New Books (Ball, Sheldrake, Jong)

Reviews of Edward Ball’s “Life of a Klansman,” Merlin Sheldrake’s “Entangled Life,” Yuri Herrera’s “A Silent Fury,” and Dola de Jong’s “The Tree and the Vine”

Ball refuses to “disown” the past, believing it crucial for white Americans to acknowledge that “marauders like Constant are our people, and they fight for us.” Accordingly, he approaches his ancestor’s story with shame, but also sympathy and imagination. He sees Constant as a boy in New Orleans, attracted and repulsed by the African drumming in Congo Square; as a disfavored younger son who bet his future on the fight for secession; as a man who clung to the lower rungs of the upper class with black labor, and then lost it. Where the record is silent, he substitutes the words of Constant’s contemporaries, or supple ments the evidence with informed speculation; in a postscript, Ball cites the work of the scholar and writer Saidiya Hartman, who describes her own methods of coping with the archival lacunae of black history as “critical fabulation.” Ball constructs his own microhistory on a similar model, stitching and patching the fragments of a past obscured by the willful forgetting that James Baldwin termed “innocence.”