Edward Ball's contention that his great-great-grandfather was a Klansman is based on his aunt Maud's journal's and family recollections that were handed down and on at least one official source where Constant Lecorgne was arrested after a failed insurrection against the Metropolitan police and the Northern occupation that controlled New Orleans.

Ball bolsters that claim with some voodoo science. He claims a Southerner of the time would have so imbued unconsciously with bits and pieces of stereotype against blacks that he/she couldn't help but discriminate against them. He mentions his favorite children's story, Black Sambo; you can't get much more racist than that. Then there's Constant's Confederate war service and his familiarity with the leader of the White Camellias, New Orleans's version of he Klan.

Ball also builds a case that the North was complicit in Southern white supremacy. By 1876 when Rutherford B. Hayes agreed to end Radical Reconstruction in return for the presidency. He actually lost the popular vote, but it was razor thin. Then there's Plessey vs. Ferguson, a terrible Supreme Court decision that ruled in favor of what eventually became the Jim Crow laws, despite the 13th and 14th Amendments.

The North was also growing really tired of trying to force desegregation on the South. U.S. Grant had successfully stopped the KuKluxKlan from murdering and harassing blacks and Republican carpetbaggers but it was soon replaced with the White League which might have been worse. Radical Reconstruction was actually a response to such atrocities as the Mechanics Institute Massacre which left around 200 dead. Another one occurred seven years later at the behest of the White League just about the time the Republican congress was losing its will to do something about black discrimination. This one occurred in the small town of Grant Parish and left 150 dead. The outrage was missing in the North.

Ball often interrupts his Constant Lecorgne story with an attempt to find descendants of people like a black newspaper publisher and doctor who grew frustrated after Grant Parish and closed his paper, returning to medicine. His descendant had been surprised to learn he had a black ancestor. Black Creoles often passed for white.

There's a certain amount of karma involved towards the end of the book when Constant dies and his wife Gabrielle is forced to take a job most self-respecting Southern women would rather die than take.