Books: “Life of a Klansman” by Edward Ball

Edward Ball is an interesting fellow. Slaves in the Family, a book about his family’s history as slave holders in South Carolina, won a National Book Award a while back. And now his latest work, Life of a Klansman, seems no less revelatory.

For it turns out that Ball, as liberal as anybody in AugNation, is descended from Constant Lecourt, a Louisiana-born Creole, who became a foot soldier in the Ku Klux Klan.

Ball descends far back into Lecourt’s history—as far back as France, in fact. It is a story of gradual decline from a once lofty status as an antebellum landowner to a world of living hand-to-mouth as a carpenter, supporting a wife and nine kids, and nursing resentments for Blacks—who in his eyes “caused” the Civil War and the Reconstruction period that followed. This of course leads first to his enlistment in the Confederate Army and later in his active participation in the Knights of the White Camellias.

The book will be catnip for anybody interested in the Civil War (from the South’s point of view, the battles are discussed in great detail). But it also debunks the image of the Crescent City as a liberal hospitable Utopia. Instead, Nola in the mid 19th century is a battleground of white against black, Republicans against Democrats, night raids of KKK members, and violent takeovers of state Capitol buildings. Sound like any insurrection you may have heard about lately?

The book also contains a juicy anecdote about Edgar Degas and his American family’s connection to white supremacy, the details of which will not be revealed

here because you will never look at his ballet paintings the same way again. Sacre blue/who knew?