Good Man from the South

THE PLANTATION (217 pp.)--Ovid Williams Pierce--Doubleday ($3).

When a Southern novel rolls off the presses, it is an odds-on bet that it will land either in the dark bog of Gothic violence or in the moonlit magnolia patch. Ovid Williams Pierce's The Plantation does neither; it is a first novel of grace, style and quiet excellence.

The Plantation's hero, Ed Ruffin, is a dying man, and as he waits for the end, friends and relations spin the web of his life out of their memories. It has been the kind of life that gets lived a great deal oftener than it gets written about--the life of a good and gentle man from whom others take, not because he is a dupe, but because it is his nature to give.

To give, as Ed Ruffin did, often meant to give up. Ed began by giving up college. When his father died he went home to North Carolina, to take care of the plantation and his spinster aunts. As a result, he also gave up the girl who might have married him as a lawyer but not as a farmer. In his loneliness, Ed married an older woman who could not give him a child. When she died he got married again, this time to a world-worn divorcee with a small son.

Unwittingly, his new wife saddled him with a crew of relatives who abused his generosity and lived a life of deadbeat ease. But it never seemed to occur to Ed Ruffin to bemoan his fate, take to hard drinking, or quit on life in any of the other established fashions. To the Negroes on his plantation he became "Mr. Ed," a man of justice. To the women of his family he spelled security without servility. In a sense, he has given his life for his family and friends, yet it is only on the day of his death that his survivors sense that a good part of their own lives will be buried with him.

If Ed Ruffin seems almost too good to be true, so does the novel which makes him believable. Author Pierce, a 42-year-old English teacher at Tulane University, has caught the small moments with big implications that many a writer loses between the lines.

An older woman meeting a younger one sees an image of her own lost youth, a little boy blurts out the awkward truth that a tableful of grownups has been avoiding, a house decays, a love dies, a ritual is born. Using the subtlest of baits, Author Pierce comes away with the novelist's prize catch, a bit of life at the end of almost every line.

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