And why did he return to the southern mountain town he’d fled 50 years earlier?

His mother was a Black servant in the home of his white father’s family... a family that never claimed him, even when young Green and his mother were living right next door. What led him on adventures from Tennessee to Texas to France to California? How did he find himself on the front row of history time and again... meeting presidents, celebrities, and athletes along the way?

What drove him to create a autobiography that asks: What does it mean to be biracial in America?

WHY WE ARE CREATING THIS PODCAST

Ely Green spent a lifetime answering what it meant to be biracial in America and how someone like him could gain equal rights and the real benefits of citizenship. At a time when we’ve taken a wider look at our American story and who gets to tell it, Ely Green’s story offers a fresh perspective—and a very different and deeply personal answer to this question.

It’s 1964. The audience is introduced to Ely Green, a biracial man born in 1893. He is returning to Sewanee, Tennessee, where he was raised, and from where he fled 50 years earlier. He brings his handwritten autobiography to a man he’s never met. His book, a tour-de-force of the biracial experience in America, will be published four years later.

We meet Patricia Ravarra, his granddaughter, who only finds out about his book—and more about the grandfather she never met—many years later.

In episode 1, we hear excerpts from his manuscript read by a voice actor, Bruce Manuel. The audience hears about Green’s two families, the one that brings him up, the one that does not claim him, and how both the Black and white communities in this small town both leave him without a space to fit in. He learns to be a mountain man from his independent Black grandfather, making his living off the forests surrounding Sewanee, and describes it in beautiful detail. We check in again with Patricia, to learn more about her knowledge about Green, and a little about his memoir, Too Black, Too White.

The audience learns that some things in the book, including the name of his father and possibly even the fact that he was born in Sewanee, are not true. Who changed the names? And why did Ely return to tell his life’s story? Who is Ely Green? And what other secrets are in that suitcase?