken riot, “allowed to flee, rather than face prison.” That shame did not keep him from becoming a committed member of white supremacist groups including the KKK, in which he committed heinous crimes, participating in the murder of freed black citizens and even a siege of a local police station—though, thanks to a politically well-placed brother with the resonant name of Yves of God, he managed not to do hard time. Ball’s resonant tale involves many other actors, including a distant cousin who was, a government report noted, “in the habit of shooting at blacks who come near his house” as well as an African American journalist and medical doctor who pressed for civil rights for his people even as Reconstruction faltered. Ball closes with a self-searching meditation: “It is dreadful what this character, my unlikable protagonist, does with himself and others,” he writes, but Lecorgne was not alone, and he does not expiate the rest of white America for its ongoing sins.
An illuminating contribution to the literature of race and racism in America. (40 b/w illustrations; family tree)
