THE SUITCASE: DISCOVERING ELY GREEN

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

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?