Bourgeois Blackness and Autobiographical Authenticity in Ellen Tarry's "The Third Door."

THIRD Door, The (Book); TARRY, Ellen; AFRICAN American women; AUTOBIOGRAPHY; AFRICAN Americans; SOCIAL role; WORLD War II; RACIAL identity of Black people; ETHNICITY; BLACK nationalism

This article presents an analysis regarding the autobiography of Ellen Tarry titled "The Third Door." It provides a reflection on the methods that race, gender and class intersected in African American women's lives before and after World War II. It states that the author uses her life story to address the question of the role played by class identification in the construction of her own raced identity. It concludes that the strategic use of the markers of class itself can allow for an unknowable racialized identity not contained by the reader's expectations.