
          Of Genteel Hardness.
          
            
              L.W.D.L. W. D.
            
          
          Vol. 12, No. 5, 1990, p. 16
          
          Ely, An Autobiography, by
Ely Green. Foreword by Bertram Wyatt Brown, Introduction by Lillian
Smith, Afterword by Arthur Ben Chitty. (University of Georgia Press,
1990, xxiv, 246 pages.).
          Here is a book that can be read for any number of reasons,
beginning with simple pleasure. The present edition is a third
incarnation. The first was published by Seabury Press in 1966, with
Lillian_Smith's introduction. It was followed in 1970 from the
University of Massachusetts Press by Ely, Too Black,
Too White, edited and with a foreword by Elizabeth N. and Arthur
Ben Chity (the latter having been the book's discoverer and
patron).
          Unlike either the 1966 edition or this present one, that of 1970
was of Mr. Green's whole autobiography. He had lived his first two
decades in and around Sewanee, Tennessee. That time is the subject of
this edition. In 1912, he fled in fear of his life to Texas. He lived
there end elsewhere until 1968. Late in life, this semi-literate man
began writing his memoirs. He wrote with a wonderful sense of
composition, actions and feelings both tautly expressed. The
post-Tennessee part is triple the length of this. I have not read
it. Having now read Ely, An Autobiography, I am
resolved to do so presently.
          There may be no ocher place anywhere quite like Sewanee, and at the
turn of the century when Ely Green was a boy and then a young man it
was no less distinctive. Ely's father was of the white elite--and most
of the town seems to have known his identity; his mother was a black
housemaid. Hence the title of the University of Massachusetts
edition. Neither the place nor person is, therefore, typical, and so
the reader becomes primarily absorbed in this remarkable man's
recollection of his growing up, of his realization of self within a
society that gave him no identity, or none that he would accept. But
because he did live within the black society, the book is also
revelatory of the hardness of that, even in what may well have been
the most genteel spot in the South.--L.W.D.
        
