Civil Rights Events

Little Rock Nine

Elizabeth and Hazel -- Part Two

 

What the local black newspaper wrote about Elizabeth [Eckford] in September 1957—that her fateful walk to school would leave an impression on her that "only death will erase"—has proven to be prophetic. The eight others quickly moved on. They left the South and, in a couple of instances, the country. Four of them married whites. They have had successful careers and families. Elizabeth, by contrast, has never strayed all that far from Little Rock, psychologically or physically. She lives in the house she left on the morning of September 4, 1957. And she has struggled with the legacy of Little Rock in a way the others haven't. Keen and unsentimental, and at times undiplomatic, she alone says she would not do it again, though she's pleased she did it once. The others regard Elizabeth as the most vulnerable among them, and have always looked out for her. But they know, too, that as stationary as she appears, it is she who's come the furthest.

 

…

 

At summer's end, her mother lost her job—retaliation, surely, for her daughter's role in the Little Rock drama. And then, in the final paroxysm of the segregationists, all of Little Rock's public high schools were closed the 1958–59 year. A tutor taught Elizabeth, leaving her a few credits short of graduating. Like all the others of the Little Rock Nine, she would flee the South, moving in the summer of 1959 to St. Louis. There she got the remaining credits, and there she made the first of several suicide attempts, with over-the-counter sleeping pills. She then continued her education, enrolling first at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, then at Central State University, in Wilberforce, Ohio. Again, she tried killing herself, though in more novel ways: hitchhiking far from campus, for instance, half hoping someone would pick her up and murder her (Margolick, Lens 12).

 

Living in Little Rock during the summer of 1963, Elizabeth received a telephone message from Hazel Bryan.

 

At 16, Hazel had married a schoolmate, Antoine Massery, then dropped out. But Hazel, by now the mother of two and living off a gravel road in South Little Rock, had an intellectually curious, independent streak: she chafed at the regimentation and racial intolerance of her church, for instance, and was eventually kicked out of it. Seeing Martin Luther King and the civil-rights protesters on television made her think of Elizabeth, and what she'd done to her six years earlier. Never mentioning it to her husband, she called the first Eckford in the phone book—Elizabeth's grandfather—and left several messages for her. Finally, Elizabeth got back to her. "I just told her who I was—I was the girl in that picture that was yelling at her, that I was sorry, that it was a terrible thing to do and that I didn't want my children to grow up to be like that, and I was crying," Hazel says.

 

Honestly, Elizabeth wasn't sure just which girl Hazel was. Far from studying the picture, she avoided it; all those white people in it had merged. But she accepted Hazel's apology, because she seemed to be sincere, because her grandfather and father urged her to, and because Hazel so clearly craved forgiveness. Predictably, the two then resumed their very separate ways; this was, after all, the South in 1963. But thereafter, Elizabeth felt protective of Hazel—white people back then paid a price for extending blacks even the slightest courtesy—and whenever reporters asked her for the name of that white girl with the hateful face, she wouldn't say.

 

Despite the occasional interview, Elizabeth largely laid low. When she attended the March on Washington in the summer of 1963, taking a bus from Little Rock, few there would have known who she was. But she could not escape her past. Watching a production of the play In White America one night in St. Louis, she heard her own voice: an account of her walk she'd once given to a newspaper. Totally unprepared, she ran to the bathroom and cried. Briefly, she moved back to Little Rock. But a broken engagement, her failure to get a college degree, the difficulty finding a teaching job, and her mother's nagging led her, in September 1967, to escape again, this time by joining the Army (Margolick, Lens 13-15).

 

Hazel [had] never stopped thinking about the picture and making amends for it. She severed what had been her ironclad ties to an intolerant church. She taught mothering skills to unmarried black women, and took underprivileged black teenagers on field trips. She frequented the black history section at the local Barnes & Noble, buying books by Cornel West and Shelby Steele and the companion volume to Eyes on the Prize. She’d argue with her mother on racial topics, defending relatives who’d intermarried.

… Secretly, Hazel [had] always hoped some reporter would track her down and write about how she’d changed. But it didn’t happen on its own, and she did nothing to make it happen. Instead, again and again, there was the picture. Anniversary after anniversary, Martin Luther King Day after Martin Luther King Day, Black History Month after Black History Month, it just kept popping up. The world of race relations was changing, but to the world, she never did.

Finally, on the 40th anniversary of Central’s desegregation in 1997, Will Counts returned to Little Rock and arranged for Elizabeth and Hazel to pose for him again. Hazel was thrilled, Elizabeth, curious. Their first meeting was predictably awkward, but the new picture, showing the two women smiling in front of Central, revealed only the barest hint of that. It all but took over the next day’s Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, and very nearly upstaged President Clinton’s speech the next day, in which he worked in a reference to them both. Soon, a poster-sized version of the picture was available: “Reconciliation,” it said. Everyone rejoiced; Thanks to Elizabeth and Hazel, Little Rock, maligned for 40 years, bathed in instant absolution.

Then, quietly, Elizabeth and Hazel discovered something quite miraculous: They actually liked each other. For all their differences—Elizabeth was better-read, Hazel’s life far better-balanced—they shared a good deal. Both were introspective, skeptical, a bit isolated; neither fit in anywhere, including in their own families. They visited one another’s homes, took trips together, spoke to schools and civic groups. In the process, Hazel helped pull Elizabeth out of her shell, then to blossom. Unemployed, on mental health disability for years, Elizabeth soon returned to work, as a probation officer for a local judge. Two years after they’d first met, the pair even appeared on Oprah.

Winfrey hadn’t bothered hiding her incredulity, even disdain, that day: Of all people, these two were now friends? But as rude as both felt her to have been, she’d been on to something. The improbable relationship had already begun to unravel.

A student of, and stickler for, history, Elizabeth looked for—and, she thought, spotted—holes in Hazel’s story. How, for instance, could Hazel have undertaken something so cruel so casually, then remembered so little about it afterward? And why, after all these years, did she absolve her parents from any blame? At their joint appearances, Elizabeth could treat Hazel impatiently, peremptorily. Meantime, others in the Little Rock Nine either shunned Hazel or complained of her presence at various commemorations.

But resentment came as well from whites, particularly whites who’d attended Central, particularly those from better families, who’d thought that, even by always looking the other way, they’d done absolutely nothing wrong during those dark days and, truth be told, considered Hazel and her ilk “white trash.” Forty years earlier she’d given them all a black eye; now, she was back, more conspicuous, and embarrassing, than ever. At a reunion she foolishly, or naively, attended, she felt their cold shoulder, and could hear their snickers. None of them had ever apologized for anything they’d done or not done, and, as far as Hazel could tell, they’d been none the worse for their silence.

Ultimately, it grew too much for Hazel. She cut off ties with Elizabeth—for her, Sept. 11, 2011, marked another anniversary: 10 years had passed since they’d last spoken—and stopped making public appearances with her. Her interviews with me—granted only with great reluctance—will, she says, be her last. When I asked the two women to pose together one last time (Elizabeth turned 70 last Tuesday; Hazel will in January) Elizabeth agreed; Hazel would not. Hazel was poised to vote for Obama in 2008; after all, even her own mother did. But so deep was her hurt that she found some excuse not to (Margolick, Lives 11-13).

Hazel had helped coax Elizabeth out of her shell, but she was also a crutch. Without her around, Elizabeth's renewal intensified. Her appearances before students grew more frequent, though they were never easy: she would not eat or drink beforehand, and would make sure a lined wastebasket and paper towels were on hand just in case she threw up. She would read off cue cards, her hands shaking. She would not wear her glasses, so she could not make out any disapproving faces. She would speak fast, the better to exit quickly. And never would she allow pictures; after all, she was ugly.

…

In the First Division of Pulaski County Circuit Court, Elizabeth's clients are mostly black, often semi-illiterate, pinched for hot checks or credit-card fraud or taking or selling drugs. Many couldn't afford lawyers; few are hardened criminals. She spends her days hearing the same stock sob stories and, frustrated writer that she is, inventing her own, matching a new face with whatever she can conjure up. She keeps peanuts around for prisoners who have to skip breakfast to come in, but she's no soft touch. "Aren't you ashamed of showing your underwear?" she might ask some unkempt man. "How are you going to get a decent job looking like that?" she'll ask someone with glittering gold grills on his teeth. Some clients prefer to wait for her colleague Curtis Ricks: he's easier on them. Once in a while, after something's been on television, someone will say, "Miss Eckerd, I didn't know that was you." Treat her the way they always have, she tells them.

…

… she was positively ebullient, even chatty; at one point Ernest Green practically had to wrestle the microphone from her. She enjoys seeing the other eight, but they're spread out; even the two of them who now live in Little Rock—Minnijean Brown Trickey and Thelma Mothershed Wair—she seldom sees. Minnijean, who was as outspoken as Elizabeth was meek—she was suspended midyear for dumping chili on the head of a student, then expelled for calling another "white trash"—admires Elizabeth unabashedly. But asked whether she knows Elizabeth well, she says, simply, "Well enough to leave her alone." To Elizabeth's eyes, even the other eight are not beyond reproach. She contends that Green, the group's de facto spokesman over the years—he was the oldest, the first to graduate, and, as an official in the Carter administration, the most prominent—has always dished out feel-good, triumphal, "Good Negro" "top spin" rather than describe the Central experience as it really was. And she considers Melba Patillo Beals's memoir, Warriors Don't Cry, a staple on high-school reading lists, unreliable and hyperbolic. (Some of the others do, too, but only Elizabeth says so.)

…

Much as she'd like to leave the whole commemoration thing behind, it's gotten so she can't; her modest speaking fees have paid for a new heating system for her house, a new roof, new awnings. She says she does not expect ever to talk to Hazel again. But when I asked Elizabeth if she missed her, she nodded her head. "I wish I could tell her how much she helped me," she says. "I don't think I ever told her that" (Margolick, Lens 13-15).

So the famous photograph of 1957 takes on additional meaning: the continuing chasm between the races and the great difficulty, even among people of good will, to pull off real racial reconciliation. But shuttling back and forth between them, I could see that for all their harsh words …, they’ve only dug in their heels—they still missed one another. Each, I noticed, teared up at references to the other. Perhaps, when no one is looking—or taking any pictures—they’ll yet come together again. And if they can, maybe, so too, can we (Margolick, Lives 14). 

 

Works cited:

Margolick, David.  “The Many Lives of Hazel Bryan.”  Slate, October 11, 2011.  Web.   http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history_lesson/2011/10/elizabeth_and_hazel_what_happened_to_the_two_girls_in_the_most_f.html.

Margolick, David.  “Through a Lens, Darkly.”  Vanity Fair, September 24, 2007.  Web.  https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2007/09/littlerock200709