Ralph Ellison as Neighbor

Only slowly did Plainfield realize that it had a distinguished new resident. In a town of three hundred, word eventually got around. The first relevant gossip in the spring of 1967 reported that the Crews place had sold. Amazingly, someone had actually paid that exorbitant asking price of $35,000. Then rumor circulated that the purchaser was black, and later that he was a well-known author. I wondered aloud, “Do you suppose we might have Ralph Ellison as a neighbor?” And so it proved to be.

The prospect excited me. I had admired Invisible Man since its appearance in 1952, when in graduate school my apartment mate George Bluestone had helped me understand its genius. I still possessed my battered paperback copy (a Signet Double Volume, 50 cents). As a young instructor at Amherst College, I had included the chapter on Dr. Bledsoe’s college in a collection of readings on Booker T. Washington, a new sequence in the college’s pioneering “Problems in American Civilization” course. What luck, I thought, to have this illustrious author as a fellow townsman.

Perhaps because he recalled beginning to write Invisible Man during a vacation in rural Vermont, perhaps because his friend the poet Richard Wilbur was thriving in the neighboring town of Cummington, Ralph Ellison and his wife Fanny had chosen a place in this little-known Massachusetts hill town where the eastern edge of the Berkshire highlands joins the southern tip of the Green Mountains. At least one hundred fifty years old, the house was located on wooded acres out of sight of other houses, seemingly an ideal location to let a writer to escape the urban distractions of New York. Painted white, it stood out against the brilliant New England fall foliage, but would have disappeared into the winter snows were it not for the low-slung Cape Cod roof. Set well back from the road on land terraced up with a retaining wall of native stone, it could attract the admiration of anyone passing, but the notorious steepness of Lincoln Street meant that few drove or walked that way.

After an economy that drew on light manufacturing by its water-powered mills and later relied on sheep-raising, the town had suffered from the rise of a national, and then an international, market. It was no help that it lay about as far from a railhead as any place in the state. The lack of jobs, the severity of the winters, and the rockiness of the soil had driven many inhabitants west or into the cities. Open fields that older residents could recall had long since returned to forest. Still, the pure air, spectacular fall foliage display, and quaint preservation of an earlier rural culture had for some time attracted a few summer residents.

The Ellisons had purchased a property that, though once sold for unpaid taxes, had been fully restored by its previous owners. The contrast with our experience was striking. The abandoned farm that my partner Walter Richard and I had bought in 1950 offered a dilapidated house and neglected barn, but we found a gifted local carpenter who joined us in restoring them. Given its rundown state, the owner had not driven a hard bargain, warning us not to expect any luck growing a crop on the land. That was far from our intention. As college teachers, we were happy with the prospect of a place for weekend and summer breaks from our regular jobs.

Though much of the charm of the town for us lay in its being virtually unheard of, we both liked the notion of a link to celebrity. Besides, having recently participated in civil rights protests, we welcomed any step toward racial integration. The latest town census recorded no resident in the “Negro” category, though the historical record showed Plainfield as the home of one black participant in Shays’s Rebellion of 1787 and one member of the all-black Massachusetts 54^th Regiment in the Civil War.

Less than a year after their purchase, fire destroyed the Ellisons’ Plainfield house. We had not yet met, but as soon as I...