The Third Door: The Autobiography of an American Negro Woman.

In the closing paragraph of her 1955 autobiography, Ellen Tarry anticipates a day when "we are united," when "there will be no door in America marked 'colored' and no door marked 'white.' Instead there will be the third door - free from racial designations - through which all Americans, all of God's children, will walk in peace and dignity." Ten years later, in the immediate wake of the "long hot summer" of 1965, Tarry added an afterword to The Third Door in which she chides obstructionist, racist whites and those she called "culturally deprived Negroes" for failing to open their minds and hearts to the idea of equal access to "the door just beyond the tall mountain of prejudice where there will be no superficial barriers based on the color of a man's skin." The progress she witnessed in her hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, along with the then-recent passage of the Voting Rights Law and the determined moral leadership she applauded in President Johnson, sustained Tarry's faith in the future at the end of The Third Door. One wonders whether that faith in an integrated, color-blind America still abides in the author of The Third Door. To some readers today this faith, rooted in the dauntlessness of Tarry's middle-class Southern family, in her commitment to moral and educational self-improvement, and in her socially conscious Catholicism, may elicit little more than an ironic reminder of a time when terms like integration and freedom now possessed an unquestioned moral authority and bespoke what seemed then a social inevitability. But if the reprinting of The Third Door contributes to a re-evaluation of the kind of faith that Tarry took for granted in her vision of a color-blind multiethnic America, then we can still find much of use in reading The Third Door.

Ellen Tarry constructs her narrative according to the sociopolitical and discursive parameters of what Frances Foster has called the "progress-report" tradition of African American autobiography in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In her foreword Tarry promises her reader that though she has been "scarred" by Southern racism, hers is not a story of frustration and bitterness, but of progress and hope. Far from the tell-all expose that she could have written by exploiting her experience as a black woman light enough to be mistaken for white, The Third Door omits events that "might have infringed upon good taste." Tarry has a higher goal: to "sow happiness in place of discord" and to evoke in her reader "faith in our American future." For every recollection of discrimination and humiliation she suffered at the hands of bigots south and north, she gives her reader instances of successful interracial cooperation. Tarry is at pains to show what an African American woman can do in alliance with fair-minded whites to bring about racial harmony and justice.

As Nellie McKay's informative introduction points out, Ellen Tarry amassed a record of accomplishment that anyone would be proud of, especially considering the obstacles Tarry had to contend with. Although her education prepared her for a teaching career in the South, Tarry distinguished herself as a journalist for the New York Amsterdam News, as the author of a series of children's books, and as an administrator in several Catholic urban centers, most notably Harlem's Friendship House. One of the more striking features of her autobiography is the manner in which she represents what became at several junctures in her life a major dilemma - whether to devote herself to her writing career or to lay that aside in favor of service to her church.

As a schoolgirl Tarry was inspired by a teacher to become a writer. "I wanted to communicate with the world - to cry out against the outrage of racial discrimination and its attendant ills," she says of her youthful ambition. Before she leaves Birmingham in 1929, intent on enrolling in the journalism program at Columbia University, Tarry makes herself anathema to Mississippi Governor (and later U.S. Senator) Bilbo himself, a notorious race-baiter who gives her local fame by fulminating against one of her editorials in the black Birmingham Truth. Circumstances (particularly the Depression and pervasive discrimination against her on account of her race) stymie Tarry's plans for further formal education in the North; she settles on an alternative career as a social worker for the Catholic Friendship House in Harlem and finds much to fulfill her in this work, including the opportunity to research and write several children's books. But when the editor of the Amsterdam News invites her in 1941 to go to work on his paper, Tarry seizes the chance enthusiastically: "It was like a dream come true for me."

The first morning on the job, however, the managing editor of the News gives Tarry an assignment to write an article on birth control. "Knowing the attitude of the Church on this practice I did not want the story on my conscience or under my by-line." So Tarry procrastinates. Eventually "I solved the problem by putting . . . [the assignment] in the waste basket." Her only comment on this solution to her dilemma is: "That was one of my lucky days. Dan [the managing editor of the News] never asked me for the story on birth control."

A few years later a bishop in the Chicago area decides that the city's South Side needs a Friendship House "to be co-directed by a Negro and a white woman." Tarry learns, to her chagrin, that her white supervisor has volunteered her for the new job without consulting her first. Refusing to criticize the white woman for her high-handedness, Tarry instead observes simply that "writing satisfied me, as jewels and fine clothes satisfy many women," because writing provided "the opportunity to project many of my interests and quieted that old urge to do something about the plight of my people." In these remarks one cannot help but hear the echo of narratives like Douglass's and Jacobs's, in which the desire to write, to express oneself in the service of one's people, becomes a means of realizing and authorizing an independent African American selfhood. Yet when a priest from the Chicago bishop's office pressures Tarry with statements like "I was the only Negro women with certain qualifications" (the narrative does not reveal what they were - although one wonders if the priest was alluding in part to Tarry's light skin) and "my people needed me for this job," Tarry quietly gives in. The reader is left to wonder how this black woman felt about being told by a white man what her people needed and how she could best respond to those needs.

One of the most problematic dimensions of The Third Door is Tarry's seemingly uncritical acceptance of patriarchal authority in her life. She never hesitates in denouncing the white racist males who kill or intimidate black men and women with impunity in the South. She gives ample evidence of being able to hold her own when black men attempt to bully or ridicule her in an effort to enforce their own desire for dominance. But there is much piety toward the pater that goes unexamined in this autobiography, as exemplified in Tarry's unqualified American patriotism, her faith in the father-God of her Catholic training, and her deference toward the priests of the Church whose paternal authority she regularly obeys. These are among the silences that make this a perplexing, yet absorbing and provocative, narrative. For students of the tradition of African American women's autobiography, The Third Door will undoubtedly prove a challenging and instructive text.