Life of a Klansman

by Edward Ball

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  Table of Contents

  A Note About the Author

  Copyright Page

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  for my children,

  Abigail

  and

  Theodore Ball

  The more images I gathered from the past … the more unlikely it seemed to me that the past time actually happened in this or that way, for nothing about it could be called normal: most of it was absurd, and if not absurd, then appalling.

  —W. G. SEBALD, Vertigo

  PROLOGUE: Our Klansman

  My mother had a soft view of the person who became our Klansman.

  —He was the one with the pretty name, she said. Constant Lecorgne.

  —Who can pronounce that? I said. He was French, and no one in New Orleans is French anymore.

  This talk took place in the kitchen. I was a teenager.

  —His name was unusual, my mother said. Polycarp Constant Lecorgne.

  She pronounced the last part Le-corn. She said the middle name with a French effort, Cohn-stah.

  —What kind of a name is that?

  —Polycarp Constant. It’s pretty.

  My mother’s name was Janet. She thought it plain. Whereas this family member, the one called Polycarp, had a fancy name. And he was French, meaning “Latin,” meaning more cultured, or more virile, or something.

  —Polycarp Constant Lecorgne, she said. It’s like a melody.

  —It is strange, I said.

  —Look it up.

  I went away to page through an encyclopedia, came back to report.

  —Polycarp was a saint, about A.D. 100, in the city of Smyrna, on the Mediterranean. He was a bishop, killed by the Romans.

  —Our Polycarp was Catholic, my mother said. He did not like his first name, so he used his second, Constant. He was not a saint.

  —What do you mean?

  —I mean it is too bad what he got up to with that White League. I mean it is sweet and bitter. The beautiful name. The business with the Ku-klux.

  This is a story that begins with a woman making notes and talking about family and ends with a lot of people dead in a ditch. This is a family story. Yet it is not a family story wrapped in sugar, the way some people like to serve them.

  When my mother died, in 2003, my brother and I went to New Orleans to bury her. We had her placed in the family tomb. We paid the cemetery to chisel her name—Janet Rowley Ball—on the stone door of the vault. Above her name was the name of her own mother, Edna Lecorgne.

  Edna Lecorgne was a granddaughter of Polycarp Constant Lecorgne, our Klansman.

  My brother and I emptied the contents of the house. (Our father was long dead, and we two the only children.) There was little in the way of books, but there were files. Our mother, Janet, was a filer. She had a big oak desk with two file drawers. Out of one I pulled a batch of folders marked “Lecorgne.”

  There was some furniture in the house explained by these Lecorgne files. A dining room set—Victorian, with a marble-topped breakfront. And a rolltop desk—tall, with pigeonhole letter slots and a barrel-like door over the desk. The furniture came from the Lecorgnes, and it was born during the years of the one with the pretty name.

  When we were growing up, my brother and I and family sat at that Victorian dinner table, where, in a manner of speaking, we ate with our Klansman one thousand times. The Lecorgne family, and it seems Constant himself, owned the dinner furniture. The table, a couple hundred pounds of cherrywood, had a scalloped pedestal, curling knees for legs, and feet like claws. It came with a massive breakfront, seven feet high, with a red marble counter at the waist, little shelves and a beveled mirror above. The dining room was the grandest in a plain house.

  As I was growing up, we ate every night at the same table. The story came out when necessary. If a visitor admired the furniture, my mother had this to say.

  —Carpenter Lecorgne had a customer who could not pay his bill. Or maybe it was someone who did not want to pay, and who wanted to barter. So a deal was made, and the client paid with the dining room furniture. When? Oh, that was sometime in the late 1800s.

  Lecorgne is not my family name. The Lecorgnes were my mother’s people, and her mother’s. Yet in the chain of being, and by inheritance, the Lecorgnes are, of course, my people. Our Klansman was my grandmother’s grandfather.

  Aunts and uncles had the name Lecorgne. Albert Lecorgne, “Uncle Albert,” sometimes came to eat. When you shook his hand, you could feel calluses where his fingers met his palm. That was because Uncle Albert belonged to a line of Lecorgne carpenters. Polycarp Constant Lecorgne had been a carpenter.

  Bertha Lecorgne, “Aunt Bert,” also came around, although to me she is a dim memory of an unsteady walk. Then there was Maud Lecorgne, “Aunt Maud.” She really was the caretaker of the Klan story.

  The Klansman? I’ve known about him since childhood. I have been afraid of his story.

  From the oak desk of my mother I took the manila folders back to my home in Connecticut. I put them in a file cabinet. They stayed there for ten years. In 2013, I took out the files. I studied the family trees and read notes about the Lecorgnes. Their lives unrolled in somebody’s cursive. The longhand was unfamiliar, it looked antique. I knew my mother’s handwriting; she wrote in a style from the time she went to school. This cursive was older. I turned over a page and saw the name “Maud Lecorgne.” It was Aunt Maud’s hand.

  * * *

  Aunt Maud’s grandfather, Constant Lecorgne, was a family hero of sorts. That is, he was a hero before standards changed, and his memory became too hot. Then he was forgotten, deliberately. Maud’s grandfather was a hero because he fought for whiteness, for our tribe. And if you measure the results, he won.

  There is a Creole saying—On lave son linge sale en famille, “Wash your dirty laundry inside the family.” Meaning, keep quiet about the bad stories, show no conflict, say nothing that dirties reputation. The adage is a reminder always to disguise.

  I want to tell the story of this ordinary man with the unusual name. Because he helped to lay out and to tend the garden of whiteness in which we dwell.

  Aunt Maud lived in New Orleans with her sister, Edna Lecorgne, my mother’s mother. (Maud was a great-aunt to me, but she went by the simpler Aunt.) When I was a child, our family many times visited New Orleans, my mother’s hometown. Eventually we moved there, and the city is one of the places I grew up. Edna and Maud Lecorgne, the two sisters with antique names, were in their seventies when I was a boy of nine or ten. They lived in a bungalow on Nelson Street, near Tulane University. The bungalow was brick and painted yellow, set up high against floods, eight feet above grade, ten steps up to the porch, deep eaves, built in the 1920s. Tulane University a half mile in one direction, the Mississippi River a half mile in the other. On the porch, a heavy door with glass on the top half. The door opened into the living room.

  To a boy of ten, older women like Edna and Maud carried a thick smell. A musty aroma filled the six rooms of that bungalow. The smell was interrupted in places by the scent of a syrupy
cologne, which appeared at the threshold of each woman’s bedroom. At those doors, the sweet eau de toilette that Edna and Maud used, from the Maison Blanche department store, shocked the nose.

  Aunt Maud wore black, horn-rimmed eyeglasses with a silver underwire. She had a flat, oval face and long white hair held tight in a bun at the back. Small, like most of the Lecorgnes. She owned a closetful of gingham dresses, indistinguishable one from the other. The thick seams of her heavy stockings ran like highway lines down the backs of her legs. Her shoes were black, laced, and thick-soled, with a two-inch heel.

  Her sister, my grandmother Edna, was not talkative about family history. Instead, it was Maud who had the lore in hand. Aunt Maud knew the names and dates. She had her journals and documents, she had family trees.

  Aunt Maud was a schoolteacher during her working life. For forty years she taught in the white public schools in New Orleans. English was her subject, mainly, and in retirement, genealogy became her vocation. She was quiet and inward. Maud never married, she had no children. Our ancestors were her offspring.

  I remember now some of the story of our Klansman, as Maud Lecorgne possessed it. Pulling out Aunt Maud’s ledgers and family notes, reading her Victorian longhand, it came back. The scene that follows dates from the 1960s, when I was a boy. Though these words are reconstructed, they do derive from facts. If there had been a recorder, it might have heard certain lines that Aunt Maud said.

  —Come here, young man. I can tell you about our people.

  —Aunt Maud, can I have a Coke cola?

  She made up a Coke with ice.

  —The Lecorgnes have lived no place but here in New Orleans since the time of Napoleon. The first of us was a man named Yves. You say Eve, like Adam’s wife. Yves Lecorgne was French, of course, and he came from Brittany, in the west of France. He was an officer in Napoleon’s navy, a man who landed up in New Orleans and who stayed. He found a bride named Marguerite Zeringue. She was a Creole, and they had five children, and one of them was my grandfather.

  The air conditioner rattled in the window.

  —My grandfather, Constant Lecorgne, was a carpenter. He built houses for plain people, and worked on boats, and he hammered many other things. Later, he was a fighter in the White League. The only difference between the White League and the Ku-klux was the League was not secret. And for his efforts, my grandfather had his head split open at the Battle of Liberty Place, on Canal Street. The White League won back the rule of white people. For a long time, nobody said that was a bad thing. Except perhaps the Negroes.

  “The Negroes” was the phrase always on the lips of white people like us, being polite. Everything is in order when you place a definite article in front of a proper name. The Negroes, the Jews, the Indians.

  —My grandfather went with the Ku-klux. I am talking about the time before the civil rights. Long time before. We would not have had them, the civil rights, had my grandfather lived. He would not have allowed the civil rights to happen.

  The memories of Aunt Maud reached back many years. She was born in 1888, in New Orleans. New Orleans is the place where everybody among my mother’s people got themselves born, and it has remained that place.

  She used that more familiar, more intimate phrase, “the Ku-klux.” It is what Aunt Maud and most people in her generation called the white militias.

  Aunt Maud kept a photograph of a plantation house hanging in the hall outside her bedroom. It was placed so that you had to look at it on the way to the bathroom. The plantation was called Seven Oaks, a monster of a house in a Greek Revival style, built about 1840. Seven Oaks plantation, for Aunt Maud, was the memory of what the Lecorgnes wanted to be.

  —The Lecorgnes married right into Seven Oaks when Yves Lecorgne, the first immigrant in the family, found his bride, Marguerite Zeringue. Seven Oaks was a place run by the Zeringue family, and the Zeringues and Lecorgnes became like two braids in a rope. At least for a time.

  These days did not last. The Lecorgnes, perched halfway up the pyramid of Southern society, with its layers of caste, began a long slide to the white lowlands. Maud knew the name for this decline.

  —The Lecorgnes were some of the petits blancs. The little whites. They have been working men, some of them working women. The women kept house, and they made a lot of children. There is more to that than they get credit for, the women. But the Lecorgnes were not always common people. They came from much better. Then, for generations, petits blancs we became. The one to remember is Constant Lecorgne, my grandfather, because he was a Redeemer.

  —A Redeemer? Isn’t that when souls go up to heaven?

  —No, that is the Assumption. My grandfather was a Redeemer because he helped to end Reconstruction. He put the state of Louisiana back into white hands. If he had not fought, if he did not have his head split open in the Redemption, we would not be here now, sitting in this nice little bungalow off Carrollton Avenue. To make the Redemption happen, my grandfather fought for the White League, and he might have done other things. There are some things that should remain secret.

  Seven Oaks plantation—built 1840, demolished 1976

  Life had wrapped Aunt Maud in a curtain of sadness. Even as a boy I could see it. Her speech was spare, her manner reserved, and she never raised her voice. In the judgment of her time, she was somewhat a diminished woman. People called her a “spinster,” a word then in common use, though not spoken in her presence. I imagine that in Maud’s youth she grew sexual roots, like everyone, but no plant came above ground. I suspect these facts enlarged her idea of the family life that had preceded her. The Lecorgnes and Zeringues, in her telling, must have had big personalities, tall highs and bad lows.

  Aunt Maud died at seventy-seven and took her stories. After that, few in my mother’s family said much about our people named Lecorgne. But things circle around, and eventually the Klansman returned. At her death, Maud’s family history files went to her sister, my grandmother Edna; and when Edna died they came to her daughter, my mother. When my mother died, they came to me.

  * * *

  My aunt Maud’s notes and story of the Ku-klux offer a glimpse down the damp hall of American history, where the Ku Klux Klan is a perennial mold in the national house. It spread first during Reconstruction, the twelve years that followed the Civil War. This was the start of the Ku-klux, the movement in which my predecessor Constant Lecorgne played his part. By 1880, the fungus vanished, cleared by its own success in winning back white supremacy, after years when whiteness looked weak.

  Forty years later, during the 1910s and ’20s, the Ku-klux came out of its dry winter, and the second Klan spread wider than the first. This time it grew into a national movement with giant membership, menacing rites, and festive parades through cities. It was this second Klan that produced the familiar uniform of white sheets and white hoods. The first Ku-klux, the one of our Klansman, had varied disguises, anything to hide identity: robes decorated with stars, cornmeal sacks for hoods, painted masks. The revived Ku-klux lived about fifteen years. But a sex and money scandal took down its leaders, and the Klan shrank again with the Depression. After the rise in Germany of National Socialism, Nazi promises of “Aryan” purity made the cause of whiteness look like a call for tribal violence and democracy’s end.

  A third variety of the Ku-klux mold appeared during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s. Although local and disorganized this time, Klan partisans in the hundreds staged bombings, marked civil rights leaders for death, and harassed their white allies. The third Ku-klux withered during the 1970s, as an open campaign for domination lost its appeal to most whites. The upper hand in the culture wars—are we to have white power alone, or some effort at pluralism?—went to a more humane side.

  In the next decades, the spores of white supremacy spread again: white power movements in the 1980s, survivalist camps in the 1990s, nationalist militias in the 2000s. The ideas and the blood spirit of the Ku-klux fall and rise. Once more, they are in the air, public, and popul
ar.

  * * *

  Our Klansman, my aunt Maud’s grandfather, was not a leader but a follower, a foot soldier. His story is not rare. Violent white supremacy is a populist phenomenon, with many in the rank and file, and few leaders. Anyone who thinks that to have a Klansman among one’s relatives is a strange or deviant thing may be surprised by the reality. In 1925, the Ku Klux Klan could claim five million members, white and Christian. It is likely that leaders of the movement exaggerated their numbers for publicity reasons. Let us assume that actual Klan membership stood at four million. Take four million Klansmen, people on the march in 1925, and estimate the number of their descendants. Count forward one hundred years to their grandchildren and great-grandchildren. By a good formula in demography, the four million Klansmen of 1925 have as their direct descendants in 2025 about one hundred thirty-seven million living white Americans. One hundred thirty-seven million people comprise one-half of the white population of the United States. Fifty percent of whites can claim a family link to the Ku-klux. Perhaps the gentle reader of these words is one. If not, someone near you.

  One-half of whites in the United States could, if they wished, write a Klan family memoir. Of course, one has to know the names of a few ancestors and want to find out about their lives. What is strange, maybe, is that no such memoirs are to be found. The rarity is not in having a Klansman around. The unusual thing is to bring him out of the closet to interrogate under light.

  A story of this kind might come from the hand of a president. The forty-fifth president of the United States is the son of a man, Fred C. Trump, who was arrested in New York one Memorial Day during the 1920s at a rally staged by the Ku Klux Klan. On May 31, 1927, in Queens, New York, about one thousand Klan marchers made their way through the borough’s dense streets. They wore robes and hoods. The parade turned into a riot when the Klansmen attacked a smaller Memorial Day march of Italian Americans. Whites beat up other whites because the second Klan, led by Protestants, was anti-Catholic as well as anti-color. Fred C. Trump, age twenty-five, resident of the Jamaica section of Queens, was among seven arrested. The forty-fifth president, in his retirement, if he possessed the means of reading and writing, might himself produce a family history entitled “Life of a Klansman.” The public awaits.