Reading Ellen Tarry’s Autobiography

Last November, I read “The Castle and My Prisoner,” the third chapter of Ellen Tarry’s autobiography, published in 1955, for a session of Faith and Reason in which guest speaker Professor Cecilia Moore presented on Black conversions to Catholicism in the twentieth century. Tarry’s story about navigating her relationships with her family, her peers, and her faith as an adolescent was compelling, and the way that she told it was beautiful. Reading her story of finding peace in the Catholic Church, along with her anecdotes of eating fig newtons and Lorna Doones at her job and getting tangled up in two sisters’ fight over a pair of stockings, was a welcome relief in a semester of endless work. Earlier this year, I read the book, which is titled The Third Door: The Autobiography of an American Negro Woman. Spending a book’s worth of time with Ellen Tarry almost a century ago allowed me to zoom out of my immediate experiences, as well as prompted me to reflect upon the routineness of upended plans.

While there was much that was engaging to me in this book, I was especially interested in the unanticipated path taken by Tarry as she pursued her dream of writing and advocating against racism. Unpredictability is not unusual, and that is partly why I, unsure of my future, was interested in this aspect of Tarry’s life. After teaching for a few years, Tarry wrote for a newspaper, before moving from her hometown of Birmingham, Alabama to New York City intending to study journalism at Columbia. Instead of getting the money together to start classes, she struggled for the next six and a half years to find and keep jobs in New York City during the Great Depression and due to racial discrimination. She eventually found work as a children’s book author and as a journalist and felt that she had found her role in the world. But then she was dragged into co-directing a Catholic interracial justice organization in Chicago. While there, she was inspired with another children’s story idea. She soon returned to New York and to reporting, which she was again reluctant to leave, but months later accepted a better-paying temporary position directing a recreation center for World War II soldiers in Alabama. There, she became pregnant with her daughter whose existence in society would further grow her desire for a “tomorrow” with, instead of doors labeled “colored” or “white,” a “third door.”

What could be considered detours in Tarry’s writing career, indeed, shaped and were part of her life and work. Her understanding of the world grew along the way. Perhaps these—even the years that felt wasted—weren’t detours, because they constituted her path itself, which was being created as she went. The tragedies and other incidents of racism that she witnessed and experienced of course should not have happened, but they did, as a result of the society in need of healing that exists, and they also motivated Tarry to direct her life towards healing the society that allowed them to happen. Tarry’s story of her life so far was full of times in which she did not know what was coming next, and I found it comforting to join her in looking back on it. This school year, I missed my equivalents to Tarry’s boarding school experiences of eating Lorna Doones in the school storeroom and finding herself in the middle of a fight between the sisters who lived on either side of her. (I couldn’t even get inadvertently sandwiched in a conversation between two others anymore.) Despite the spatial isolation, I found connection across time as, decades after she wrote it, I read Ellen Tarry’s account of the people she met, the places she had lived in, and the awkward, infuriating, or otherwise memorable moments that helped form the trajectory of her life and career.