After the death of his mother, Edward Ball traveled into his family’s past both figuratively and geographically, seeking to unearth racist roots. He found them in places, like a sprawling plantation outside New Orleans, and in people, like his great-great-grandfather Polycarp Constant Lecorgne.
The result is a book designed to discomfort its reader. It begins in the prologue, where Ball recounts conversations with family elders who again and again remember Lecorgne as “our Klansman”. The coziness and repetition of the phrase leads the reader to wonder just how near Ball feels to his forebear. And that, as becomes clear later, is exactly what Ball wants.
Ball is not a new traveler among his ancestors. In 1998 he wrote Slaves in the Family, in which he explored his father’s side of the family. Over a century and a half in South Carolina the Balls had owned thousands of human beings, and the author examined that in typical memoir style. More interestingly, he tracked down the descendants of those slaves, and gave voice to their stories.
So it’s disorienting, in Life of a Klansman, when Ball slips in and out of a stream of consciousness that seems to imagine the thoughts of his racist ancestors in a sympathetic way. For instance we meet Klansman Lecorgne as police charge him and others with occupying a New Orleans police precinct building.
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