Family Ties by Sam Worley

There’s a cool new story in Sewanee magazine about a project I’ve been lucky enough to work on: a podcast about Ely Green, who was born in 1893 and grew up on the mountain. The launching point for our podcast, The Suitcase, is a manuscript that Green wrote and that’s been published in a few different editions, the first in 1968. It’s the story of a life that’s impossible to describe briefly: Green was biracial, never knew his white father, and was orphaned early on when his mother, a young Black woman named Lena, died of tuberculosis. Things only got more eventful after Green left Sewanee—he struck out for the Texas oil fields, worked on the French docks during World War I, and eventually made his way out to California, where he chauffered for celebrities and helped desegregate a munitions plant during the Second World War. 

That’s a lot already. But as we got underway with this project, we knew that what was not in Ely’s book might be as important as what was. We knew, for instance, that the various published versions contained some important elisions and omissions—notably, the identity of Green’s father, whose family employed Green’s mother, a domestic worker. Both parents were teenagers. In the published book, Green’s father gets a surname: Doane. But that name is fictitious, inserted by Green’s editors to protect the identity of a respected white Sewanee family—whose real name, as you’ll learn when episode 2 drops, was Wicks. That’s the name Ely Green used in the handwritten manuscript, by the way. (For a deeper dive into the differences between Green’s manuscript and various published versions, check out the Ely Green Digital Variorum—a project overseen by Hannah Huber, who’s also a producer of the podcast.)  

As we’ve worked on this episode, I’ve thought a little bit about the irony of this situation—what’s been left out, and why. Wicks was removed from the published book because Green’s father’s family was considered important—they were white. At the same time, we learn very little from Green’s book about the other side of his family—the Black side. That’s not because they had secrets to protect but because, in their time, nobody with power thought they had much of a story worth preserving, and because nobody told Green very much about where he came from. We’ve spent quite a bit of time trying to learn more about Ely’s grandfather, a man named Ned Green, based on sparse clues in the manuscript. Here’s what an older white mentor tells Ely about his grandfather:

“He was born in slavery, was sold on the block. Most of this family was sold like he was.

He said some of his people has never been located yet.”

That’s it. The history of Black people in the United States is substantially characterized by blank spaces where information should be. As the historian Cynthia Greenlee said in the first episode, “Trying to build African American history is a constant search. And it’s also an effort in grappling with the things we can’t know, and trying to figure out ways to get around the silences of the archive. Some of the silences are because our stories were not considered worth preserving.”

Still: We’re working on it. We enlisted the help of a genealogist, B. Bernetiae Reed, to see what we could turn up about Ned Green’s origins, and she found record of him as early as 1870—when he was living down the mountain from Sewanee in Winchester, Tennessee. On the one hand, that’s not very much; on the other hand, it’s a lot more than we knew about Ned previously. 

Reed also found a record of Ely Green’s first marriage, to a woman named Tellie Lewis, whom he met in or around Sewanee. This story is a bit scandalous—before leaving Sewanee, Green seems to have both dated and impregnated two women who were twin sisters, and he had children with both. We realized recently that an address in Manchester, Tennessee, that was registered to one of his daughters in the 1960s is still owned by somebody with the same surname—suggesting there may be yet another Green descendant whom we might be able to track down and speak with. Separately, we came across an old paper by Sewanee students who think that they might have nailed down the place on the mountain where Ned Green’s cabin was—but, until we speak with them, we have no idea why they think that. 

What’s this all mean? It’s invigorating to be reminded that, from a few sparse details, a clearer picture might eventually begin to emerge—a clearer picture is beginning to emerge, and several generations of one family are beginning to come into view. It just means that we need to keep digging. — Sam Worley, October 30, 2025

Acknowledgements

Now, a personal note. As we get ready to launch, I want to thank everyone who worked on this first episode and on the project, and who gave us encouragement. You can find full credits on the Episode 1 page.

Hannah Huber and Sam Worley have been the very best partners on this project. I’m grateful also for Bruce Manuel whose buttery voice to me summons Green’s words and thoughts so beautifully. Will Davis believed in us and got us off the ground.

This project would not be possible without the support and the groundwork of The Roberson Project on Slavery, Race, and Reconciliation, especially its director Woody Register, and his colleagues Chris McCreary and Tiffany Momon. Thanks to them we were able to meet the brilliant Cynthia Greenlee, and you’ll be hearing more from her. Also thanks to Sewanee’s Center for Southern Studies, and my former boss John Grammer who introduced me to Hannah Huber, director of the digital humanities project based on Green’s manuscript, the Ely Green Variorum. John Grammer, the ultimate matchmaker, brought me over to meet Hannah at a faculty party and said you two should talk about Ely Green. So we did. 

The School of Letters brought me into contact with Sam Worley, the incredibly talented writer of the first episode, and third musketeer. Writer Karla Diggs, who will author an upcoming episode, is also a School of Letters graduate. Finish your novel Karla, we have work to do! While they were School of Letters students with Hannah Huber, both Kristy Sherrod and Ayo Alofe produced academic work on Green’s writings. 

The Sewanee Archives, headed by Mandi Johnson, is the keeper of this manuscript. Both the Archives and the Shiverick Recording Studio are under the purview of Kevin Reynolds, Associate Provost for Library and Information Technology Services. Arthur Ben Chitty and his wife Betty made sure every note about their relationship with Ely Green made it to the archives. Em Chitty continues to provide contemporary insight into their historical work. 

All of this would be one-dimensional without the extraordinary Patricia Ravarra, Ely Green’s granddaughter. Her openness and insight are at the center of this project. 

While this is an independent project, the mountain, Sewanee, and the University of the South have been sources of support and inspiration. In addition to those mentioned above, so many people have engaged us in conversations of joy and of reckoning. For this I thank Sibby Anderson-Thompkins, Tiana Clark, Virginia Craighill, Patrick Dean, Brooks Egerton, Rachel Fredericks, Luke Gair, David Haskell, Adam Hawkins, Sally Hubbard, Adam Latham, Kelly Malone, Pamela Macfie, Tom Macfie, Chris McDonough, Lizzie Motlow, Jamie Quatro, Kevin Reynolds, Neil Shea (honorary mountaineer), Eric Smith, Jerry Smith, Nathan Stewart, Meera Subramanian, John Jeremiah Sullivan, John Willis, Elizabeth Wilson, and my bartender Brian. Thanks to Rob and Phoebe Pearigen for returning to the mountain to reignite a love for the arts and humanities. 

In Los Angeles, Sara Terry and Thomas Lakeman have gone the extra mile in a very real way to help me see Ely Green’s life in Los Angeles. Thomas, besides artfully imitating Transatlantic accents, is also our designer. 

I want to thank again everyone involved in the audio and music: Ryan Crouch, Sarah Rimkus, Bria Suggs, Madison Sellers, Amelia Barakat and Gus Goldsmith.

And sometimes it’s important to thank people who haven’t done anything—in that amazing way of keeping obstacles from alighting on your desk. That’s my boss Justin Taylor, who, to be serious, has kindly supported this project every step of the way, and made it possible through the magic of Veranda for me to meet author Ralph Eubanks, a very important consultant for this project for whom I am so grateful.

My husband, Stephen Alvarez, recorded, edited, directed, offered insight, patience, love and very firm feedback, and reminded me that we have everything we need to do our work. To Stephen, thank you from the depths of my heart. 

Finally, I always want to say thank you to Mr. Green, who so openly shared his life, who had so many secrets, and adventures, and heartaches, who fought for equality, and whose footsteps I try to find here on the mountain.

April Alvarez

The Ely Green Project

I don’t know when I first read Ely Green’s book. At some point, if you live in Sewanee, someone will tell you to read his autobiography, Too Black, Too White. They are mostly interested in the original published edition that is all about Sewanee, a small college town atop the Cumberland Plateau. It would be quite a while until I made my way into this book, in fact I’m pretty sure it was the events of the summer of 2020 that led me to it, but once I read it, I immediately ordered the newer edition that contains his complete manuscript, a book that takes on his adventures outside the corporation as he called it, a book that considers the question about what it means to be an American, what it means to be biracial.

Born in 1893 to a black mother, Green would not be claimed by his wealthy white father or his family. In our podcast, we’ll dig into the history of Sewanee to see how this happened, and hear Green’s voice through a reader, a former Sewanee resident, Bruce Manuel. The unfathomable hurt and pain are at times too much to bear. At the same time, his love for the surrounding land and even the town itself was familiar, as I can still walk some of the same ridges where he hunted and gathered herbs and still sit by the same waterfalls where he talked to the ghost of his departed mother.

As an outsider to Sewanee myself, and as someone whose father did not claim them, I found myself connecting with his story over and over again. I was quite pleased to find out his original manuscript existed here at Sewanee (a story in itself), and that a very organized and brilliant digital humanities expert was already hard at work, sussing out the changes from his crowded cursive to that very first publication. I’m always game for getting ahead of myself, and over a cocktail at a faculty welcome party I got way out over my skis and suggested to Dr. Hannah Huber that we needed to produce a podcast. Next thing I knew we were planning nine episodes. Dr. Huber, it seemed, thought his story had more to say, between the lines, between the words.

We were grateful as well for two graduate students who started work on episodes—Sam Worley and Karla Diggs—researching, writing, and finding more questions, more mysteries about Green. Why did he leave Sewanee? And why did he come back 50 years later with 1,200 pages of a memoir in suitcase? And, what did he do in between? I mean besides work the oil fields, run liquor, and serve in a world war overseas. While some of it is on those pages, we kept finding things that were just out the line of sight, things we wanted to know. Things we think you will want to know too. We were lucky to find researchers, records, and even his descendent, the amazing Patricia Ravarra, his granddaughter, who was also quite shocked to learn that the grandfather she never knew had written a book about his life.

We’ll reveal our discoveries in the podcast, and cover some background here in the blog. We’ll tell you about conversations, historical records (the ones we found, the ones lost forever), we’ll tell you about journeys that take us through American history, all the while sharing Green’s ideas about what it means to be a citizen as a Black man, and how dangerous it was to pass as white. His stories, which we will of course share, reveal a man ready to fight in what he believed in, while at the same time creating a nearly cinematic universe of his life, from the hills of Tennessee and plains of Texas, to the ports of France, to the golden age of Hollywood. In many ways he was pointing us to an idea that has really exploded here in the summer of 2024, an idea about what it means to be biracial in America. We can’t wait for you to join us on this adventure to discover Ely Green.

—April Alvarez, Sewanee, TN