Life of a Klansman

by Edward Ball

  Half of the gang flees the building and disappears. Thirteen make a last stand and are caught. They are dragged and pushed with gun barrels out to the street, then arrested. A Black Maria rounds them up. Polycarp Constant Lecorgne, the one with the pretty name, is herded into the wagon, thrown in the city jail. The Ku-klux spasm comes to an end.

  “P.C. Lacorgne” and comrades, indicted for treason against the U.S. government and breach of the Ku Klux Klan Act, in 1873

  The New Orleans district attorney, James Beckwith, writes the indictment, United States v. Peter Duffy, et al. The lead defendant, Duffy, is one of the thirteen. Constant is arraigned. He and his gang face two charges. The first is treason. Theirs was a violent attempt to overthrow the government. “P.C. Lacorgne,” says the indictment, which misspells his name, “traitorously did attempt” to subvert the state “in contempt of the allegiance due by him to the commonwealth.” The second charge is violating the 1871 Enforcement Act, the so-called Ku Klux Klan Act. With that law, Congress is trying to stop white militiamen who put on robes and hoods, who torment and kill black people, and who attack the government.

  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.

  PART II

  GRANDS BLANCS / BIG WHITES

  Map of New Orleans, 1817

  2

  Anyone who has passed through New Orleans knows the church, St. Louis Cathedral. It stands in the middle of the old city, in the Vieux Carré, the French Quarter, facing the river. The story of our Klansman starts here, with a wedding.

  The levee of the Mississippi River rises above the streets, a dam between the city and the water. Stand on top of it with your back to the water and look down into Jackson Square. Three acres of green, wrapped by an iron fence. Pebbled paths ribbon between oaks and palmettos. An equestrian statue, a fountain, and at the edge of the square, the creamy stucco face of the cathedral. Each year the church is photographed at least ten million times, counting one picture for every tourist who glances at it.

  When I was growing up, I spent a thousand nights along these streets in the heart of New Orleans. I mean, these streets of the hard-drinking, bad-behaving, overeating, many-sexed city that makes its living by selling itself to visitors. I miss it. The city cannot not be missed when you leave.

  Travel back two hundred years and step into the church, and let us look at what lies behind the door.

  It is October 8, 1816, and a wedding is under way. Here is the bride, eighteen-year-old Marguerite Zeringue—pronounced Zeh-rang—plus her people. Marguerite’s family is large. She has eleven aunts and uncles, siblings of her father, and each of them has children, her cousins. Marguerite’s parents own a rice farm on the Mississippi. Some of the Zeringues are here, some from her mother’s family, and at least one enslaved worker. Here is the groom, Yves Le Corgne, age twenty-nine. He is Eve Le-corn-ye—the syllables smooth when spoken. Yves is alone, save maybe a few friends; he has no family of his own in New Orleans. He is a sailor with the French navy, or he used to be a sailor, until one day, when he came ashore from a vessel flying the French flag. That was a few years ago. That was when Yves gave up on France and quit the navy. He is what Creoles call les Français étrangers, “foreign French.” Meaning, he is a new immigrant, an unknown who got off a boat.

  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.

  Louisiana started as a French colony in 1718, then became a possession of Spain in 1763. The church went up during the Spanish phase. The colony returned to France briefly after 1800, and then the United States bought Louisiana, in 1803. It is a meandering story, more so when you name the Native people, the Chickasaw and Choctaw, who are driven aside when the whites come.

  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.

  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 Maud, 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.

  Marguerite Zeringue is reed-thin and petite, probably, with dark hair. White Creole women in Louisiana also keep up Empire fashion, which encourages Marguerite to wear her hair shoulder length but pinned up, with corkscrew curls falling from her ears. The style means Marguerite’s wedding dress might be high-waisted, gathered in below her breasts, a light fabric falling, no corsets or stays, ending in a billow at the ankle.

  Witnesses have written their names in the register. Marguerite’s parents are here, Jean-Louis and Ann Zeringue. So is a witness named Jean DeBlanc. The Zeringue family are close to Jean DeBlanc. He has known them for decades, from a time when he and they both lived on a slow stream called Bayou Lafourche, one hundred miles from New Orleans. Now they are friends in the city. Jean DeBlanc is a man with a future. In fifty years, DeBlanc’s son, a flamboyant lawyer with a florid name—Alcibiade—will lead a white supremacist movement. And in fifty years, a son of the pair getting married, a carpenter with a florid name—Polycarp Constant Lecorgne—will join the flamboyant lawyer called DeBlanc in a campaign of violent rage. It is an arrangement of symmetries, but these things do not yet matter. There is a wedding to finish, and no one here knows what is coming.

  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.

  Yves Le Corgne, the solitary groom, sees his bride ascend the aisle. Yves’s people, his family, live five thousand miles away, in France. Some say that Yves, a petty officer in Napoleon’s military, absconded from the French navy. The truth is fugitive, like the man, because there is no record of his arrival in New Orleans. There is only the wayfaring stranger who gets married.

  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, five miles upriver from New Orleans. At 175 acres, it is a small plantation, with eleven enslaved workers, the latter fact thought prestigious.

  Yves Le Corgne possesses little. Yves is marrying up, lifting himself to a higher class. Marguerite is marrying down, and her parents, I imagine, do not care for it.

  The wedding is in French, first language of the bride and groom. English is spoken by a minority population, les Américains. The Americans have been streaming in, a few hundred one season, a thousand the next, since President Thomas Jefferson bought Louisiana from France, thirteen years ago. But the Americans and their language are second-class goods. Only one or two speakers of English can be seen at this Creole event.

  The priest looks up.

  —Yves César Le Corgne, voulez-vous prendre cette femme, Marguerite Constance Zeringue, pour votre épouse? Do you wish to take Marguerite as your wife?

  The office done, the priest blesses the couple with holy
water. A rustling of clothes, recessional music, and the church empties. At night, the French sailor takes his wife to their bed. My aunt Maud Lecorgne had a saying about petite women, and Marguerite apparently was small. As Maud put it, Yves’s bride is so thin he has to shake the sheets to find her.

  * * *

  What lies behind the eyes of Yves Le Corgne, the new immigrant with a highborn wife? His youth says something.

  Yves César Le Corgne is born in January 1787 in Bretagne, Brittany to the English, in the northwest of France. His parents, Yves Le Corgne and Marie Morin, are peasants who farm and fish. Their home is a tiny island called Molène. A half-mile square, population three hundred, Molène lies seven nautical miles out from the regional harbor on the mainland, the city of Brest. Looking out their cottage door, the Le Corgnes see nothing but ocean.

  The region of Brittany juts out from France into the Atlantic in the shape of a spear, and Brest, population twenty-five thousand, lies at the tip of the spike. Brest is a port for the French navy and home of the Académie de marine, the naval academy. Shipyards proliferate. The ocean turns the economy, and to send men to sea is the main task. Men are dispatched to war from Brest and sent north to fish la Manche, the English Channel. Young Yves Le Corgne shuttles back and forth from Brest to his island home two hours distant, Molène. He takes to the water, like everyone.

  The French Revolution erupts in 1789. Yves is a toddler when riot sweeps away the monarchy in Paris. The Terror and guillotine replace Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, but the violence is four hundred miles and worlds from Brittany. What a boy might see, dimly, is decay in the power of elites. The church and priests tremble, landlords and the rich look weak and fearful as they hold tight to lordship and money.

  Napoleon Bonaparte seizes power in 1799, and soon the wars of empire recruit a generation. In the harbor at Brest, Yves sees warships coming together and sailing off. In December 1801, a giant mobilization takes place, as upwards of forty thousand sailors and soldiers leave from Brest on an expedition to the Caribbean. They are going to the old French colony, Saint-Domingue. Yves, at age thirteen, would have seen the massing of men and watched the flotilla from his front door. The mission of the fleet, everyone knows, is to put down the revolt of the enslaved who have thrown off French rule in the Caribbean. Napoleon is sending an army to take back Saint-Domingue and to impose slavery once again in the country called Haiti. It is for the magnificence of France.

  Yves has a decent education. Book learning is not common for a son of peasants, but Yves’s handwriting and later working life show some of it. In another way, he is ordinary: like most young men in Brittany, he is pulled to sea. Already the matter of language follows him. Much of Brittany uses the language of Breton. Breton has Celtic roots and is closer to Welsh and Irish than it is to French. A native of Brittany grows up to speak Breton and acquires French as an additional tongue, the official language. But Yves is a little different. Evidence from French archives shows that Yves Le Corgne’s parents are newcomers to Brittany, having moved there from the region of Normandy, where French is the dominant tongue. Yves probably grows up speaking French at home and Breton in his schooling. In America, he will continue to shift among languages.

  In 1803, news reaches Paris that two-thirds of the men on the flotilla from Brest have been killed in Saint-Domingue, Haiti. Black troops under their commander, Jacques Dessalines, meet the French invaders, who die on the field and in waves of yellow fever, a tropical disease to which the whites have no resistance. Word makes its way to Brest and to the ears of the young Yves Le Corgne that the Caribbean is a death trap. Les nègres are killing all our men, and French glory is degraded. By spring 1803, the entire French force in Haiti is wiped out, except for a thousand or so deserters who have decamped to New Orleans and nearby.

  Napoleon decides that American colonies, with their slave rebellions and mass graves for whites, are not worth the cost. The emperor will raise money for his European wars by selling the French colonies instead. Diplomats from the United States agree to buy all of Louisiana, comprising one-third of North America, for $15 million. The territory, which was transferred by Spain to France in 1800, is handed by France to the United States in December 1803.

  During the Napoleonic wars, at least five men with the name Le Corgne are in the French navy and sailing out of Brest—relatives of Yves Le Corgne. One of them is Yves’s uncle, Jean. Jean Le Corgne is said in an indictment against him to be “middle height, with chestnut brown hair.” Jean joins the navy during the revolution and serves on a twelve-gun ship called the Belliqueuse (Bellicose), which plies the English Channel as coast guard against the detested British. But in 1794, he deserts, walking away from the Belliqueuse in some port. The French navy puts out a search for Jean Le Corgne and fails to find him.

  Yves Le Corgne seems to follow his uncle’s path, both into the navy and out of it. In 1807, Yves is twenty, an age many sailors sign on. War is thrashing throughout Europe, and France wants recruits. What is left of the French navy, half-sunk off of Spain in the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, is confined around Brest as British ships patrol the English Channel. Eventually a handful of warships get out and reenter the fight for Napoleon. It is April 1809, and Yves may be on board with the fleet. On the west coast of France near the port of La Rochelle, French gunships meet a British squadron in the Battle of the Basque Roads. France does badly, but saves its ships. Two years later, in the Adriatic Sea off Italy, French gunships meet British frigates in the Battle of Lissa, over an island fortress. My aunt Maud’s notes say it is this year, 1811, that Yves’s ship is captured, and he is taken prisoner by the British. In the story Maud tells, Yves is jailed in England near the city of Bristol, on the River Severn. A British history describes a bastion near Bristol that is fitted out to become Stapleton Prison, which receives French and other captives of Napoleon’s half-dozen wars. Yves remains jailed for a period of time before going home to France, probably in a prisoner exchange.

  He finds his way back to the French fleet. Now about twenty-five, Yves crosses the Atlantic. I cannot be sure of the circumstances. Napoleon’s attempt to reenslave Saint-Domingue has already failed. Haiti has driven out ten thousand or more exiles, half of them white, some of them biracial, some of them black and former slaves. In 1809, these exiles are on the move again, pushed out from their place of refuge on the island of Cuba. They are looking for another French home. Schooners and brigs and frigates and warships collect the exiles, salvage their lives, and take them to New Orleans. This part is conjecture, but it may be that Yves Le Corgne is aboard one of these salvage ships during the last sweeps of the evacuation from Cuba. By this time, back in Europe, the so-called Grande Armée of France is giving up the nation’s empire. French sailors in the Caribbean hear the bad news from home as Napoleon invades Russia and then retreats; the emperor sends armies to fight in Spain, where the British defeat them. It is 1813. Austria, Prussia, and Sweden declare war on France, and Napoleon meets their armies in a giant battle in Germany, at Leipzig. The French lose again. The glory of France seems to dissolve like a powder. In March 1814, allied armies enter Paris, and Napoleon abdicates.

  It is the reversal of his country’s fortunes back home, I think, that prompts Yves Le Corgne, still in the Caribbean, to leave France behind. Yves’s uncle, Jean Le Corgne, had absconded from the French navy. I suspect the nephew follows this gallant family tradition and decides to take his chances in New Orleans. Yves’s method of immigration appears to be desertion, stepping off a French warship and not getting back on. I put the year at 1814. He is twenty-seven.

  * * *

  In New Orleans, Yves is suddenly among many who do not look like Frenchmen. What does this man of warships and exile feel in the presence of black people? Although he probably knows something about blacks as seamen—the French navy recruits black sailors—I imagine that Yves thinks les nègres live somewhere outside of civilization.

  It happens that a French physician named François Be
rnier is one of the first to develop racial classification. In 1684, Bernier, who travels for years outside France, to Africa, through Asia, publishes an essay in Journal des Sçavans, an early periodical for scholars and a mouthpiece of the new scientific method. Bernier provides an early racist map of humanity. In an essay called “Nouvelle division de la terre, par les différentes espèces ou races d’hommes qui l’habitent” (“A New Division of the Earth, According to the Different Species or Races of Men Who Inhabit It”), he divides the human species into four “races,” consisting of the “first race” (Europeans, he says) and three “lower races,” namely, Africans and East Asians, plus “the frightful people of the Lapps,” the Sámi of northern Scandinavia. Europeans are “the measuring device against which the rest of humanity might be compared.”

  Fifty years later, a botanist in Sweden, Carl Linnaeus, widens the lens of early science to see and compile species of plants, as well as “races” of people. In 1735, writing in Latin, Linnaeus coins the phrase Homo sapiens (“knowing man”) in his commanding text, Systema Naturae. He names four subspecies for Homo sapiens, and gives them traits: europeaus (“very smart, inventive”), americanus (“ruled by custom”), asiaticus (“ruled by opinion”), and afer (“sluggish, lazy, crafty, careless”).

  With Linnaeus, Homo sapiens hungers for categories. The attractions of order and genus and species are great. And taxonomy, the idea of different human registers, becomes the path to self-knowledge for knowing man.

  Workingmen and sailors with some education, like Yves, do not read Linnaeus, of course, but they would certainly know of the encyclopedia man, Comte de Buffon, Count Buffon. He is born Georges-Louis Leclerc but is familiar to France as “Buffon.” In the mid-1700s, Buffon starts to publish an encyclopedia, Histoire naturelle (“Natural History”), written in common French, and he produces an eventual thirty-six volumes; schools for plain people purchase and teach from them. The books are an omnium gatherum, a text of all things, and their contents seep into newspapers. Buffon imports the race program of Carl Linnaeus into Histoire naturelle and adds two to the growing scheme. He places Linnaeus’s “afers,” or black Africans, “between the extremes of barbarism and civilization” and gives the opinion that black people brought to Europe might change their color and become “perhaps as white as the natives.”