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
