Bourgeois Blackness and Autobiographical Authenticity in Ellen Tarry's the Third Door

In the past 10 years, has become a watchword in critical race theory, influenced not only by organic developments within the field, but also by convergences among African American studies and ongoing work in areas as diverse as postmodern theory, gender theory, queer theory, narrative theory, and autobiography and identity studies. Scholars have argued convincingly that a variety of forces have defined and often determined representations of authenticity in African American cultural production. Moreover, recent scholarship has established that these accepted notions of (to use J. Martin Favor's term in his groundbreaking 1999 book of the same name) have influenced not only the shape of the African American literary canon but also modes of non-literary self-representation, and even the lived experience, of African Americans themselves. (1) Yet while a substantial body of scholarship examines canonical and popular African American texts in the light of these considerations, little attention has been given to those texts and authors historically marginalized by these same constructions of authenticity. (2) This essay seeks to redress that imbalance by presenting the first extended critical treatment of the work of African American author and political activist Ellen Tarry, whose major but little-known text is her 1955 autobiography The Third Door. Tarry's story, describing her development from an innocent middle-class southern child into a Harlem-based Roman Catholic journalist, biographer, children's author, and civil rights activist, offers an invaluable meditation on the ways that race, gender and class intersected in African American women's lives in the period immediately before and after World War II. Yet her richly detailed work is little more than a footnote in African American literary history, marginalized by several generations of critical neglect. Looking at the vexed reception of The Third Door, then and now, both places a much-needed focus on a forgotten writer and allows us to comprehend, as well as to interrogate, the nexus of critical assumptions about race, class, gender, and authenticity that continues to inform our understanding of postwar African American women's writing. Unlike many of the better known women writers who are her contemporaries, Tarry uses her autobiography prominently to address the question of the role played by class identification in the construction of her own raced identity. (3) The nuances of her deployment of class as a marker of that identity, however, were lost on most early reviewers, who interpreted her references to middle-class blackness as a choice that marked her as a member of the black bourgeoisie that sociologist E. Franklin Frazier excoriated in the same year. Contextualizing the wholesale lack of interest in Tarry's bourgeois autobiography at the time of its appearance can illuminate considerably the troubling role played by class in the construction of the authentic woman's voice in postwar African American literature. Simply put, I ask here what specific notions of class-based African American undergird past interpretations of Tarry's narrative and how these constructions work against her attempt to tell what is, in fact, her own true story. (4) In proposing an answer to this question, I draw attention to the contradictions within responses to the autobiography in the process of explicating the strategies that Tarry employs to address the awkward fit between particular aspects of her identity (including, of course, not just her middle-class background, but also her Catholicism and, to a lesser extent, her light skin) and the then-prevailing tenets of what Gene Jarrett has labeled racial realism (2). A closer look at The Third Door reveals that Tarry is hardly the naive autobiographer she has been considered until now; rather, she is well aware of the tenuousness of her subject position within then-dominant discourses of and authorial authenticity as she actively works to subvert the expectations implied by these conventions. …