Life of a Klansman

by Edward Ball

  The white mob throws itself on the locked doors of the Mechanics Institute. Inside, several hundred now expect to die, and the scene is panic. The gangs fire into the windows. Police and firemen break down the doors, force their way upstairs and into the meeting hall. Some blacks jump from second-floor windows into the street, only to be shot on the pavement below. There are other tactics, according to the witness James Thomas. “I heard a policeman say they carried the plan out very nearly. When policemen shot and wounded people, the firemen would run up and kill them with their clubs.”

  Many who flee the scene and run several blocks are chased, caught, and beaten to death. Policemen stop the passing streetcars and drag black passengers off to be beaten or killed.

  If he is on the scene, and I believe he is, I imagine Constant must feel twenty things. Here are some emotions I think he and others in the white mob feel: fear … pride … duty to power … jealousy … anger … masculine insecurity … anxiety … ambition.… Maybe the gangs who do the killing feel the thing we call sadism, though the word for it does not yet exist. At bottom, under all these feelings, lies a foundation on which the twenty emotions of the hour are piled, and that is the sense of a tribe in its power, acting as one.

  Constant Lecorgne is one of my people. He is one of my family. How can I respond to the discovery of what he seemingly did? In several ways. I do not feel responsible for the crimes he seems to commit—I mean, legally responsible—for the reason that the living cannot control the acts of the dead. In the frame of the law, I do not feel culpable for the Mechanics Institute massacre. However, as a matter of conscience, I feel implicated. I feel associated with this cruel and merciless festival of violence. I feel a part of it. Because he acts on behalf of his family—our family, if you like—I have a feeling of wretchedness and shame.

  The family I share with Constant is remote. He is a great-great-grandfather of mine. Everyone has sixteen great-great-grandparents, and Constant, to me, is one of those sixteen. Oral tradition, customs, and stories are the drivers of family identity. I have a few stories from Constant’s granddaughter, my aunt Maud. A few smooth stories are not the same as membership in a continuous family life.

  But disavowal like this is a stage of grief. To disavow is to know something is true and terrible, and yet to desire that it not be true and act as though it is false. To disavow is to push away a horror. Constant is one of sixteen great-great-grandparents: the thought has a distancing effect. The reality is that Constant, my grandmother’s grandfather, is a murderous actor on behalf of his family—on behalf of us. And it is a vile taste in the mouth. I must own it, in some way. He was a fighter for our gain, for my benefit. To say anything else is to prevaricate.

  It is not a distortion to say that Constant’s rampage 150 years ago helps, in some impossible-to-measure way, to clear space for the authority and comfort of whites living now—not just for me and for his fifty or sixty descendants, but for whites in general. I feel shame about it. That is not a distortion, either. I am an heir to Constant’s acts of terror. I do not deny it, and the bitter truth makes me sick at the stomach.

  Whites are my people, my tribe. They were Constant’s people, his tribe. In that way he belongs to us, and to hundreds of millions. I know the honest way to regard race violence is this: American history is full of it. It is pandemic. The United States was founded upon racial violence. It is within the core of our national identity.

  Here is a way not to see these events: The marauders like Constant are immoral, abject, and bad people. They are not like us, they belong to someone else.

  It is truer to say this: the marauders are our people, and they fight for us.

  * * *

  That day at the Mechanics Institute, a man named Lucien Capla is on the scene. Lucien Capla is a Creole of color, age forty-five, a man with some African ancestry and some French. His family pronounces its surname, Capla, with the accent on the end, Kah-PLAH.

  Lucien Capla is a shoe dealer, a businessman. He is born before the Civil War, outside slavery. The distinction means much. It means that he is French-speaking, literate, and that he has money. In fact, he has a good deal of money. At one point, the Capla family have a live-in servant named Étienne Dubas, their driver and factotum. They are among the colored elite.

  The Caplas run a shoe store near the edge of the Vieux Carré, at 164 Barracks Street, where Lucien Capla has made and sold shoes for more than twenty-five years. The address is also the Capla family house. A court reporter who watches him testify to a committee of Congress describes the shoemaker as “colored slightly.”

  On July 30, Lucien Capla and his son Alfred go to Mechanics Hall to witness the events. Alfred is sixteen. Father and son cheer the parade and yell for the right to vote, then follow the convention delegates inside the hall. Louis and Alfred take seats among the other spectators who have pushed their way into the building.

  Lucien Capla is active in the Republican Party, and he knows many of the men who have showed up. Some are like Capla himself—colored, free-born, and French-speaking. Capla and his son Alfred know that it is risky, but they are accustomed to taking risks. In the witness chair in front of a congressional committee, Capla explains how he has already been targeted. A year back, when the agitation for the black vote started, Capla made it known to everyone that he wanted the ballot. He showed up at rallies for the Universal Suffrage Association and yelled “Suffrage, now!” with the others. Capla describes the boycott of his business by whites, which started when he joined the voting campaign. “After I went with the Republicans, I did not sell a shoe to a white man for six months,” Capla tells Congress.

  On July 30, at 12:00 noon, Louis and Alfred Capla are in Mechanics Hall. The shooting starts outside, and they take cover. By about 12:15, the white gangs break into the building.

  “They fired on us, and I saw the people fall like flies,” Capla says in testimony. “Then I took my son, who was with me, and we ran out at the door among the policemen, who fired at us; and when we got down the stairs they fell on us, and if I was not killed, it was because God did not want me to be killed.” Louis and Alfred somehow get free from the building, but they are chased down in the street and caught. Capla is beaten and ends the fight with deep cuts on his head. The police in the gang drag him to jail. Capla’s son, Alfred, is also beaten badly. “My son was separated from me and left on the banquette for dead,” Lucien Capla tells Congress. At some point in the attack, one of the gang—a policeman or fireman—pulls out a gun and shoots Alfred in the face. The bullet enters the boy’s right eye, destroying it, and lodges in his head. The gang that has Alfred at its mercy thinks this is enough, and leaves him to die.

  “The firemen took a great share in this affair,” says Capla. “There were even women who had weapons to kill the negroes with. I heard women call out, ‘Those dirty Yankees!’ And ‘Those niggers! Kill them! Do not let a single one of them get away!’”

  I do not know whether Constant Lecorgne is on the scene when someone shoots Alfred Capla in the face. Chances are he is not. After the initial massacre at Mechanics Hall, the attackers scatter through the city, smashing black businesses and jumping black people at random.

  While Lucien Capla bleeds in jail, someone picks up his boy Alfred and carries him to the hospital, where he joins a hundred or more who have been shot or beaten. The bullet has apparently not entered his brain, and miraculously, Alfred survives. He is blinded in one eye and disfigured, but after many weeks makes a recovery.

  Alfred is in good enough shape to accompany his father a second time, on another outing. They attend the congressional hearings where Lucien Capla gives testimony. “My son is here,” Louis says, pointing to a sofa in the room where Alfred sits, listening. “He has lost one eye, his right. He has four bullet wounds on his head, and three stab wounds. He is sixteen.”

  Capla is not optimistic about white opinion or white identity. “I know their sentiments. I have a great many enemies among those people. Some
belong to a very decent class, and some to a very low class.”

  Many free people of color—after the war they are no longer f.p.c.’s but Creoles of color—remain in Louisiana for generations. It is likely Lucien Capla has descendants in or near New Orleans. I expect it is possible to find the Capla family. I make a plan to look for them.

  After the Caplas are savaged, some of the white guerrillas get the idea to attack the New Orleans Tribune, the black paper of Louis Roudanez.

  “To the Tribune!” is a cry heard down the street. But when the marauders reach the newspaper’s office, on Conti Street, they find it guarded by Union soldiers. Neither the publisher Louis Roudanez nor his minions can be gotten to. It is too much to risk crossing the army, and the gangs melt away.

  Witnesses testify that as bunches of men swarm the streets, they sing rebel songs. One favorite song of the times is “I’m a Good Old Rebel Soldier.” It goes like this—

  I’m a good old Rebel soldier

  Now that’s just what I am;

  For this “Fair Land of Freedom”

  I do not give a damn!

  I’m glad I fought against it

  I only wish we’d won,

  And I don’t want no pardon

  For anything I done.

  I hates the Constitution

  This great republic, too,

  I hates the Freedmen’s Bureau

  In uniforms of blue

  And I don’t want no pardon

  For what I was and am

  I won’t be reconstructed

  And I don’t care a damn.

  The massacre lasts till about 3:00 p.m. “After that, there was no one left to kill,” says one witness. About midafternoon, companies of Union soldiers appear on the scene. They have come up from Jackson Barracks, the military base three miles downriver, where much of the army is quartered. Their commander blames the long delay on a mistake: someone waylaid the first calls for help.

  The shooting continues in other parts of the city. “Colored persons at distant points, peaceably pursuing their lawful business, were attacked by the police, shot, and cruelly beaten,” according to the report in Congress. And “the dead lying on the street were violated by shot, kick, and stab. The face of a man just breathing his last was gashed by a knife or razor in the hands of a woman.”

  It is time to pick up the bodies.

  A white historian sympathetic to the marauders and not to the victims says about two hundred people are killed. The editor of the New Orleans Tribune, a man who is present on the downtown scene throughout, also reports that hundreds die. “The police and the mob, in mutual and bloody emulation, continued the butchery in the hall and on the street, until nearly two hundred people were killed and wounded,” he writes. “The number was probably much larger than this; but of that number the names and residences are known.” About the distribution of death, it is all black: “All of the dead belong to the unarmed crowd. Not one single person died on the other side.”

  Delegates to the convention number some forty whites, and three of them die. The marauders seem to spare most of the race traitors, letting them escape. Out of empathy, I imagine. Whereas none of the black supporters of the delegates get away. Dozens of working-class people in black New Orleans are killed. Dozens of businessmen, teachers, and educated leaders, too. People set a foot in politics at the first moment it becomes possible, and they are slaughtered for it.

  Newspapers in the North respond. The day after the killing, on July 31, the New-York Tribune tells its readers to “judge the facts” of the riot. “This was almost a St. Bartholomew massacre, and it was intended to begin the Reign of Terror in the South.” Louis Roudanez publishes accounts of the killing in the New Orleans Tribune. Writers for the paper interview witnesses and survivors and deliver these stories to the state government and to the Union Army. They send bulletins to other newspapers in the North, and they get the New Orleans Tribune into the hands of members of Congress.

  A month later, President Johnson is on a speaking tour in the Midwest. It is a lobbying trip. He wants lenient handling of the South. On September 2, in St. Louis, Missouri, Johnson looks out on a crowd of five hundred and lays the blame for the New Orleans massacre on the people who died.

  “If you take the riot at New Orleans, and trace it back to its source, you will find out who is responsible for the blood that was shed there,” Johnson says. “The intention was to enfranchise one portion of the population, called the colored population, and at the same time disfranchise white men.” It is whites who suffer. They are the ones victimized. “Let me say that there are many white people in this country that need emancipation,” says the president. “Let white men stand erect and free.”

  During and after the massacre, the police arrest 261 people of color—riot, vagrancy, what comes to mind. All are beaten, many are shot by the police during arrest. Those victims are dragged to jail—the calaboose, so-called—with wounds bleeding.

  There are four arrests of whites, for drunkenness.

  * * *

  The Mechanics Institute massacre is the first spasm of the panic that goes under the name of “Ku-klux.”

  The effects are deep. The sense in the North is that the white South will have the old order, by any means. The sense is that whites in defeat are not moved an inch.

  A strong turn comes in politics. The Report of the Select Committee on the New Orleans Riots is printed and passed among newspapers from Massachusetts to California. In November 1866, three months after the killings, the midterm elections take place. The massacre brings out a big vote, and a Republican landslide sweeps every state north of Tennessee and Virginia. In early 1867, dozens of white men who are trying to think about the black South enter Congress.

  In Louisiana, however, white opinion is exactly the reverse of that in Ohio and Pennsylvania. It is upside down, like the picture in a camera obscura.

  “It is our general belief, fixed and unalterable,” says The New Orleans Crescent, soon after the killing, “that this country was discovered by white men, peopled by white men, defended by white men, and owned by white men, and it is our settled purpose that none but the white man shall participate in its government.”

  The Mechanics Massacre triggers what historians call Radical Reconstruction. These are the years, 1867 to 1870, that black Southerners and whites try to create an interracial democracy. Maybe what is “radical” is that they face waves of white terror, some of which brings the Lecorgnes back onstage, and yet they keep trying.

  The killings in New Orleans—where Constant lends a fist or a gun—are the cause of it. A call is out to defend the rights of the tribe. The directions are in, the pageant arranged. The Ku-klux carnival begins.

  16

  I look for the Capla family. I have reason to believe a descendant of Alfred Capla, the sixteen-year-old shot in the eye, lives in Gentilly. I drive to Gentilly, a northeast branch of New Orleans. A French Creole who once owned the land called it “Chantilly,” after a wood and chateau near Paris. When he sold off the pieces, Americans roughed up the spelling, and “Gentilly” it became. The Lecorgnes of Bouligny knew nothing about Gentilly. In Constant’s day, the place was a dry ridge that ran through la ciprière, cypress swamp.

  The soldiers of whiteness have victims, killing has an aftermath. What happens with families that whiteness fails to crush?

  I come to a new and pretty house standing on a little mound and perched a few feet aboveground. The height says it is a Katrina house. Gentilly has partly recovered from Hurricane Katrina. In August 2005, a Category 5 hurricane, Katrina, came to New Orleans and opened a crevasse, an old-fashioned levee break. Katrina chiseled a gash in a concrete berm on a twentieth-century waterway called the Industrial Canal, which runs through the city like an oily spine. Gentilly went under some eight feet of water, and so did half of the rest of the city. The pretty cottage is new, since the 2005 hurricane and flood, with some bulldozed and empty lots nearby, where people could not afford to r
ebuild.

  I climb a wooden stair to the high front door, and a thirtyish man answers. He is skeptical, a wrinkled brow and flat mouth. I ask for Janel Santiago Marsalis.

  It once was pretty hard to find living families who have links to events of more than a hundred years ago. It is less so since the digital curtain rose to display on public databases the naked life happenings of people long dead. If you have a name from the eighteenth or nineteenth century, it is possible to locate living people who carry past events—History, with a capital H—as part of their family history. Although I am not yet sure when I knock, I think a woman named Janel Santiago Marsalis is a great-granddaughter of Alfred Capla, the boy shot in the face. The massacre took place five miles away, and about four generations back.

  Ms. Marsalis appears at the door. Her brow wrinkles like that of the man, as if to say, “What do you want?” It turns out the man is her son. Ms. Marsalis possesses sensitive eyes. And she wants identification. I am a white stranger, and the visit is unannounced. She is a woman of color, and unknown whites seldom bring good news.

  “Do you know of a family member named Capla—Lucien or Alfred?” I say.

  At this question, she relaxes her brow. She nods.

  “An event called the Mechanics Institute massacre?” Ms. Marsalis tilts back her head, clenches her mouth, and then nods again. Recognition. It was only 150 years ago. The event is somewhat fresh.

  * * *

  Three women in the family want to talk. We rendezvous at a safe place, a neutral coffee shop in Gentilly—beige decor, barista at the espresso counter, bland sounds on the speakers. Ms. Marsalis arrives. She comes with her sister, Alice Richard. In a while the family historian appears. She is Joann St. Cyr, sister-in-law of the first two women. The three women are in their seventies and early eighties, all mothers of grown children, and all retired.