NONFICTION - May 3, 1992

YOU LIVE AND LEARN. THEN YOU DIE AND FORGET IT ALL by William Ferris (Anchor/Doubleday: $12.50, paper; 251 pp.). This is a remarkable oral history, the result of 20 years of effort on the part of the author, who first encountered Mississippian Ray Lum, horse- and mule-trader and storyteller extraordinaire, when the author was a young boy and his farmer father was doing business with Lum. When Ferris sat down to interview his subject for the first time, he was 28, an English professor, and Lum was 79. The relationship would yield a 1971 film and accompanying record, “Ray Lum: Mule Trader,” as well as more thanr 50 hours of recordings, several thousand photos and slides, hours of film and numerous letters. If Ferris has devoted much of his career to the gathering and shaping of this material, it is because, as he says, the story of Ray Lum, and the stories he as to tell, are the history of the rural South--and a means for the author to understand his own life, as well as the life of his subject. The book is divided into two parts, the first a chronicle of Lum’s life, the second his reflections on his career as a trader; his 60 years of traveling throughout the South, from Mississippi to Texas, define a way of life that has all but disappeared. When Ray Lum was a young man there were 26 million horses and mules in the United States; that number slipped to fewer than four million by 1958. Thanks to Ferris, we have an exquisitely detailed account of a portion of our recent history.