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
