Elizabeth Eckford’s house sat on a short stretch of West 18th Street, just off Peyton. Everything about the building and the land it rested on was compact, as if someone had sat down and figured out the smallest and most inexpensive way to fulfill a dream—a place of one’s own. The home was squat and square, with two bedrooms on a single floor, along with a crawl space below and a small attic, accessible only via a ladder. The place was rudimentary, unfinished: the pine floors, for instance, had never been varnished. The front yard was tidy, and tiny. There was room for a small garden, or a lawn, but not really enough for both, and certainly not enough for a tree. No one had ever bothered with the backyard, where a big rock stuck out of the dirt. A local black doctor, who’d grown rich performing abortions and speculating in real estate, had built it in the late 1940s, and the Eckfords—Elizabeth’s parents, Oscar Jr. and Birdie; her older sister, Anna; and her younger brothers, Oscar 3rd and Bolden—were the first folks ever to live there, moving in on Elizabeth’s eighth birthday in October 1949. That was a time, shortly after World War II, when if you scrambled enough, even the relatively poor could own their own homes. The house had grown with the family: as two more children, Melbert Don and Katherine, had come along, the Eckfords had added a couple of rooms to the back.
Little Rock in the Eisenhower era was a racial checkerboard, with blocks of whites and blocks of blacks interspersed throughout large parts of the city. To delineate the racial boundaries, one needed only to look up (there were no streetlights in the black neighborhoods) or down: the white blocks were paved, while the black ones were clay, though they were always covered with oil—it tamped down the dust—whenever elections loomed. Elizabeth’s mother had always hated the neighborhood. She’d grown up in the sticks, in the hamlet of Pettus, Arkansas, thirty-five miles or so east of Little Rock. Her education there was spotty, scheduled around the crop year; like promising and ambitious blacks throughout the state, she’d come to Little Rock by herself as a teenager to attend the prestigious all-black Dunbar High School, earning her keep by cleaning the home of the black schoolteacher with whom she lived. (The schoolteacher had evidently taken on the country girl as her personal project, refurbishing her language and cleaning up her grammar; Birdie became a stickler herself, correcting her children whenever they split infinitives.) She never liked the home on West 18th Street; with many lots either still wooded or empty (a cow grazed on one), the area reminded her of the countryside she had fled. (Once a year, Elizabeth would visit her blind grandfather in Pettus; his farm had a mule, and the water tasted different there.) Near the city limits, Elizabeth’s new neighborhood also housed various illicit businesses. Sundays, the kids watched gleefully as ladies in their church finery tiptoed toward the nearby gin mills to gamble or drink.
Elizabeth’s house (Photo by Brian Chilson)
Within Little Rock’s black community, the Eckfords were known for their intelligence and seriousness. They’d always thought of themselves as something special, or, as Birdie Eckford once put it, “something on a stick.” “Aren’t you Eckford’s?” someone once asked Elizabeth’s brother Bolden when he stumbled into a bootlegging joint. “Don’t tell your parents you were down here!” The patriarch of the family was Elizabeth’s grandfather, Oscar Eckford, Sr., a large and imperious man—his second wife (Elizabeth’s step-grandmother), and even some white people, called him “Mr. Eckford”—who ran a small grocery store and café called Eckford’s Confectionary on West 15th Street. He had served in France in World War I (when the state VFW wouldn’t admit him and other blacks, he had helped set up a VFW post of their own) and started his store during the Depression, selling the ribs his wife cooked up in the front room of their house. Though the shelves were never very full, there were big jars of barbecue sauce—made from vinegar, root beer, brown sugar, and mustard—along with enormous bags of cornmeal and flour and lots of penny candies. The place smelled of Dubble Bubble gum. From behind the counter, sitting with his fat legs crossed, Oscar Eckford presided over his domain, barking out orders to his wife and everyone else.
Her grandfather was the only black man Elizabeth knew who spoke to white people without fear—in part, she figured, because he paid his bills on time and never owed anybody anything. He was very principled, with little patience for people who, like the white man who delivered bread to his store, refused to take a stand on the issues of the day. (Such a fellow wasn’t “worth the gunpowder it would take to blow him up,” he liked to say, and that was typical, for he often spoke in aphorisms.) He had blue eyes and traced the family name back to a chaplain in the Confederate Army. He was acutely aware of lineage; “Who are your people?” he regularly asked. Of all his grandchildren, Elizabeth was, if not necessarily his favorite, the one for whom he held the highest hopes. “EEE-lizabeth,” he would always ask, looking her squarely in the eye, “what did you learn in school today?” From “Pop-Paw,” as his grandchildren called him, she always understood she would go to college, though she never knew quite how.
Elizabeth’s father was neither as ambitious nor as accomplished, though he surely put in his time. He worked nine days a week, he told people. Seven were for the Missouri Pacific Railroad, where, after a few unhappy years waiting tables in dining cars, he’d taken a lower-paying job—stocking trains, renting pillows—that let him stay in town. Weekends, he was an “extra man,” hauling junk in his pickup, performing odd jobs for three white families. Birdie Eckford also worked, teaching laundering at the Arkansas School for the Blind and Deaf Negro, five blocks from the Eckford home. That let her look after Oscar 3rd, who was badly handicapped. He appeared autistic (the term used then was “retarded”; Elizabeth’s father once described him as an “idiot”). Late in her life, Birdie disclosed that he’d been dropped during delivery, when she’d given birth by herself. “Baby Brother” could have lived at the school, but Birdie brought him home every night; he was a familiar sight in the neighborhood, running up and down the street or rocking back and forth on the porch.
Birdie watched her other children just as vigilantly. She let them do very little, like dance or ride a bike or roller skate. Birthday parties were generally forbidden, unless she knew the parents. “The Queen of No,” Elizabeth called her. When her girls met with their Brownie troop a few blocks from home, Birdie knew exactly how long the sessions lasted and how many steps away they were. When they attended shows at the segregated Gem Theater (where there were films with black casts, and the audience talked back to the screen), a teenage girl to whom the family was close always went along. When any of them strayed even slightly from her orbit, Birdie Eckford suffered; whenever one was in trouble or pain, she somehow always knew. The Eckfords had no phone—it was too costly—but they did have a television, the better for her to keep her children in her sights. When Elizabeth returned from some event, her mother always asked whether there had been any men there. Perhaps, Elizabeth later theorized, she had been sexually molested when she was young.
Elizabeth’s mother was pious: you could tell her mood by whether she sang hymns or the blues. Once she took voice lessons, which she paid for by letting her teacher use the converted player piano the Eckfords owned to teach other children. She was also superstitious, and mixed in with her Methodism was some sort of hoodoo. She thought certain people—she called them “readers”—were endowed with supernatural powers, and paid them for their prophecies. (One of them lived in a dilapidated house. If she had such magical powers, Elizabeth used to wonder, why had she remained so poor?) But her superstition was ecumenical. She spent time in the Baptist bookstore and often clutched a rosary. To some, she seemed a little off—“an elevator that didn’t go up all the way,” as one of Elizabeth’s childhood friends put it. Elizabeth’s parents had a troubled marriage; her father was abusive and strayed regularly, though it was something Elizabeth knew only from her mother’s complaints. Perhaps that was why the Eckfords ignored certain family rituals; for instance, never did they sit for a family portrait. Only in some years could Elizabeth afford to buy her school picture.
Early on, Elizabeth became a reader. When, at age seven, she finished her first book, Dr. Seuss’s The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, she felt like shouting with joy: a whole world had just opened up to her. In sixth grade, she overheard a teacher saying she read at an eleventh-grade level. Sensing this, Elizabeth’s parents let her sit in her Daddy’s chair and read even while her siblings had to clean the house. When you saw her, nine times out of ten she had her head buried in a book. The kids in her neighborhood thought of her as the “professor girl”; whenever they had a question about something, they turned to her. But Elizabeth was modest. She got good grades not because she was smart, she thought, but because it was expected of her, and because she worked hard. And, at least in ninth-grade civics, because she had a crush on her teacher.