Mr. Ball artfully reanimates ideas that attempted to justify slavery and, later, black subjugation ... Mr. Ball also connects historical New Orleans with the present moment, as when he interviews the descendants of black and Creole families who were victimized by White League violence, showing how past trauma lives on ... Mr. Ball sets this section of the book apart. It’s a risky but effective narrative gambit, revealing that while Mr. Ball may share the history of the people he is interviewing, the impact of that shared history is both infinitely varied and painfully particular ... Life of a Klansman does just that; it helps the reader to understand that uncomfortable historical legacies must be faced and confronted. Though Mr. Ball shies away from prescriptiveness ... His prose is almost never cloying or superficial; this is not a handwringing apology of the sort one sometimes reads in social-media confessionals. Mr. Ball is movingly philosophical about what responsibility his generation holds for the sins of its fathers. He veers away from sentimentality ... Mr. Ball’s examination of the life of his family’s Klansman reminds us that there’s much more work to be done.
... 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 ... Because he has few documents, Ball indulges in a lot of surmises and speculations, perhaps a bit too many for my taste ... Lecorgne was a minor player in this movement. But for that reason his tale is valuable, both for understanding his times and for understanding our own; he allows us a glimpse of who becomes one of the mass of followers of racist movements, and why ... The interconnected strands of race and history give Ball’s entrancing stories a Faulknerian resonance. In Ball’s retelling of his family saga, the sins and stains of the past are still very much with us, not something we can dismiss by blaming them on misguided ancestors who died long ago.
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 ... Ball uses...[a] paraphrasing approach inventively to enter the minds of various White figures, though at times he transitions confusingly between these voices and his own historical narration. The book’s most compelling character is not Lecorgne but New Orleans itself, culturally and racially layered ... Throughout, he writes to a White audience, using the pronoun 'we' ... While Ball may be well-intentioned in using this language to challenge those who might identify with his burdened past, because he does not explicitly acknowledge this audience selection, he effectively disregards readers of color, as though they presumably wouldn’t choose to engage the history of White terrorism or a White writer who grapples with his relation to it ... Ball doesn’t ultimately connect Lecorgne and the systemic racism he embodies with contemporary white supremacy ... Life of a Klansman is valuable as a self-searching profile of ancestral atrocity. But without confronting America’s present-day white-supremacist severities, Ball ultimately lands softly on the bloody terrain.
... a book designed to discomfort its reader ... it’s disorienting 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...All of this could seem, to the impatient reader, like an effort to empathize with the racist mind ... Ball refuses to allow his readers that distance. He writes of Lecorgne as despicable but fully human, forcing the reader to view the world through the long-dead man’s little round-framed spectacles. All of which makes Ball’s eventual point so much more powerful ... the second half of the book focuses largely on the consequences of his ancestors’ actions, and the people affected. These are not cursory mentions: Ball creates detailed and loving portraits of people such as Janel Santiago Marsalis, who is initially wary of Ball in New Orleans. She’s a Creole artist who paints her own ancestors. Some of her family died at the hands of Lecorgne’s fellow Klansmen. Through her art and in the book she, as Tulane’s students might hope, lifts Black voices mightily.
Ball cannot know Constant’s mind intimately. However, employing Saidiya Hartman’s technique, 'critical fabulation,' allows him creative liberties in constructing Constant’s life and his milieu. When gaps emerge in psychology, motive, or context, the author relies on the vast historical, literary, and artistic archives (family papers, public records, periodicals, photographs, and scholarship) about 19th-century white New Orleanian experience to speculate artistically about his ancestors ... 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.
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 ... [an] engrossing 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 ... Never does the author lose sight of his complicit inheritance of privilege at the expense of black lives. Nor does he lose sight of the families fighting to be recognized as human ... Life of a Klansman removes the histrionic hoods and gazes purposefully into the frantic eyes of a homegrown terrorism.
Ball writes predominantly in the present tense, making us feel the structural (and genetic) links between himself—the white writer—and Lecorgne, the white supremacist ... Ball offers a particularly piercing psychoanalytic reading of the present, even though his subject is the past ... [a] guide to that massive bedrock half-hidden by the dirt.
... exquisite research ... Ball sifts through the uncertainties, fills in gaps using inference and implication, and successfully renders a disturbing story of a Klansman.
Ball reconstructs his ancestor’s world and moral insight in a work of novelistic expansiveness ... Ball makes it easy to grasp, if not excuse, the sense of social upheaval that motivated Klan violence ... Ball refuses to “disown” the past, believing it crucial for white Americans to acknowledge ... he approaches his ancestor’s story with shame, but also sympathy and imagination ... In two short interludes, Ball meets with descendants of those who survived the Mechanics’ Institute Massacre, letting their family stories share space with Constant’s ... Here, the connections feel more tangential, and the encounters forced. Perhaps Ball could have investigated not Constant’s survivors but his successors, who, fearful of replacement by racial 'inferiors,' are once again infiltrating police departments and organizing militias. Most readers will have little trouble drawing these parallels themselves; the strategies are familiar because the struggle is ongoing.
This is a timely book. It covers another period when America sought to confront its past and make amends for centuries of oppression of African-Americans ... To compensate throughout — and he freely confesses to this — the author supposes, surmises, imagines, suspects, and substitutes surrogate sources to fill in the gaping holes in the historical record of his family four generations back. This comes off as forced and unsatisfying. The ongoing assumption is if something bad happened in New Orleans way back when, Polycarp was in the middle of it ... To compound matters, Ball’s prose is relentlessly truncated: short declarative sentences that leave the reader longing for a subordinate clause, a compound sentence, or even a dangling participle ... At no point does the author describe his relative straight-forwardly as 'my great-great-grandfather' — an omission the publisher’s publicity material does not repeat — while at times he refers to Polycarp inexplicably as 'my grandfather' ... Despite the book’s flaws, Ball has done substantial research and paints an intimate, eye-opening picture of New Orleans during Reconstruction.
...a powerful, horrifying history of a family and a nation ... a compelling, nuanced story, amply illustrated with family photographs. The book 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.
... 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) ... 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.
A violent legacy stirs a deep meditation on the nature of racism in this anguished study of Civil War–era New Orleans ... He also vividly reconstructs the mindset that propelled Lecorgne—a resentful, working-class striver nostalgic for his family’s formerly privileged position atop New Orleans’ complex racial hierarchy—into racist activism ... a clear-eyed work of historical reclamation and an intimate, self-lacerating take on memory and collective responsibility.
