The Third Door: The Autobiography of an American Negro Woman

by Ellen Tarry

Book by Tarry, Ellen

Genres: Autobiography, Race, Book Club

304 pages, Hardcover

First published October 6, 1971

Reviews

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is hard to accept just how racist this country was, and probably still is, in a lot of ways and places, including between blacks themselves. Raised in Alabama, Ellen Tarry converted to Catholicism in her teens, during a college-prep year at a Catholic boarding school for girls, which was run by the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, the order founded by St. Katherine Drexel. At the time of Tarry's attendance there in the 1920s, the saint was alive and active. With fair skin and red hair, Tarry could "pass" as white, but she very seldom chose to, despite the hardship this caused her, for example, when looking for work as a teacher in Alabama, and later, for ANY work, in New York City, where she moved on the threshold of the Great Depression. Her dream: to attend the Columbia School of Journalism.

Tarry's autobiography is very readable, and dare I say, enjoyable. Any reader interested in gaining perspective of what it meant to be a black, or a Catholic convert, or a southern female of the first half of the 20th century will be glad to read this book. That these three aspects are combined in a writer like Ellen Tarry is very powerful, indeed.

[Charles Stephen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was given to me more than a decade ago by Archbishop Oscar Lipscomb of Mobile, when I first interviewed him for my research on Spring Hill's desegregation. The narrative of this Alabama Catholic, an African American woman who could pass for white, is engrossing. I'm already a third of the way through it.

Tarry managed to be in Harlem during the later years of the Renaissance. She was also rubbed elbows with white Catholic college students who were influenced by the Jesuit, John La Farge, to be more accepting of African Americans as equals.