Book Review: Life of a Klansman

Edward Ball's memoir-history hybrid is a masterclass for nonfiction writers

The most impactful book I read in 2023—as both a reader and a writer—was Edward Ball’s Life of a Klansman: A Family History of White Supremacy (2020). Some of you may have read his first book, Slaves in the Family, which won the 1998 National Book Award for nonfiction—it’s on my TBR¹ list.

Please, read this book!

There’s so much for writers (aspiring and accomplished) to learn from it. Sigh. So much to admire here. Let’s dig in.

The Story

Since my analysis will not focus on the plot, here’s the official sales copy for Life of a Klansman:

In Life of a Klansman, Edward Ball returns to the subject of his National Book Award-winning classic Slaves in the Family: the mechanisms of white supremacy in America, as understood through the lives of his own ancestors. This time, he tells the story of a warrior in the Ku Klux Klan, a carpenter in Louisiana who took up the cause of fanatical racism during the years after the Civil War. Ball, a descendant of this Klansman, paints a portrait of his family’s anti-black militant that is part history, part memoir rich in personal detail.

     Sifting through family lore about “our Klansman” as well as public and private records, Ball reconstructs the story of his great-great grandfather, Constant Lecorgne. A white French Creole, father of five, and working class ship carpenter, Lecorgne had a career in white terror of notable and bloody completeness: massacres, night riding, masked marches, street rampages—all part of a tireless effort that he and other Klansmen made to restore white power when it was threatened by the emancipation of four million enslaved African Americans. To offer a non-white view of the Ku-klux, Ball seeks out descendants of African Americans who were once victimized by Lecorgne and his comrades, and shares their stories. 

     To have a Klansman in the family tree is no rare thing: demographic estimates suggest that fifty percent of whites in the United States have at least one ancestor who belonged to the Ku Klux Klan at some point in its history.

Organizing the Book

I’m a developmental book editor, so my attention always goes to structure. Ball could have chosen a dozen other ways to explore and explain this strange time and culture, but he does it thematically. It’s tricky for writers to tell history this way—easier to march ever-forward in time. Ball uses vivid scenes and vignettes, while minimizing time travel. I can only suggest reading it yourself to appreciate the technique.

Five Writing Tips for Nonfiction Authors

#1. Start with a Bang

Ball uses the fiction writer’s tool of jumping right into the action of a KKK raid in the first lines of Chapter One:

The middle of the week is good for an attack, for the surprise. It is March 4, 1873, in the city of New Orleans, a Tuesday night. About 9:00 p.m., a man called Polycarp Constant Lecorgne emerges from his house by the levee of the Mississippi River…

They are taking back power from the coloreds and the carpetbaggers. They are taking it back from the U.S. Army. The army is the occupier, the carpetbaggers are the thieves, and les nègres are the lackeys of both…

Then, he pulls back to explain the evolution of the 1871 Enforcement Act, the so-called Ku Klux Klan Act. He ends the chapter with a punch:

Constant stands accused. He is charged with treason. If he hangs for it, I will not have the pleasure of telling his story. He is a fighter for whiteness. Which he knows, and we also know, is not treason at all.

#2. Use Present Tense, even in Telling History

Ball breathes life into the dusty pages of a former time in a foreign culture by telling history in present tense using vignettes and scenes instead of exposition. For example, we learn about the history and customs of 19th century Creoles through the story of his ancestors’ wedding in the present tense. Notice how this choice brings the reader right inside St. Louis Cathedral:

Here is the bride, eighteen-year-old Marguerite Zeringue…plus her people…Here is the groom, Yves LeCorgne, age twenty-nine…The church has a vaulted ceiling, an altar of colored marble and gilded wood, on top of which stand three women. A mural is painted on the rear wall showing Louis IX, the sainted king of France, proclaiming the Crusades. The Louis whose name became Louisiana…

(Next, he goes into a paragraph about the state of Louisiana as a French colony in 1718, its transition to Spain in 1763, returning to France in 1800, then to the United States in 1803).

…But to the ceremony. When Yves Le Corgne and Marguerite Zeringue stand at the altar, France is their mother country, as it is for half the whites in New Orleans, at least in fantasy.

See how intimate this feels? I imagine myself in the church, in the time, and eventually in the minds of these families as they are joined through marriage: “Here IS the bride..a mural IS painted..France IS their mother country…”. That’s using the present tense at its best.

#3. Disclose Without Bogging Down

One thing that peeves some readers about memoirs is not knowing the episodes that were condensed or the conversations that were reconstructed or imagined. In spite of liberally using his imagination, you can’t accuse Ball of “making stuff up” because he discloses the feint, which is grounded in research.

As Ball proves throughout the book, you don’t always need to use clunky footnotes to disclose assumptions. Going back to the wedding scene here, look for the ways he does this so elegantly (again, I used italics for present tense):

I have no portraits of the bride and groom. They do not hire a portrait painter, and it is many years before the advent of photography. But I can see them to a degree, by inference. I see them by thinking about their great-grandchildren, the people named Maude and Edna, and Albert Lecorgne, whom I knew as a boy in New Orleans.

Yves Le Corgne as I picture him is slight, with thin features and a sharp chin. His brown hair is straight, cut to an inch or two in length, and combed forward in the Empire style. Many men, certainly white men with French roots, wear their hair in a style imported from Paris. It is copied from the emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte, and spread by imitation to the fingertips of the French-speaking world.

Still in the wedding scene, we learn about chattel slavery in the family (italics on present tense):

Also on hand, maybe, is a young woman named Polly. She is twenty-one, black, and an enslaved servant. Polly has been working for years in the home of Marguerite’s parents. Today, she is a breathing gift. Marguerite’s parents are presenting Polly to their daughter as a wedding present, handing her over like a living dowry.

Marguerite’s family, the Zeringues, have two kinds of capital that Yves does not: slaves and social position. The Zeringues are Creole: they are French in language and life, and they have lived in Louisiana for nearly one hundred years. The Zeringues are enviable—to whites, that is. They have a rice farm on the Mississippi…with eleven enslaved workers, the latter fact thought prestigious.

Here’s another example of disclosing his assumptions (in bold):

Marguerite has a new worker, Ovid, named for the Roman poet. Ovid is sixteen, and the record makes no mention of his parents or siblings. Probably Marguerite went to the slave market in the City Exchange Hotel and bought the boy away from his family. It is a guess, but that is the way a nice widowed lady might do things.

#4. Go Lightly and Liberally with Commentary

Just in reading these brief excerpts above, you know where the author stands on racial stratification and slavery. But he doesn’t use a heavy hand. Instead, he peppers his observations throughout the text, and they accumulate like silt in the reader’s consciousness instead of smashing it like a boulder.

When Ball comments, he avoids judging historical characters based on present standards. At the same time, he doesn’t let the reader forget how much we still have in common with them.

Constant is an agent of racist terror, and he is one of us. What lies in the unconscious of this ordinary man who cannot keep a full work calendar and who terrorizes people? Maybe a hundred things can be found, with names. Bloodlust from war. Disgust with blackness. Subservience to authority. Attraction to blackness. Insecurity of self. Fear of blackness. Rage at scapegoats, defined by their blackness. The main items, maybe, are forms of aversion and arousal around blackness. He is one of us, one of ours. Does Constant share an attraction and repulsion around blackness with other whites? He does, both with the majority of whites then, and perhaps with the majority during the so-very-enlightened 2000s.

#5. Find an Unforgettable Ending

Sticking the landing is just as challenging as starting with a bang. Ball could have ended in the present day, when he talks to descendants of various characters in the book. Instead, it ends in 1905, when his ancestors fully descend from what were known as Big White to Little White.

Ball’s great-great-grandfather Constant dies, leaving his wife Gabrielle to work in a school for blacks behind the family church, St. Stephen. “She is seventy years old, then older. She works and works, and does not stop. She reaches for her mop to swab the floor, cleaning up after the black children.”

If you’ve read this book, let’s talk!

If you have a family history like this, have you considered writing a book about it? Jeannette Walls wrote what she called a “true novel,” Half-Broke Horses.² Here’s what she says about fictionalizing family history.

1. To Be Read

2. You may also have read her book or seen the movie The Glass Castle.