Bourgeois blackness and autobiographical authenticity in Ellen Tarry's The Third Door.

In the past 10 years, "authenticity" 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 "authentic blackness" (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 racial 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 black 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 black 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 "naive" 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 black woman's voice in postwar African American literature. Simply put, I ask here what specific notions of class-based African American "authenticity" 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 racial and authorial authenticity as she actively works to subvert the expectations implied by these conventions.

Whether classified as "an octoroon with all the usual problems of octoroons" (Jackson 38) or dismissed as an author whose conclusions are insufficiently "convincing" and "may not win acceptance from [the] reader" (Review 368), Ellen Tarry and her autobiography have been repeatedly labeled "unrepresentative" of the African American experience. Yet I would argue that Tarry's story forces the question whence these notions of "representative" identity come, as Tarry refuses specific constructions of "authentic" postwar blackness, and in so doing, gestures to the broader question of how the category of the representative might itself be troubled and demand reconsideration. In splintering her own subject position among multiple axes of self-identification, Tarry critiques notions of a monolithically defined "authentic" blackness, especially one excluding considerations of class. As a white-appearing, middle-class, southern-born but northern urban-identified, devoutly Catholic black woman, Tarry writes a multivocal narrative that defies the concept of self-determination through a lone discursive affiliation. Yet her story is scarcely a celebration of the dissolution of clearly defined markers of selfhood. Rather her textual practices mark her identity as marginal while forcing the issue of class to the fore. Invoking both a right to "privacy" and the exigencies of "good taste," Tarry deliberately withholds specific pieces of information, distancing and even alienating readers in a reminder that her identity is ultimately (autobiographical treatment notwithstanding) emphatically not an object for sentimental identification or exoticization. These textual tactics demand a reconsideration of her work as a sophisticated attack on notions of African Americanness as postwar product, to be mediated through carefully constructed channels of literary practice appropriate to historically specific readerly expectations. Having exploded the idea of what she, a "Negro woman," is not, Tarry stubbornly refuses to divulge what she is, allocating to herself autobiographical privileges normally associated with non-working class white male autobiographers, whose lives are generally accorded a respect and absence of prurience that women's stories, and black women's stories still more, have historically not enjoyed. Her recognition of "good taste," an obviously class-contingent category, becomes a tool not of assimilation but of resistance to it, as Tarry highlights her "privacy" to frustrate the reader and reemphasize that it is she who controls the narrative.

Although some of Tarry's near contemporaries, such as Ann Petry and Zora Neale Hurston, disappeared only to be recovered and reintroduced into late 20th-century literary anthologies and academic syllabi, Tarry, who continues to live in Manhattan at the age of 100, is as unknown today as she has been for decades. To understand why this is so, it is useful, I believe, to look at those references to her that do exist. One index of her obscurity is the lone reference to her in Dark Symphony, the comprehensive and influential anthology of African American literature that appeared in 1968, in which Tarry appears as "Ellen Terry [sic], a Roman Catholic and writer of children's books [who], together with Bishop Skeil [sic; Bishop Sheil is meant] of Chicago, persuaded [Claude McKay] to convert to Catholicism (Emanuel and Gross 87).(5) Surveys focusing on black women writers, such as Mary Helen Washington's Invented Lives (1987), overlook her; even Joanne Braxton's Black Women Writing Autobiography: A Tradition within a Tradition (1989) omits Tarry's major work in an otherwise wide-ranging list of black women's autobiographies of the 1940s and '50s. Tarry's children's literature, groundbreaking in its portrayal of African American urban life and interracial relationships, is today similarly unknown. Finally, although the 1997 Oxford Companion to African American Literature insists on Tarry's "status as a significant figure in African American literature" (Andrews, et al 711), no major recent anthology of African American writers excerpts her work. (6) What recognition she still enjoys Tarry owes to her very minor "rediscovery" in 1992, when The Third Door, now featuring an introductory essay by Nellie Y. McKay, was reissued by the Umverszty of Alabama Press. Tarry s essay Natzve Daughter, which appeared in The Commonweal in 1940, was resurrected and reprinted later in Lorraine E. Roses's and Ruth E. Randolph's Harlem's Glory (1996), a collection of little-known, sometimes unpublished, black women writers of the first half of the twentieth century. However, these flickers of academic interest were insufficient to spark any sustained critical notice. As Tarry herself noted in a 1999 interview with Katharine Capshaw Smith, "I gave up all my connections to the literary world.... I'm lost, so to speak, as far as the literary world is concerned" (282).

When The Third Door appeared in 1955, the few reviews it received were mostly tepid endorsements. Damned with faint praise by white reviewers (James M. Gillis's remark in The Catholic World that "The Third Door is a good-tempered book that deserves wide reading" was typical), Tarry's book fared still worse with black critics, who were inclined to feel that Tarry's work lacked the necessary gravitas. Although Blyden Jackson judges Tarry's autobiography to be "closer to true literature" than other adult nonfiction by black writers in 1955, he nevertheless categorizes it as "programmatically blithe" (37-38). For Hazel Browne Williams, writing in Phylon, the problem with The Third Door was a lack of "analysis" that rendered the book appropriate only for "these readers: desirers of Negro literature that omits unpopular stereotypes ... persons interested in a depiction of the Catholic faith in action; non-Negroes unacquainted with middle-class Negro life and views; lovers of familiar scenes and faces in the Negro world, and adolescents" (479). Margaret Just Butcher, then an English professor at Howard, chose to include Tarry in her survey of the current state of African American letters in The Negro in American Culture, published in 1956. While Butcher enthusiastically endorsed the work of other black female writers of the postwar era, her dismissal of Tarry is noteworthy:

   ... Ellen Tarry, was, according to her publishers, "like the late
   Walter White ... in a position to choose her destiny." In short,
   "she too was fair skinned, and her calling herself a Negro was a
   voluntary act of allegiance that brought with it the special trials
   and special opportunities that confront the Negro people today."
   There is a certain naivete about this observation that many Negroes
   will find irritating. There are countless Negroes who "look white"
   and have made no "voluntary act of allegiance"--some are
   sophisticated and well-educated, as Ellen Tarry apparently is;
   others are, in spite of being ethnically "colored," exactly like
   "poor whites" in appearance, attitude and conduct. More important,
   however, is the fact that there are countless Negroes who do not
   "look white," but whose attitudes, aspirations, achievements--and
   indeed accorded recognition--are based upon their basic and
   intrinsic human and intellectual worth.... [The autobiography's]
   essential point eludes the Negro reader who, in all probability,
   will think Miss Tarry's various crises less momentous than she
   does. Her experience, for example, of not being able to get a
   taxicab in a Southern city during the war years is understandable,
   but too familiar to command empathetic response from Southern women
   and parents who have endured the same and worse frustrations--and
   humiliations--for years. (215-16)

Butcher's remarks make clear that she considers Tarry's autobiography useful only for a white audience, one whose unfamiliarity with the realities of southern black life would enable it to achieve an empathetic identification with "Miss Tarry's various crises"; the implication here is that Tarry does not actually know what being black is all about. While to a certain extent this refusal of Tarry's authenticity seems based on her self-identification as "ethnically colored," Butcher, like Williams, also implicates her class status in Tarry's disqualification. Emphasizing Tarry's inability to get a taxi in the wartime South foregrounds Tarry's relative wealth and obscures that she is a native of the area, dissociating Tarry both economically and geographically from any "folk" authenticity she might otherwise be seen as claiming. (8) The example given shows Tarry as a traveler, a racial tourist, rather than a black participant in a racist society.

What Butcher (and later Nellie Y. McKay) describes as Tarry's "naivete" is arguably the opposite, however. Rather, it is clear from the beginning that Tarry, who says she wrote The Third Door for her daughter, understands what is at stake in writing a book subtitled "the autobiography of an American Negro woman." As Leigh Gilmore remarks,

   Criticism of autobiography is often political in just this
   way. It offers writers the opportunity to present themselves as
   representative subjects; that is, as subjects who stand for others.
   It also threatens writers with unsympathetic scrutiny.... Public
   and private life are interwoven in such a way in autobiography that
   either legitimation or shaming is always a possible response.
   Within the volatility generated by representativeness, the private
   becomes vulnerable and ambivalent as it is transformed into public
   discourse. (130)

From the beginning, Tarry demonstrates a keen awareness of the dynamics of evaluating narratives of blackness and seems determined not to be classified as "inauthentic," even as she recognizes that the combination of her white appearance, her middle-class educational and social background, and her Catholicism combine to make her an unusual representative of postwar blackness. (9) She emphasizes the value of her southern heritage in her experience as a black person and eventually lays claim to corporeal authenticity by proxy when she gives birth to a child who is much darker than she is. (10)

But by far the most prominent of Tarry's rhetorical strategies is her carefully explicated attitude toward class. She foregrounds her rejection of bourgeois distinctions that blur the effectiveness of racial solidarity, and deplores consumerism as a distraction from political engagement. At the same rime, however, she is shrewd enough not to try to suggest that she is not herself middle-class. Instead of attempting to deny her class identity, Tarry uses it to redefine her raced identity as well. She notes in the foreword that she has "omitted the telling of certain events because their inclusion might have infringed upon good taste" (2). Moreover, Tarry tactically invokes a privilege she herself sees as coterminous with bourgeois values to carve out for herself both a narratorial authority and a narrative space within which her identity as a black woman can be articulated on her own terms. (11)

Tarry begins her narrative by confronting the question of her physical appearance, using the complexity of her inherited phenotype as a figure for her liminality more generally. "Anthropologists would probably have said my father was a mulatto and my mother an octoroon," Tarry notes dryly. "I do not know what scientific name they might have used to describe my sisters and me" (3). Drawing on a trope common to African American autobiography, Tarry recalls carefully considering her physical appearance as a child not only to determine which of her family members she most resembles, but also implicitly to see how her racial identity manifests itself in the mirror. Although later events reveal that Tarry is not dark, she writes that as a child she more strongly resembled her father, who was recognizably black, than her mother, who could easily pass for white: "I used to hear old women ... say that Papa had a right to be so crazy about me because I 'looked like he spit me out.' Although I thought he was the most wonderful man in the world, every night when I said my prayers I asked God to let me wake up looking like my pretty blue-eyed mother with her red-gold hair" (7). (12)

Tarry initially desires lighter skin because she believes that her mother is beautiful; later, however, when she comes to understand the complex links between class and color, her feelings change. The racial heritage that her mother romanticizes as a "duke's mixture" attracts negative attention from other black children, who deride her for being a "no-nation nigger": "In an attempt to explain the action of the children who taunted us, Mama told us they were 'common' and that we should avoid them. Instead of realizing ... that our resemblance to the whites who were responsible for their plight was a constant source of irritation, I grew up thinking the world was full of 'common' people like them and 'uncommon' people like us" (18).

Throughout her autobiography, Tarry locates class bias exclusively in black women, and it is in her interactions with them, including her mother, that she rejects notions of class as divisive and unproductive in the struggle for equality of what she always calls "my people." According to her daughter, Eula Meadows Tarry regarded fighting back when attacked, whether by whites or other blacks, as "common." Tarry's mother maintained this attitude after Tarry reached adulthood and embarked on her writing career. Ellen's first job as a journalist entailed writing a column called "Negroes of Note" for The Birmingham Truth. One such column came to the attention of the racist then-governor, now infamous Theodore Bilbo, who publicly attacked Tarry for her praise of Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, who had recently abolished segregation in his government office. Bilbo climaxed his hysterical invective with a call to burn Tarry alive. Although Tarry received a number of menacing phone calls, ultimately nothing came of the threats, apart from the clear indication that Tarry's mother viewed her provocative journalism and growing dedication to the goal of equal civil rights primarily as a social faux pas: "Mama was disturbed by the incident. However, she took great comfort from the fact that her white friends had assured her she could count on them for help if the family was in danger. 'I've spent most of my life in Birmingham,' she complained, 'and I was never mixed up in any mess like this before'" (83). (13)

Tarry's experiences in Birmingham force her to re-evaluate her mother's notions of "common" and "uncommon" people, as she develops a lasting distaste for the pretensions of the black middle class to which she nevertheless demonstrably belongs. In the space of 20 pages, Tarry clarifies the ways that too complete an investment in maintaining middle class identity obstructs both spiritual development and political awareness. Her conversion to Catholicism, the major spiritual event of her adult life, is mocked by a woman who "could not understand how anybody would 'leave the Congregationalist Church to go over on the South Side to some old Catholic Church no one ever heard of before'" (59). (14) As a teacher, Tarry is asked to be a charter member of a "social club" designated for black professional women; she is appalled to learn that "non-professional" women are not welcome at club-sponsored dances. She notes finally that "the caste system which dominated Negro Birmingham" (76) segregates blacks from each other as effectively as it keeps them away from whites: "Between the Negro people I knew in Birmingham and the Negroes I did not know there was little, if any, intermingling.... Few of us realized then that we lived off the money we received for rendering services to people with whom we would have been reluctant to associate" (75). Even the vivid illustration of her sudden insight into her position in a racist society is filtered through early recollections of class consciousness. At age 16, Tarry watches from her doorstep as police verbally harass, then brutally beat, a young black man called Shorty, one of the "new people" in the neighborhood whom Tarry's mother deplores as a "wild bunch." When Tarry cries out in the boy's defense, her mother tries in vain to stop her, but Tarry pushes past her and into the street, where she faces the policemen down. "I could hear words coming out of my mouth," she writes, "but I was beyond fear." Nevertheless, her sudden realization of racial solidarity ("For the first time, I knew who and what I was") does not blind her to the social difference between herself and Shorty: "Shorty stirred, then dragged himself to the curb where he sat with his head between his knees. We had never spoken in our lives" (62-63).

If her experiences in Birmingham clarify for Tarry the mutual exclusivity of class snobbery and effective political action, her subsequent move to New York City forces her to confront her middle-class relationship to money. Originally Tarry intends to pursue a journalism degree at Columbia University, but the Depression quickly convinces her that she will be unable to afford tuition. Instead, she takes a series of better or worse paying jobs and embarks on a life of consumer pleasures, frequenting speakeasies and buying "a fur coat on the installment plan ... to wear to midnight Mass" (114). Her new interest in material possessions coincides with her growing awareness that she is capable of passing for white, a thing she insists she never does, even when she is told that doing so will make finding work easier for her. (15) Nevertheless, the anecdotes that illustrate this part of her life, all of which mingle her need to make money with her resentment at being mistaken for white, make clear that Tarry's full recognition of her racial ambiguity is inextricably linked with her realization and construction of her self as a sophisticated consumer. It is only when her younger sister arrives for a visit and reminds her of her original intentions that she realizes the emptiness of her materialistic lifestyle. Her sister's rebuke evokes the first allusion Tarry makes to feeling solidarity with other young black women, as she recalls the story of Edna, the family's housekeeper, whom she has recently been told was murdered with impunity by a white policeman: "The apartment was filled with alternating echoes after my sister left: one voice was hers and the other was Edna's.... I became critical of my friends and lost interest in parties. I choked on the smoke in nightclubs and went to sleep during the entertainment, which seldom varied. I had nothing to show for six years in New York but a closet full of cheap clothes, a few pieces of furniture and a stack of rent receipts" (117).

Tarry becomes involved with the Negro Writers' Guild, through which she meets a wide range of black luminaries including Claude McKay and James Weldon Johnson, and also begins her long association with Friendship House, a Catholic organization dedicated to promoting racial harmony and faith-based activism to "combat the forces of Godless Communism in Harlem" (144). She also, at last, begins to write in earnest, both as a journalist for the Amsterdam News and as the author of race-related children's books. Her belief that her new literary calling has entirely displaced her previous materialism is explicit: "Writing satisfied me," Tarry says, "as jewels and fine clothes satisfy many women ... I felt as if I had found my niche in life at last" (194). The process by which her work influences the way she constructs her identity is similarly clear, as she develops the habit of prefacing the lectures on racial tolerance that she gives at community events with "as a Negro," and as her assignments bring her into contact with people and situations that force her to redefine her identity on a daily basis.

Among these people are Tarry's first two "suitors," Arthur, a young "eligible" black man visiting New York from New Orleans, and Jim, a white senior editor at the publishing house that accepts Tarry's juvenile fiction. Neither relationship results in marriage, for reasons, as Tarry explains candidly and straightforwardly, that have to do with the complexity of her own multiple axes of self-identification and the inability of either man to accommodate them all. Jim, she writes, is physically attractive to her (she describes him as "a substantial-looking man who wore his tweeds well" and who has "blue eyes and red-gold hair, not quite as red as Mama's") and Tarry specifically notes that his race does not trouble her, though "after Edna's death ... I had been wary of white men" (151). Furthermore, Tarry credits Jim with helping her to overcome the lingering vestiges of her own class prejudice: when Tarry complains that a woman she has met is "common," Jim reminds her that "Abraham Lincoln said God must have loved the common people because he made so many of them," a "lesson in tolerance" that Tarry asserts stayed with her long after Jim's death. However, Tarry writes that she cannot accept Jim's multiple marriage proposals because he is an atheist and a divorce.

Arthur, on the other hand, initially seems compatible with Tarry, and she writes of her joy at the prospect of visiting him in New Orleans (once she has obtained an invitation from a female friend who also lives there, to maintain proprieties). Yet Arthur ultimately also proves to be an unsuitable match; Tarry explains frankly that "the arrogant, assured air [she] had admired in Arthur was but a defense for the brooding bitterness which lies curled up in the breasts of most Negro men I have known" (122). Prone to outbursts of anger that Tarry sees as unprovoked by her behavior, Arthur at last voices his frustrations after meeting Tarry's family during a visit to the South, where Tarry is traveling, collecting "folk tales," and doing research for the Federal Writers' Project. "You can't understand my problems anyway," he tells Tarry. "I'm black! And each of your relatives you introduce me to is whiter than the others" (168).

Arthur's observations merely crystallize Tarry's experiences throughout her research trip, where she is regularly mistaken for white unless accompanied by a darker friend or colleague, and where her interviewees tell her stories that seem at once vaguely familiar from her youth, but also strange because of the class divide across which she and the interview subjects communicate: "most of the elderly Negroes I talked to ... were descended from what sociologists call 'field Negroes'" (163). Nevertheless, Tarry stubbornly maintains her investment in the southern identity that she insists she has maintained with her "corn bread and collard greens talk" (150), her years of residency in New York notwithstanding, and when the opportunity presents itself to return to Alabama, this time for a stint with the USO-NCCS (National Catholic Community Services) in Anniston, she does not hesitate, even though leaving New York will mean putting her journalistic career on hold. Theorizing that she is both making a contribution to the war effort and making visible African Americans in the NCCS, Tarry willingly returns to fight what the black soldiers she meets call "the battle of Alabama."

However, her identification with the South disappears with the ends both of the war and of her brief marriage to a soldier she meets in Anniston. The autobiography's longest chapter, entitled "USO Diary," concludes with Tarry, newly divorced and pregnant, and announcing, "I promised God and the baby that it would be born in a place where it would be free" (248). She returns to New York to give birth to a daughter, Elizabeth. Elizabeth's birth marks a significant turning point for Tarry, who suddenly feels her own black identity anchored by her darker baby. "Fair at birth, her skin tone deepened into a smooth brown--like caramel candy.... This, I hoped, would make life less complicated for her than it had been for her mother" (252). Accompanied by Elizabeth, Tarry's own experience of her race becomes somewhat "less complicated" as well, as on trips to the South she is now denied hotel rooms and taxis by whites who refer to her child as a "nigger baby." (16)

In writing frankly about class and skin color, Tarry indicates that she understands the discursive backdrop against which her autobiography will be measured. Her rejection of middle-class materialism and snobbery as well as her embrace of her "dark" daughter's skin color, are self-authenticating gestures intended to inscribe them both in a wider extant concept of "authentic" African Americanness. Yet at the same time, Tarry's autobiography complicates an understanding of autobiography of marginalized groups, usually theorized as an ongoing negotiation between a singular sense of personal identity and a collectivized "We" comprising other members of the marginalized group whose life stories contribute to what Kenneth Mostern calls "that process which articulates the determined subject so as to actively produce a newly positive identity" (11). The multiple valences of Tarry's identity suggest that her approach to positioning herself as a subject might be best described as a Venn diagram of contingent selves, and her "We" gives equal weight to her great-grandmother, a former slave whose tales first awaken Tarry's interest in orally transmitted history, and to the white priest and novelist James A. Hyland, whose commitment to building a Catholic church and school for blacks in Louisiana in defiance of the Ku Klux Klan inspires Tarry's own sense of civic and spiritual duty.

Most importantly, for all of Tarry's lip service to her rejection of middleclass elitism and consumerism, she nevertheless appropriates "taste," a middleclass categorization to which she is privy, as a means of resisting a totalizing reading of her text that would render its complexity useless, forcing it either to fit the mold for African American authenticity or be left permanently outside of it. When Tarry announces in the beginning that she has left untold portions of her autobiography in the interest of maintaining the narrative's "good taste," she seems at first to be cleaving to a prim and ladylike approach to authorship designed to remind us that she is not "common" and that her autobiography will not appeal to the reader in search of the "tell-all expose" that William L. Andrews notes Tarry might have written "by exploiting her experience as a black woman light enough to be mistaken for white" (148). Yet such a caveat also alerts readers that autobiography, far from being a transparent chronological rendering of "real" events, is structured and incomplete. Her antagonistic strategy highlights, rather than obscures, the constructed nature of the personal narrative.

What Tarry chooses to leave out, significantly, is all reference to her own sexuality, even within the confines of marital relations. It is not that she is a prude, she notes, and she is hardly unaware of men or the realities of sex; indeed, early on in her tenure with the USO, she goes looking for soldiers to fill the club at a "creep joint ... across the street from the 'pro' (prophylactic) station" (235). However, Tarry shows that she is acutely aware of the conflation of blackness with exotic sexuality as well as of the assumption that black women are intrinsically sexual commodities. She tells stories of a principal who chases her around a classroom when she refuses to be "nice" to him, a white cab driver who announces his intention to rape her after she declares her race, a "friend" who offers her a job as a wealthy white man's mistress, and of a man she calls only "Mr. X," an immigrant from "one of the Balkan countries," whose "spontaneous gaiety and love of music" she finds charming until the evening when "in the pretty language he always used, Mr. X admitted that he thought 'all Negro girls' indulged in sex freely, with abandon, and boldly explored the many bypaths of love-making" (109-10). Given her openness about these and similar encounters, as well as her willingness to explain the reasons she did not marry other men, Tarry's narrative avoidance of her relationship with Elizabeth's father is all the more conspicuous. Though she is willing to discuss the ways a spurious version of black women's sexuality is constructed by whites (what Hortense Spillers has called the myth of the black woman as "the embodiment of carnality" [76]), she refuses to divulge any insight into her experience of its reality. In the guise of "taste," Tarry posits a new version of the sexuality of the "Other," one she insists will remain unknowable. Tarry's text rejects the ways that black women are expected to offer up their life stories for prurient consumption, just as she rejects the way she believes black women are expected to offer up their bodies. Tarry's story of her marriage is told in a few cryptic sentences interspersed throughout the minutiae of her activities with the wartime USO. Referring to her husband exclusively by his last name, or as "the soldier," she writes in February of 1944: "Patton was in charge of the officers' club and mess and we often found the opportunity to co-operate." Given that Elizabeth is born in November of that same year, some "co-operation" is evident. But Tarry reveals only enough to maintain middle-class appearances; Elizabeth is the legitimate offspring of a "secret civil ceremony" joining Tarry and "the soldier named Patton," which Tarry discovers a week later "was not made in good faith" (245). Tarry's revelation is framed by the longer story of the return of her ex-boyfriend Arthur, whose romantic overtures she is forced to reject because, although she cannot tell him so, "on a chain around my neck was a wedding ring" (244); the framing device emphasizes still further the distance between the main narrative and the intriguing back story. Once readers learn that Tarry has discovered she is pregnant, a few pages later, references to Patton cease altogether.

Obviously, Tarry has no obligation to divulge the details of her marriage; as life has I have noted, her reticence to discuss her private precedents in life writing by other black women, and even by black men. (17) Yet clearly Tarry puts substantial effort into arousing readers' interest, in spite of the brevity of her remarks, and it seems unarguable that devoting less than a paragraph in a 300-page book to so central an event, while hinting at a background story that will never be told, is a significant narrative strategy. Why was it necessary to keep the marriage "secret"? Given Tarry's devout Catholicism, why does she accept a "civil ceremony," which, though legally binding, could not be legitimate in the eyes of the Church? Why does Tarry say the marriage was not entered into in "good faith"? Why does she give Elizabeth the last name of Patton, and, although she apparently has no further contact with her ex-husband, why go on to nickname her daughter "Pat"? Tarry thus deliberately stokes and summarily douses readers' curiosity; perhaps readerly frustration goes a long way toward explaining the antagonism with which contemporary reviewers responded to Tarry's "hints and Victorian phrasing" (Williams 479). Because Tarry's is a raced narrative, invoking the privilege of structuring her autobiography as she sees fit without kowtowing to the preconceptions and demands of what even her reviewers assume is a predominantly white reading public, is a resistant strategy that reinscribes Tarry's identity as "other" while complicating what Katherine Sugg has neatly called the assumption of "a specific kind of minority identity behind minority writing" (802). Her disruption of readers' (potentially sentimentalizing) pleasure in the text is apparently designed to remind the reader that, "as a mode of disengaged engagement, aesthetic appreciation divorced from the artist's life functions as a denial of that life" (Cruz 31). Instead, as Doris Sommer has provocatively written of the work of Rigoberta Menchu and Elena Poniatowska, Tarry "offers opacity, not to watch it evaporate, or congeal in shows of transparent authenticity, but to mark difference" (17).

In the end, Tarry's narrative promises an "authentic" southern black woman's narrative, with all the conventionalized revelation that the label implies, only to insist on maintaining a respectful distance between herself and readers by cordoning off specific elements of her story behind the velvet ropes of "good taste." Invoking class privilege in this way, rather than reifying still further the divide between "authentic" blackness and middle-class identity, The Third Door instead argues tacitly that strategic use of the markers of class itself can allow for an unknowable racialized identity not contained by the reader's expectations. Tarry's choice was hardly the only one she could have made; in fact, she might well have secured for herself a more prominent position in the history of African American literature by de-emphasizing her membership in, or even exhibiting open hostility toward, the black middle class, a strategy J. Martin Favor insists continues to characterize the work of black intellectuals even today. (18) As a journalist in 1930's Harlem, for example, Tarry had all the "street" credibility she needed to pen a portrait of her own black urban life more in keeping with the fairly clear conventions of the "realistic" protest fiction for which the postwar era in African American literature is now better known. Instead, Tarry's multiple rhetorical and discursive registers allow for the possibility of another, more complex, retelling of authentic black experience. Rather than allowing her voice to be undermined by its class affiliation, Tarry appropriates class to rewrite her own shifting and contingent raced identity as her intellectual private property, undermining the notion that her life needs to be an open book, let alone a best-selling one, to be politically or spiritually inspiring. In so doing, she investigates the notion that "authentically raced" authorial identities are normative constructs rather than neutral descriptions of experiential selves and their textual translation. Ultimately, her work underscores critics' obligation to re-examine our own investment in authenticating particular constructions of race through our recognition of specific thematic and textual strategies as markers of the "real" in realistic representation and the "race" in racial authenticity.

Works Cited

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DeIrosso, Jeana. "Catholicism's Other(ed) Trinity: Race, Class and Gender in Black Schoolgirl Narratives. NWSA Journal 12.1 (2000): 24-43.

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Eversley, Shelly. The Real Negro: The Question of Authenticity in Twentieth Century African American Literature. New York: Routledge, 2003.

Favor, J. Martin. Authentic Blackness: The Folk in the New Negro Renaissance. Durham: Duke UP, 1999.

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McKay, Nellie Y. Introduction. Tarry ix-xxvi.

Meier, August, and David Lewis. "History of the Negro Upper Class in Atlanta, Georgia, 1890-1958." The Journal of Negro Education 28.2 (1959): 128-39.

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Posey, Thaddeus J. "Praying in the Shadows: The Oblate Sisters of Providence, A Look at Nineteenth-Century Black Catholic Spirituality." This Far by Faith: Readings in African American Women's Religious Biography. Eds. Judith Weisenfeld and Richard Newman. New York: Routledge, 1996: 73-93.

Redding, J. Saunders. On Being Negro in America. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1951.

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Notes

(1.) An exhaustive list of critical studies treating African American authenticity is beyond the scope of an endnote, but a few titles should serve to indicate the range of emphases: Sutherland, Valerie Smith, Favor, Benston, Johnson, Eversley, Willie, and Karem.

(2.) A notable exception is Jarrett's recent anthology African American Literature beyond Race, which showcases short stories or excerpts from novels that have gone unstudied because of their emphasis on putatively non-racial themes. However, although the specific selections chosen have been marginalized, with the possible exception of Frank Yerby, all of the writers represented are well known within academia.

(3.) It would, of course, be a mistake to suggest that class was irrelevant to Tarry's generation of black women writers. Certainly Ann Petry's The Street (1946) provides a superb example of a text that vigorously questions the relationship of middle class mores and ideals to the reality of everyday life for African Americans in Harlem; Dorothy West's The Living is Easy (1948) takes as its subject the black middle-class in Boston. Among poets, Margaret Walker's 1942 For My People is, in Allego's phrase, "a middle-class [African American] female's bildungsroman," (n.p.), while Gwendolyn Brooks's 1953 Maud Martha is a careful treatment of the effects of racism, sexism, and class bias on an African American woman before and after WWII. Still, it is worth noting that, however often critics reductively conflate these writers with their protagonists and speakers, none is actually writing autobiography. What is at issue here, I think, is an implicit difference critics have historically ascribed to autobiography in contrast to fiction; autobiography has traditionally been considered as a more "transparent" mode of writing, one in which authorial intent is privileged as somehow more obvious and textual complexity concomitantly devalued for its risk of introducing "inaccuracies" and muddying the clarity of the "life story" under scrutiny. Although recent studies in autobiography have obviously largely dispensed with this sort of formulation, it remains a powerful force, as indicated by current debates over, for example, the ethics of fabricating portions of memoirs (e.g. James Frey's A Million Little Pieces, or Augusten Burroughs's Running with Scissors).

(4.) Obviously, it would be a mistake to confer on The Third Door the status of "truth"; autobiography is, as several decades of critics have now pointed out, a textual space in which a culturally constructed and historically contingent epistemology of the self finds expression, and the "Ellen Tarry" of The Third Door is not a transparent equivalent of the person holding the pen. Rather, my concern is with the strategies Tarry employs in representing herself as a (black woman) character in her own story and in the reception of that representation in 1955, the year of its publication.

(5.) McKay's health was very poor in 1942 when Tarry found him alone in a basement apartment and saw to it that he received medical attention and care through the auspices of Friendship House. Although she modestly down plays her role in rehabilitating him ("He had done so much for me it was a privilege to be of some small service" [187]), the full extent of her assistance to him is revealed by McKay's biographers, who credit his later conversion to Tarry's intervention. For a concise summary of this episode, see Griffin.

(6.) For an excellent survey of specific anthologies of African American literature in the past 150 years, as well as brief allusions to the political, ideological and personal considerations underpinning each, see Kinnamon.

(7.) A review of the new edition of The Third Door, by Andrews, appeared in African American Review 29 (1995): 147-49, and Tarry is mentioned in a 1993 article by Estes-Hicks. This latter article mentions The Third Door only by title in a series of "post-Black Boy autobiographical writings by refugees from the Black South [who] continued to bemoan the homeland as wasteland and as enemy territory" (9).

(8.) The Negro in American Culture is the product of collaboration between Butcher and Alain Locke, who died as he was completing the manuscript. Though Butcher's remarks on Tarry can only be her own opinion (Locke died in 1954), her disdain for Tarry's bourgeois blackness provides an extension of Locke's own lifelong conviction that black culture would be destroyed by capitalism. See Locke.

(9.) Tarry's Catholicism provides another discordant discursive register; though her conversion recalls and evokes 19th-century black women's spiritual autobiography, the Catholic Church itself was and is so closely associated with white hegemony and an assimilationist doctrine as to make inevitable "the assumption that Catholicism is not relevant to U.S. blacks" (Delrosso 24). For insight into the history of African Americans' involvement in the Catholic church, see Posey.

(10.) Tarry cannily recognizes that, as Favor asserts, "to understand the essence of the black experience [it was felt that] one needed to turn to the South and its figurations of black and white" (15). She begins her narrative by announcing in the Foreword that she was born "a Southern Negro," a distinction she continues to exploit in New York, where her voice communicates her blackness when her face does not. As she tells her publisher, Margaret Wise Brown, "it was too late for me to change [my skin color]. Anyway, my southern accent made up for my lack of pigmentation ..." (The Third Door 136).

(11.) The Third Door invites comparison with Zora Neale Hurston's 1942 autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road. Though Hurston (whose conflicted attitude toward her own class identification has been well documented) offers none of the same excuses as Tarry for her own refusal to accommodate readers, she, too, explicitly states her "intention of putting but so much in the public ear" (Hurston 189). Like Tarry, Hurston omits details of a romantic relationship (in this case, that preceding her marriage to her second husband, Albert Price III). Although Hurston's secrecy may stem from motivations not unlike Tarry's, it is also part of a broader artistic pattern made up of what Washington identifies as "all sorts of manipulative and diversionary tactics ... [designed] ... to avoid any real self-disclosure" (19). By contrast, Tarry (who, unlike Hurston, was also not pressured by her publisher to write her autobiography) seems altogether willing to provide as much information about herself as possible (much of it verifiable, in fact, given that the events of her life overlap so regularly with those of other, far more famous people); as a result, this single break in the narrative stands out all the more forcefully.

(12.) Interestingly, the photo on the original edition of The Third Door features a much more racially distinctive Tarry (she looks to me like the screen actress Dorothy Dandridge); the 1992 edition carries a later photo in which lighting and hairstyle combine to enhance Tarry's paleness and reduce her "ethnicity."

(13.) McKay insists that although Tarry has come under tire for her lack of feminist consciousness, "Tarry grew up in a family of extremely strong, able women" who influenced her outlook dramatically. However true, Tarry's autobiography complicates McKay's contention. Of Tarry's two grandmothers, one is only briefly described as the doting mother of two sons, and the other died when Tarry was four. Her father's sister, "Nannie," was initially instrumental in Tarry's upbringing, but she moved away when Tarry was not yet old enough to go to school; later, Tarry writes in detail of the way Nannie excoriated her for her conversion to Catholicism, after which she simply stopped speaking to her. It seems that Tarry's mother, Eula Meadows Tarry, must be the strong female role model to whom McKay refers. Yet even this claim is a problematic assumption. In just 10 pages of tightly compressed childhood memories, Tarry mentions four times that her mother was very fond of giving her "switchings" with whatever was at hand, including a young sapling that Tarry had been given as part of an Arbor Day "city-beautification" plan; "getting whipped with a tree was just too much," observes Tarry wryly. While it is tempting to dismiss Tarry's mother's behavior as culturally and historically specific, it is noteworthy that in an interview Tarry gave at age 92, she continued to dwell on her mother's punishments: "I always thought I was adopted.... I could not understand how, if I was Mama's child, she was always switching me ..." (K. Smith 267). It is clear that Tarry's mother had few qualms about punishing her daughter in unconventional, as well as conventional ways, as, for example, when she blamed her 14-year-old daughter for "causing" Bob Tarry's fatal heart attack by calling him when she heard an intruder breaking into the house. Juxtaposed with Tarry's tales of whippings are stories that articulate her mother's anxieties about her "darker" daughter's appearance. When Tarry presses her nose against the windowpane to watch a thunderstorm, her mother is "sure [her] nose would be flattened forever" (13). In short, it is only through substantial revision of Tarry's story that a pattern of positive familial feminist influence emerges.

(14.) For an account of the significance of the upper-class, northeastern establishment connotations of the Congregationalist church to the southern African American community, see Meier and Lewis. Tarry does not explicitly say that her mother's opposition to her newfound Catholicism sprang from class concerns, but does point out that Eula Mae kept her daughter's conversion secret from the community as long as possible, cryptically citing her need to "think of Ida Mae and Little Sister [Tarry's younger siblings] now" (55).

(15.) An especially tantalizing moment in Tarry's story occurs when she relates how she finally lands a job after weeks of fruitless searching. Having explained that she has labored to convince prospective employers that she is black, despite her appearance, and that each of them has rejected her application as a result, Tarry writes that on her way home from one such encounter she is moved by an advertisement in the subway to purchase a "rinse" for her hair to "brighten" it before going on her next interview, at a white nightclub downtown. The rinse turns out to be bleach, and she ends up a blonde; she also gets the job. A cynical reader would see disingenuousness in Tarry's account. Rather, I'd like to emphasize that the anecdote of the blonde Ellen Tarry incarnates a low point in Tarry's sense of herself as an African American, preceding a racial and political awakening that parallels her earlier conversion to Catholicism.

(16.) Tarry also scorns middle-class consumerism as antithetical to Elizabeth's development of authentic race consciousness. When Elizabeth, who grows up in New York, announces at the age of nine that she wants to be as fair as Tarry so that she can "stay in the best hotel in Florida," Tarry worries about "the values she was establishing which made the 'best hotel' in Florida seem so important to hero. She takes the child for another trip through the ostensibly desegregated South to expose Elizabeth to southern segregation. Once there, the naive girl is disappointed to learn that the labels "Colored" and "White" on southern drinking fountains do not denote different colors of water. Exposing her daughter to the overt racism of Alabama is crucial to Tarry, who writes that the child would never understand "my disagreements with race-relations 'experts' who often base their conclusions on life in areas above the Mason-Dixon line if she never had the firsthand experience of being a Negro in the South" (283).

(17.) In his 1951 autobiography, Redding writes openly about assumptions made by white audiences not only about his own sexuality but about his willingness to discuss it and his own refusal to play along: "The approach to my intellect is not through my gonads.... Since Negroes were assumed to be sexually immoderate, I made a show of strict asceticism, chastising the flesh in a way most unnatural to youth" (57, 60).

(18.) Favor argues that "though most critics are, by definition, middle-class, they work themselves into a strategic alliance with folk privilege by consciously emphasizing aspects of heritage and experience that link them to the folk while downplaying their own similarities to 'buppies' " (13).

Stephanie Brown is Assistant Professor of American literature at The Ohio State University. She has published numerous articles on African American literature and film.