Abstract

The Ely Green Digital Variorum focuses on the autobiography of Ely Green, a biracial man who was born in 1893 and came of age in Sewanee, Tennessee on and around the University of the South. In the 1960s, he shared his hand-written manuscript with two white historians at the university, Arthur Ben Chitty and Elizabeth Chitty, who edited and helped publish the manuscript. Since 1966, multiple editions of Green’s work have appeared, none of them exactly what Green wrote. The aim of the Ely Green Digital Variorum is to draw focus to Green’s manuscript as a cultural and historical artifact that illuminates life in Sewanee at the turn-of-the-twentieth century. This widely neglected autobiography provides a sweeping, firsthand account of the region’s race relations during post-Reconstruction and Jim Crow. As a public-facing digital resource, the project will function as an online critical edition, highlighting variations between the original manuscript and its print editions in the effort to “un-edit” Green’s story. Phases of the project were completed in classrooms over the 2022–2023 academic year, engaging students in archival work, digital research, literary and cultural-historical analysis, diplomatic transcription, and text encoding with TEI-XML. The project is anticipated to formally launch by Spring 2024.

In his introduction to the 1991 edited collection Bearing Witness, acclaimed literary critic Henry Louis Gates, Jr. details the origination and legacy of the African American autobiographical canon:

Deprived of access to literacy, the tools of citizenship, denied the rights of selfhood by law, philosophy, and pseudo-science, and denied as well the possibility, even, of possessing a collective history as a people, black Americans—commencing with the slave narratives in 1760—published their individual histories in astonishing numbers, in a larger attempt to narrate the collective history of ‘the race.’ If the individual black self could not exist before the law, it could, and would, be forged in language, as a testimony at once to the supposed integrity of the black self and against the social and political evils that delimited individual and group equality for all African-Americans. The will to power for black Americans was the will to write; and the predominant mode that this writing would assume was the shaping of a black self in words (4, capitalization as in source).

Gates recalls his earliest experiences with Black first-person narratives during the 1960s, when works by authors such as Sammy Davis, Jr., Malcolm X, and Claude Brown were bestsellers, evincing “the potency of black autobiography [as] hardly restricted to the realm of high culture” (4-5, capitalization as in source). Brown's Manchild in the Promised Land, was particularly appealing to Gates, which he describes as having “captured the terrors that every adolescent encounters on the crooked path to adulthood [...]perhaps most crudely evidenced by the fact that his book sold three million copies and was translated into fourteen languages in 1965.” From my perspective, this description similarly characterizes another first-hand account of Ely Green’s captivating coming-of-age story, Ely: An Autobiography, which was published the following year by a small press, only released in the thousands, and not mentioned in Gates’s seminal study.

The more recent 2021 edited collection A History of African American Autobiography opens with a chronology of African American life writing, including the 1965 publications by Davis, Malcolm X, and Brown. Missing from that list is the autobiography of Ely Green, a biracial man born in 1893 in Sewanee, Tennessee, the location of the University of the South, colloquially referred to as “Sewanee.” Since its first publication in 1966, Green’s story has been relegated to Sewanee local history. Even within that minor canon, it has been largely forgotten. Historically, Sewanee students and faculty have fondly looked back to literary texts that mythologize Sewanee as a respite from the turmoil of the U.S. Southern landscape, long shaped by segregation and racial oppression. A prime example is the 1944 memoir Lanterns on the Levee, penned by 1904 Sewanee graduate William Alexander Percy, who describes Sewanee as an “Arcadia,” “a place to be hopelessly sentimental about and to unfit one for anything except the good life” (n.p.). Green’s firsthand account, meanwhile, depicts a very different Sewanee. Despite being a marginalized figure in Sewanee’s literary and cultural memory, Green provides a sweeping, firsthand account of the region’s race relations during the eras of post-Reconstruction and Jim Crow or racial segregation laws in the Southern United States, particularly segregation and Black servitude in Sewanee and its surrounding areas. Green left Sewanee as a young adult, resisted passing for white, and lived an itinerant and often difficult life: his gifts of adaptability, intelligence, and athleticism were suppressed at every turn by systems of segregation that deprived him of the self-advancement supposedly inherent in American citizenship.

Green received only six months or so of formal education in his youth and taught himself to read and write as he came of age. As he honed his literacy in young adulthood, Green became a practised chronicler of daily life. Despite two tragic incidents—one in which his diaries were used as evidence in a court hearing and never returned and another when a scorned lover absconded with his personal papers—Green was persistent in compiling his life story. By 1964, Green had compiled over 1,200 handwritten pages. Having heard that a white historian was looking for Black stories about local Sewanee history, Green travelled from his home in Santa Monica, California to present a suitcase full of these papers to a historiographer at the University of the South, Arthur Ben Chitty, and his wife Elizabeth Chitty. Chitty had received his Master of Arts in History at Tulane University and his thesis was a historical study of the Reconstruction Era at Sewanee. He and his wife, who went by Betty Nick, proved invaluable figures at Sewanee, for they served in many ways as official and unofficial custodians and preservers of Sewanee’s history. Unsurprisingly then, the couple was eager to help share Green’s story and facilitate the publication of the manuscript.

Despite decades of endeavouring to see Green’s story in print and film, Chitty only succeeded in getting two editions of Green’s story published. The first was in 1966 by a small Episcopal publishing house, Seabury Press, and included only Green’s years in Sewanee (the first 220 or so pages of the manuscript). Elizabeth Chitty originally transcribed the handwritten manuscript, which contains no paragraph or chapter breaks. But it was Seabury Press and its editor at the time, Arthur Buckley, that handled the editing and formatting. Green suffered a debilitating stroke around this time and died in 1968, so he was never involved in the editorial process. The Seabury version altered, condensed, and divided the transcript to meet novelistic conventions with formal punctuation, paragraphs, and chapter breaks. It was directly reprinted by the University of Georgia Press in 1990, and it is this version that is still marketed to Sewanee students today (as the singular edition including only the Sewanee years).

The second publication facilitated by the Chittys appeared in 1970 from the University of Massachusetts Press. This time, Green’s original structure of eight sections was maintained and fewer passages were omitted. However, the autobiography as a whole was treated more as a historical document than a work of literature. As Jocelyn K. Moody explains in the introduction to A History of African American Autobiography, “Truth-telling, embellishing, subterfuge, flattery, prevarication [are] the underpinnings of African American literature, survival, and self-determination. When [...]white supremacists argued that, as barbarians, people of African descent lacked moral integrity and any interest in honesty and credibility, the sideways truth became a Black folk necessity in these United States” (13). By vetting and “correcting” the manuscript without any accompanying editorial record (neither edition provides notes explaining the changes that were made), the 1970 edition values the manuscript for its worth as a historical document much more so than it does as a product of memory, story-telling, and self-making. Thus, it diminishes Green’s desire for self-expression in its quest to provide an “accurate” account of race relations in the South. The Press’s inclination to “vet” Green’s work draws on the centuries-old practice of treating the African American autobiographer as chiefly “a reliable transcriber of the experience and character of black folk” (1), as William L. Andrews explains in To Tell a Free Story. Even in the 1960s, historians working with Green’s manuscript succumbed to a lineage of racial bias born in the time of U.S. slavery: “As a class, no group of American autobiographers has been received with more skepticism and resistance than the ex-slave” (Andrews 4). Andrews details a trend in slave narratives in which formerly enslaved autobiographers had to have the support of “white sponsors” (5) to lend validity to their stories to appease white readers. The editors who worked with Green’s manuscript followed in this tradition, taking it upon themselves to make Green’s story more “trustworthy,” and thus more appealing to their target readership.

Ironically, both editions were altered to provide false names for prominent white families in Sewanee. For instance, Green’s white father is referred to with a fictitious name to protect the privacy of the family. Yet, there is no evidence of any Black names being likewise changed. Green’s mother was a domestic servant in a white household when she became pregnant with Green. It was common knowledge in Sewanee at the time that a son in that household, much older than Green’s mother, had raped and impregnated her. Green writes in his manuscript that his mother was seventeen at the time of his birth, but according to Arthur Ben Chitty in a letter to an editor at the University of Massachusetts Press, Green told him that she was fourteen at the time. The reason for this discrepancy is unknown, but possibilities range from Green wanting to protect his mother’s privacy to his being all too aware of the sensibilities of the kind of readership to which his book would be marketed. Yet, while Chitty exercised discretion in changing the family name of Green’s father, he encouraged the University of Massachusetts Press to show no such prudence in asking them to change her age to fourteen. The Press must have decided to represent the age as Green wrote it, as they kept it as seventeen. Decades later, Chitty would take it upon himself to note her age as fourteen in his 1999 entry for Green in Oxford University Press’s American National Biography (Chitty, “Green, Ely”). Furthermore, in publicity surrounding the publications throughout the years, Green’s mother is named but never his father.

The Chittys should be celebrated for bringing Ely Green’s story to light, and it is evident from the several decades that Arthur Ben Chitty spent promoting Green’s work that Green and his story meant a great deal to the Chittys. Therefore, the goal of the Ely Green Digital Variorum (EGDV)—in its effort to un-edit Green’s story—is not to identify specific agents who acted upon Green’s manuscript with racist intentions but rather to reveal and explore the complexities of institutions of power, from the historically white elitism of Sewanee to the publication industry (intent on appeasing, at most, a moderately liberal, white readership), that would only accommodate Green’s story in an attenuated, more palatable form. This project poses the following questions: How can we deal with these concerns by returning to the manuscript? How do we identify these variations and changes? How can we visualize them and make sense of them? Are their trends and patterns to be discovered that tell us about why these alterations were made? The EGDV is an attempt to answer these questions by serving as a digital edition of Green’s diplomatically transcribed manuscript displayed alongside its published derivatives. This endeavour is guided by the practices of digital history: A 2017 white paper presented by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media argues that “[r]ecognizing arguments in forms of digital history including digital collections, datasets, and digital public history would build a bridge bringing historians to digital history” (“Digital History” 2). This project represents an effort to build a bridge between the study of canonical texts in literature, such as those included in the study of African American autobiography, with works featured in digital editions, underscoring how a “digital collection reproduces a single archival collection, [and] the selection of that collection is an argument for its importance, and the importance of considering it as a whole.” (4). The EGDV is also a work of public digital humanities, an emerging subfield led by Kathleen Fitzpatrick, who calls for scholars to “start making the work that we’re doing on campus, publicly visible, publicly accessible, [...]findable[...]and free out there so that people can read it and care about it” (Chambliss, “Kathleen Fitzpatrick and Public Digital Humanities”). Overall, the project seeks to draw scholarly and public focus alike to Green’s manuscript as a cultural and historical artifact that exists as the only un-attenuated version of the story. It aspires to make a place for Green’s story—as a testament to an individual’s lifelong struggle with belonging and citizenship across racial and cultural divides—in the canon of African American autobiography and to exemplify an innovative means for elevating Black voices in and beyond the institutional archive.

Digital Initiatives at the University of the South

An introduction to the EGDV calls for a brief background on digital initiatives at Sewanee, as well as my role as Digital Technology Leader and Project Administrator for the Center for Southern Studies. The EGDV is a digital humanities project and collaboration between the Center for Southern Studies and the Roberson Project on Slavery, Race, and Reconciliation at the University of The South. The Director of the Roberson Project, History Professor Woody Register, has been leading the university’s investigation into its historical entanglements with slavery and slavery’s legacies since 2017. According to the Project’s mission statement:

The Project’s name memorializes the late Professor of History, Houston Bryan Roberson, who was the first tenured African American faculty member at Sewanee and the first to make African American history and culture the focus of his teaching and scholarship. The Roberson Project seeks to honor his inspiring legacies at Sewanee: the devotion to rigorous teaching, the pursuit of scholarship, the dedication to social justice, and the personal example of high moral character. In doing so, the Roberson Project seeks to help Sewanee confront its history in order to seek a more just and equitable future for our broad and diverse community.

The Center for Southern Studies—led by English Professor John Grammer—was established a year later after receiving a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support innovative, digital efforts that encourage inclusive, diverse, and enriching explorations of Southern history. The Roberson Project, therefore, made for an ideal collaborator. Before the Center for Southern Studies was even established, Register was already thinking of ways that digital humanities could support the Roberson Project’s public history and community engagement efforts. In August of 2020, I took on the role of Digital Technology Leader and Project Administrator for the Center for Southern Studies after completing a postdoctoral fellowship in digital humanities at the University of Illinois at Chicago. By this time, the Roberson Project had a list of digital projects ready to discuss with me as the new digital humanities specialist.

I began work by helping the Roberson Project develop a digital humanities plan for Save Sewanee Black History (SSBH). Having already established strong ties with community members of the historically Black St. Mark’s neighborhood in Sewanee, the Roberson Project team had hosted numerous digitization days with the goal of acquiring scans of photographs and other family memorabilia to document this community’s rich history. By the time I was on board, they were ready to begin organizing the data and developing a web platform for the project’s digital archive using Omeka. SSBH is now just one facet of a larger Omeka S collection called Black South Cumberland, a project inspired by Black community members who “urged us to focus on the ‘educators’ and the schools that African Americans started and sustained in their locales [and that] were community pillars that linked and bound to one another through networks of kin, vocation, and neighborly connections.” The project aspires to make more accessible what many Black community members of the Tennessee South Cumberland region “have been working for 20 years or more to preserve[...] and with little support from the area’s cultural institutions, like the University of the South. With few resources beyond ‘sweat equity,’ they have organized to preserve the places and histories of African American enterprise and community life that gave opportunity, meaning, and joy to generations of people in this region.” The Roberson Project’s collective effort to recover Black voices, experiences, and legacies supports larger Black digital humanities efforts to empower students to “think critically about the ways that not digitizing the stories of the local community further silences them” (Earhart and Taylor 260). It is this “‘technology of recovery’ that undergirds black digital scholarship,” as Kim Gallon explains it:

Recovery rests at the heart of Black studies, as a scholarly tradition that seeks to restore the humanity of black people lost and stolen through systemic global racialization. It follows, then, that the project of recovering lost historical and literary texts should be foundational to the black digital humanities. It is a deeply political enterprise that seeks not simply to transform literary canons and historiography by incorporating black voices and centering an African American and African diasporic experience, though it certainly does that; black digital humanities troubles the very core of what we have come to know as the humanities by recovering alternate constructions of humanity that have been historically excluded from that concept (capitalization as in source).

Investigating how academic institutions have been complicit in the historical exclusion mentioned by Gallon is another important goal of the Roberson Project. Two other projects, on which I have been privileged enough to work, the Locating Slavery’s Legacies database (LSL) and Founding Funders do just that. LSL is an interinstitutional project that utilizes Omeka S to collectively survey memorials to—and against—the Lost Cause across college campuses. The other is an ArcGIS map and accompanying WordPress website that best explains our university’s need to reckon with its troubled past. The Founding Funders project “assesses the depth and breadth of investments in enslaved human property by the nearly 300 persons who assembled the financial foundation of the University of the South between 1856 and 1865” (Founding Funders). More broadly, the project seeks “to understand and reckon with the University of the South’s origins in the campaign to justify, protect, and expand slavery in the period before secession and war fractured the American nation.”

The EGDV picks up on the eras that encompassed the aftermath of a “fractured American nation,” for Ely Green came of age during post-Reconstruction and Jim Crow on the very domain of a campus established to educate the progeny of Southern white enslavers. It only makes sense that Ely Green’s collection in the University Archives would become a collaborative focal point for Southern Studies and the Roberson Project. To formalize this convergence, I took on the role of crafting Southern Studies’ signature digital humanities project, with the support of the Roberson Project team, that would recover and un-edit Green’s story. The project supports the Roberson Project and Southern Studies missions in numerous ways: 1) For Sewanee’s campus, it will serve as a pedagogical tool for faculty and an immersive learning resource for students to grapple with a fuller picture of Sewanee’s past; 2) It will further Southern Studies and the Roberson Project’s initiative to bring Sewanee scholarship into the twenty-first century by creating signature work at the intersection of public history and digital humanities; 3) Beyond Sewanee, it will serve as a model for using digital tools to reckon with a college or university’s past and its legacies of slavery, and to explore authorship, print history, and the living legacies of collections housed in institutional archives.

Project Phases and Progress

Before I arrived at Sewanee, my colleague Woody Register was already considering ways to craft a digital edition project around the Ely Green collection. In May 2020, I received an email from Register, wherein he stated his vision for a “digital variorum”:

What I would like to do is investigate digital ways to compare the various iterations, a kind of algorithmic way of exploring what happens when African American self-expression meets Southern white liberalism/moderation in the late era of segregation. The idea is to produce a digital variorum that enables an interdisciplinary engagement and interaction with the various texts as a way of examining how editors made it publishable and negotiated the meaning of race in converting it to “white” English prose expression of authentic Blackness.

This description gave more me than enough to contemplate that summer. Once I had onboarded at Sewanee, the project planning process began slowly. I had to assess the materials in Green’s collection and determine the scope of the project, one that I soon realized entailed an intense amount of labour. Just scanning the 1,200-page manuscript was a daunting task. Given the demands of the existing Roberson Project digital humanities activity (namely Save Sewanee Black History, Founding Funders, and Locating Slavery’s Legacies) our team had little time to dedicate to a new enterprise. This changed in Fall 2022, when the Roberson Project, with support from Southern Studies, hired Digital Technology and Public History Coordinator, Cliff Whitfield, a recent graduate from the University of North Carolina, Greensboro with a Master of Arts in Museum Studies. With Whitfield joining the team, I finally had the support I needed to get started in earnest.

In June 2022, I reached out to the autobiography’s copyright holders: Green’s granddaughter, Patricia Ravarra, and Em Turner Chitty, daughter of Arthur Ben Chitty. They both enthusiastically gave their consent. Drafting a project plan was the next step. I began by determining the project goals: I wanted to explore the print history of Green’s story through an emphasis on authorship and bibliographic study, while engaging practices of public and community history with a particular focus on honouring the living legacy of the archival material, particularly by consulting with Green’s granddaughter on every phase of the project. I also wanted to draw attention to Green’s Manuscript as a cultural and historical artifact that recovers one of the countless Black voices omitted from the official Sewanee narrative.

To begin, I acquainted myself with existing digital efforts to preserve and explore Black authorship in autobiography. One notable project is Documenting the American South: North American Slave Narratives, which is a feature of the Documenting the American South (DocSouth) online repository, a longstanding digital publishing initiative sponsored by the University Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In the project’s introduction, series editor William L. Andrews writes: “Slave and ex-slave narratives are important not only for what they tell us about African American history and literature, but also because they reveal to us the complexities of the dialogue between whites and blacks in this country in the last two centuries, particularly for African Americans.” Green’s autobiography falls in the camp of what Andrews describes as the “descendants of the slave narrative [that] confirm the continuing importance and vitality of its legacy: to probe the origins of psychological as well as social oppression and to critique the meaning of freedom for black and white Americans alike from the founding of the United States to the present day.” Another example is The Charles W. Chesnutt Archive directed by Stephanie P. Browner, Matt Cohen, and Kenneth M. Price. The longstanding project was created in 1997 by Browner and her undergraduate students at Berea and represents a decades-long, single-scholar experiment that evolved into a project supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2018. It has its roots in the “early period of digital literary studies”: “[o]ne of the powerful things about [this time],” according to Amy Earhart, “is the DIY approach that many scholars embraced, the sheer joy and freedom of bringing important texts to the larger scholarly community.” From humble beginnings, the project evolved into a well-funded endeavour that enabled its transfer to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (CDRH) and conversion “to TEI-compliant XML, [featuring] transcriptions and images of Chesnutt's galley proofs of four full-length works, including emendations in Chesnutt's hand, allowing users to see this meticulous writer's revision process in action.” (“History”). This models my intention to draw focus to Green’s handwriting and to allow users to see how it was altered in the printed editions. It also exemplifies the longevity a project can maintain and the ways in which it can grow over time with only intermittent financial and technical support. Resources such as these provided me with both a theoretical and methodological framework for the variorum.

In considering the technical path forward, I turned to scholars who had projects with which I had become closely acquainted. Earlier in 2022, I organized a panel for the Charlotte Perkins Gilman Society at the American Literature Association’s annual conference, which featured a presentation by Deanna Stover, Assistant Professor of English at Christopher Newport University. She discussed her digital humanities project The Yellow Wall-Paper Digital Edition. I was so impressed by what Stover had accomplished on her own and with students. Her website features a dual-panel reader with the transcribed manuscript on one side and the transcription of the short story’s first publication in January 1892 by New England Magazine. The website explains that “[f]or both the manuscript and periodical, we attempted to keep everything exactly as it appeared in the original–including spelling errors (see ‘furnitnre’ instead of ‘furniture’ on page 654 of the periodical, for instance).” The variations between the manuscript and the printed edition are highlighted in yellow in both panels. Visitors to the website also have the option to view scans of each page of both versions by clicking on the page numbers in the upper left corner of each panel viewer. Stover was kind enough to join me in a Zoom call later that year to explain her process. I learned that just as the variorum prompted me to learn how to encode text, so too The Yellow Wall-Paper Digital Edition required her to gain such skills. She immersed herself in training by taking the virtual course “Digital Editions: Start to Finish,” led by the Programming 4 Humanists team at Texas A&M University’s Center of Digital Humanities Research. From there, she was ready for her first round of coding with students. She began by assigning students “individual Google Docs [with] the portion of the text they would be responsible for and asked them to use the comment feature to highlight the elements [they] would encode” (Stover). She then introduced her class to the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), which standardizes encoding procedures for machine-readable texts, so her students could develop an XML tagging system using the Oxygen XML Editor, a software for processing XML documents. I adopted her pedagogical process in my own classroom, as I will later explain, and found her process to be such a success. From having students collaborate with me on determining a standard tagging system to visualizing the wireframe of the digital edition, Stover’s shared experiences in the classroom truly enhanced my teaching in the academic year to come.

I also consulted with two members of the team at Northwestern University that produced The Pulter Project. This is a more complex project with a much bigger production team. Whereas Stover’s digital edition involves two versions of a single short story (approximately 6,000 words), The Pulter Project features three editions of 120 poems composed by the seventeenth-century poet Hester Pulter. I initially met Matthew Taylor and Sergei Kalugin, the technical editors and web developers for the project, during my time with the Digital Humanities Initiative at the University of Illinois at Chicago. They, along with their colleague Josh Honn, led the Initiative’s inaugural workshop on digital humanities literacy and methods. It was there that I first heard about The Pulter Project. As I considered model projects for the variorum, I immediately recalled the comparison tool feature of The Pulter Project, which presents a dual-panel view of two iterations of a poem. Like the Yellow Wall-Paper Digital Edition, you click on an icon in the upper corner of each panel and view a scan of a given manuscript page. I arranged a consultation with Taylor and Kalugin at the start of 2023, as I began in earnest to prepare the encoded manuscript. They provided me with a technical pathway and language toolkit to use with my students that spring semester. They helped me scale down my vision, asking the question: What is the entry point for the project? The answer, I determined, was a digital version of the manuscript. It had to be accessible (an easy-to-read version) and it needed to be authentic to Green’s handwritten text (according to the textual scholarly practice of conveying authenticity and preserving digitally). From there, I could begin finalizing my scaffolding and framework in the form of editorial markers using XML, processing samples of the derivatives (published versions), and—the most advanced step—begin formulating a system that syncs pages across versions.

Throughout the academic year 2022–2023, Whitfield and I worked together on the project plan, and it was Whitfield who completed the mammoth task of scanning Green’s 1,200-page manuscript, which he completed by early Spring 2023. He saved the scans as two different versions: large TIFF files for preservation and small JPEG files for easy access. As part of our data management plan, we created a naming convention system so that file names corresponded with manuscript page numbers. In Fall 2022, Whitfield and I also took Stover’s advice and completed the same online course with Texas A&M, which was led by instructors Melanie S. Demmer, Lauren Liebe, Laura Mandell, Scott Nowka, and Daniel L. Schwartz. The course introduced me to the basics of TEI-XML and the Oxygen XML Editor, so that I learned to encode a range of literary and non-literary texts for online publishing using XSLT, HTML, and CSS, as well as creating search capabilities with XQuery Language, which enables elaborate explorations of TEI-encoded textual data. This training, alongside the class model that Stover provided me, more than adequately prepared me to make the variorum the focus of the classes I would teach throughout that academic year.

In the Classroom

In my courses, I used work on the variorum to teach students skills in digital archiving and textual encoding and to encourage them to examine print history and authorship as they compared Green’s handwritten words to the books’ printed versions. I followed the pedagogical practice detailed by Roopika Risam in New Digital Worlds, in which she defines “[d]igital humanities pedagogy [as] not an attempt to teach students particular technical skills, applications, or platforms but a pedagogical approach that enables them to envision a relationship between themselves and knowledge production” (91). Specifically, I used digital work on the variorum to challenge students to think critically about Green’s manuscript on two levels: First, I wanted students to explore the content and insight of his writing: for example, how Green incorporated the vernacular of his era and region into his writing, what literary legacies he expresses in his storytelling, and the ways in which he anticipates and, at times subverts, reader expectations. Second, I challenged students to examine the treatment of Green’s writing throughout the publication processes, highlighting the concerns I detailed in this essay’s introduction, especially the haphazard, heavy editing and Green’s subsequent absence from literary studies in African American autobiography. In this way, students become, as Risam explains it, “producers who can write back to canonical formations of knowledge, the absences in which the voices from the margins fail to be heard, and the politics of knowledge that reinforce structural inequalities” (93).

In Fall 2022, I led a class for the interdisciplinary program Finding Your Place, which emphasizes the study of place, community, and identity across disciplines. Early in the semester, I had students participate in a digitization day, where they informally scanned hundreds of pages of Green’s collection. We then used these images to begin the process of comparing the manuscript pages to its derivatives. Before they began comparing their assigned pages, students compiled an annotated bibliography to provide cultural-historical context for important references to persons, places, and events that will eventually be featured on the project website. This helped students better understand Green’s perspective and surroundings, as they explored the cultural-historical moments in which he was living. The next step was to determine the conventions of a diplomatic transcription of Green’s manuscript. Many questions arose: How do we deal with misspellings? How do we document Green’s idiosyncratic punctuation system? What about indecipherable letters or words? It was a challenge to come to a uniform answer to all these questions, but the combination of in-line comments and markup in Google Docs allowed for students to note challenges or detail their rationale for particular decisions made in the transcription process.

Navigating the differences between versions was no easy task and the assignment led to very stimulating discussion and discovery. For instance, we soon realized that there was no clear, standardized process for how either Press edited Green’s words. Sometimes, complete sentences were omitted, other times just words here and there. Sometimes, misspellings were corrected, sometimes they were not. Green tended to write in the vernacular with the clear intention of conveying the Black dialect of his region, yet that is what was most often corrected as a “misspelling.” Moreover, across the two derivatives, different things are changed. Unfortunately, there was no way for us to fully trace the editorial process in the records of Green’s collection. The Chittys did a fine job of saving the long sheets and galley proofs from the 1970 edition, which is more faithful to the manuscript (or at least to Elizabeth Chitty’s transcription of it), but there is little documentation of what the Seabury Press did to prepare the “Sewanee years” for publication. An example of the breadcrumb trail we followed in the Archives is a 1968 letter to Arthur Ben Chitty from an editor at the University of Massachusetts Press, which describes Seabury Press as having “novelized what they published” of Green’s Sewanee years. The editor expresses his intention to “maintain the integrity of the book” by not simply reprinting the Seabury’s version of the autobiography’s first section. Instead, he tells Chitty he will get that section “back to the point where we are with the rest of the typescript.” Unfortunately, the University of Georgia Press chose to reprint the Seabury Press edition without alteration in 1990, and this is still the only edition of Green’s Sewanee years that remains in print.

In students’ final presentations, several noted a common trend among editors to omit passages in Green’s writing when he is most introspective, particularly at moments when he is reflecting on his biracial identity and the discrimination he experiences. Moreover, across the students’ analyses, it became clear that some of the names of white people (in addition to Green’s father) were changed to protect the identity of their families. Students also noted an editorial tendency to correct misspellings when referencing—or in the dialogue of—white elites but to leave words misspelled when Green likewise referenced Black individuals. Through these impressive discoveries, students concluded that instances of omission, alteration, and pointed spelling corrections convey important insights about the effects of bias in the editorial process and other factors of literary marketplace, such as intended audience, on the censorship of Black literature.

I will highlight one student presentation that exemplifies the impressive work that all the students did in that Fall 2022 classroom. About midway through Green’s Sewanee years, he describes a trip he takes to visit family in Alabama. For the first time, he attends a Black Baptist church. Having only had attended Sewanee’s predominantly white Episcopal church up to that point, Green is shocked by the difference. Typical of his inquisitive and verbose nature, the young Green assails his Uncle Tom with questions. Here is an excerpt from Green’s transcribed manuscript: “I started asking Uncle Tom about religion he soon got tired of trying to answer them. Then he said white people teach negros what they want them to know. That will help them to be more service to the white people. That’s why most negros is willing for them to have all this world: just give them heaven. When you are that way you are a good negro a should go to heaven.” Uncle Tom tells him to “forget all about the experience you had” at the white Episcopal church in Sewanee: “You will see why you will never be able to understand somthing that really not what you hear about: There are many religions and teachings of religions. Most people demonistrative as to their intelligence. That is why many people like us don’t display our feeling” (Italicized portions omitted from 1966 edition). As the following student reflection explains, these insightful lines from Green’s recollections are omitted from the 1966 edition and their meaning altered through editing in the 1970 version:

While both the 1966 and 1970 transcript had a great number of changes in the spelling and grammar along with a few changed names, the 1966 edition frequently omitted phrases and whole sentences from the original text.... Green very much wrote his autobiography as if he was sitting in front of us telling his life story, and the 1966 edition seems intent on removing elements of his manuscript that give it this style. But there is one[...]difference that highlights a particularly disturbing aspect of the 1966 edition, when Uncle Tom is telling Green about religion, he reveals to him how white people present Christianity in such a way that encourages Black people to value heaven more than any rights they would want to have on Earth, but the 1966 edition leaves out just enough of this section to make Uncle Tom’s message be something that can easily be glossed over. The changes in the 1966 edition seems[sic] fixated on removing Green’s personality from the work and on softening the hardships of biracial and Black children in Sewanee.

This student’s discoveries reveal how these omitted statements by Uncle Tom align Green’s contemplation about racial identity in the U.S. South with reflections by literary giants of the time in which he came of age, such as Paul Laurence Dunbar’s 1895 poem “We Wear the Mask,” which decries:

We wear the mask that grins and lies,

It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—

This debt we pay to human guile;

With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,

And mouth with myriad subtleties. (lines 1-5)

Uncle Tom’s words also call to mind W. E. B. Du Bois’s description of “double consciousness”:

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. (ch.1)

As my student astutely observed, Uncle Tom explains that within the racist structures of the U.S. South, Black inhabitants are constantly pressured by the power structure of white religion (among others) to be “a good negro” and to not “display our feeling.” In doing so, Green voices through Uncle Tom a literary legacy of Black interior duality, one that parallels and underscores the specific struggles Green faced in his experiences as a biracial youth in the South. This stimulating classroom engagement of the textual scholarly practice of un-editing represents what Christopher Ohge describes in Publishing Scholarly Editing as an effort often “neglected in several humanities disciplines, which leaves students lacking in exposure to the fundamental stories of how the making of texts shapes their reading experiences and critical interpretations” (9). It also helped contextualize and frame important questions we developed as a class about what it means to create the variorum and the choices made along the way.

The following semester, I invited a new group of students to further explore the history of how Green’s story was adapted to appease the comforts of a moderately liberal white readership, as well as the Chittys’ string of rejections in their attempts to get Green’s manuscript—as the work of a Black writer—published by mainstream presses. I taught an upper-level English course alongside independent graduate study courses for Sewanee’s School of Letters, an MFA program. I had the undergraduates refine the diplomatic transcriptions first completed by the first-year students. I trained them in TEI-XML encoding, and we then worked together to create a custom TEI-XML schema for the project. Once all was ready, we began encoding in the Oxygen XML Editor. An example feature of the custom schema includes the Unicode symbol that we determined best visually represented an interesting characteristic in Green’s handwriting. He would often write three dots typically in the shape of a triangle that represented, as Chitty claims, when Green was resting his pen. But, there is clearly a more intentional pattern to the three dots. They seemed to be used in the place of colons and periods and, at times, at the conclusion of a particular scene or reflection. We decided it was important to replicate this in the digital edition and so we found a Unicode symbol that looked very similar to the triangular three dots. Green also has moments where he does a vertical ellipsis, so we found a Unicode symbol code for that as well. Beyond encoding the manuscript line-by-line, students took a page-by-page inventory, noting persons, places, dates, and events that could be used for more advanced encoding endeavours in the future, such as XQuery.

With the graduate students, we investigated the theoretical and cultural-historical aspects of the project. They took the course as a literature seminar, so we focused on the literary history of Green's story by reading it within the context of the African American autobiographical canon. They composed research papers that will be featured on the project website. In these essays, they engaged in literary analysis to explore Green’s narrative voice while also using a cultural-historical lens to examine the ways in which white editors altered Green’s manuscript during the Civil Rights Era. To prepare my students for their essays, we discussed the decades-long effort the Chittys made to see Green’s story converted to the screen and in print. Ultimately, they all but completely failed. The Chittys must be highly commended for the countless time they spent in epistolary correspondence with editors, agents, and writers. Their representation of Green, however, is typical of a moderate white scholar in the 1960s. For instance, in a draft of Green’s 1999 entry in Oxford University Press’s American National Biography, we glimpse Arthur Ben Chitty’s typical interpretation and treatment of Green’s story: “His sole legacy is the 1,200 page autobiography (complete in the second edition) with its erratic punctuation, no paragraphing, hundreds of misspellings, and scattered illogical dots where, he said, ‘I was resting my pen’” (emphasis added, Chitty, Correspondence). Chitty omitted “illogical” from the final draft. This alteration reveals the unconscious bias that often shaped Chitty’s representation of Green. At the same time, however, Chitty’s editorial decision to remove the word “illogical” suggests that he ultimately regretted that word choice and understood it to be a misrepresentation of Green’s abilities.

In other words, his papers in the Archives reveal a tendency to appease the sensibilities of the white elites of the publishing industry that were discomforted by the prospect of publishing works by Black writers that might be too insightfully fixated on race relations in America. For instance, in a rejection letter from the famed Bennett Cerf, co-founder of Random House, Cerf states: “I must tell you frankly that there have been so many books published this year—with heaven knows many more already under contract—about the Negro problems in America, past and present, that we simply do not want to hear any more for some time to come.” Cerf goes on to list only two pending publications on the subject, one of which was written by a white author (The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron). After the Sewanee years publication by Seabury Press, Arthur Ben Chitty was only able to see Green’s work published by academic presses. Even Seabury Press refused Chitty’s two requests to publish the full autobiography in 1967 and to reprint the Sewanee years in 1980. As one graduate student observed: “It is interesting to note that Green’s story is adapted to survive in the literary marketplace, while he is adapting to how to survive in Sewanee.” Duality is a current that runs throughout this project. It is revealed in the bifurcated identity that Green struggles with during his lifetime, through his biracial status as well as the double consciousness of being African American as exemplified in his childhood dialogue with Uncle Tom. It is also evident in the way his story itself was censured by publishers and the digital variorum endeavours to provide a lasting comparative tool between his written words and their attenuated derivatives.

Conclusion

The current phase of the project entails designing and building a custom website to house the project. With support from the university’s McCrickard Faculty Development Fund, I am working with the team at Performant Software Solutions, which is including the variorum in a new, open-source web component they are developing to display digital editions of historical texts. They will provide a range of services to support the development of the website, including TEI/XML editing services, weekly meetings via videoconference, as well as support for source code, database configuration, and other assets. After the project is complete, I have the option to extend our contract so that they can provide ongoing hosting, maintenance, and support services. The website should be ready to launch in the fall of 2024.

As I envision future phases of the project, I hope the variorum will feature, likely years from now, the entire manuscript (over 1,2000 pages) alongside all variations of the autobiography, including printed excerpts of Green’s work, like “Aristocratic Mouse,” which was published in The Sewanee Review in 1968. In the nearer future, I would like to develop a standard tagging system for cultural-historical references (people, places, events, etc.) using XQuery to allow for complex searching capabilities throughout the manuscript. Lastly, in future classrooms led by myself or members of my southern studies cohort, I hope to develop a mapping component of the project that details the locations on Sewanee’s domain frequented by Green in his coming-of-age story. I would also like to see a class—or at least a major assignment—dedicated to testing the digital edition after its launch.

Ultimately, the EGDV is not a project that presents findings or makes a conclusive argument. Rather, I want this project to embody the digital humanities methodology I most value: one that creates possibilities and infinite insights as opposed to the traditional mode of putting forth some finite claim. My intent with the project is to show how digital tools and methods can enable new discoveries about Green’s story and create opportunities for students and researchers to make their own observations and arguments about the text’s cultural and historical significance. In this way, the exploration has really just begun.

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