Unlike many of the rabble-rousers that morning, who had come in from the sticks, Hazel Bryan, age fifteen and a half, actually lived in Little Rock. But her roots, too, were rural. She had been born—on January 31, 1942—and raised in the hamlet of Redfield, population a hundred or so, roughly thirty miles to the south. Her parents had married in 1940; her father, Sanford, had been thirty years old, her mother, Pauline, only fourteen. The town’s economy revolved around a sawmill; people on both sides of her family worked there. Hazel grew up in a small house, with a privy in the back and two sycamores her father had planted in the front. Their street ran parallel to the train tracks and Highway 365, which they took periodically to Pine Bluff.
In January 1944, five days short of Hazel’s second birthday, Sanford Bryan had gone off to World War II, leaving Hazel and her younger sister, then only a few months old, behind with their mother, who had taken a job making bombs in the Pine Bluff Arsenal. Fighting in France that November, he had taken shrapnel in his hip, shoulder, and stomach, and after a prolonged hospitalization overseas and stateside, had come back to Arkansas with a gimpy, shriveled-up left leg, one that always required him to attach a metal brace to his shoe. Hazel never knew him any other way; one of her earliest memories was of walking alongside her limping father shortly after his return, and of his stopping to take off his Bronze Star and Purple Heart and pin them on her chest.
Sanford Bryan had been physically active before going overseas—as a young man, he had run away with Ringling Brothers—and his injury left him frustrated and embittered, rough and profane. One night, after mixing alcohol and pills, he’d stumbled into the open sewer in front of the local beer joint and had to be rescued. (As Hazel later saw it, it was a botched suicide.) So embarrassed was he by his disability, and by the unsightly equipment it required, that as much as he’d always liked to swim, only once did Hazel actually see him go in the water. He couldn’t really work, so Hazel’s mother did. He favored more sedentary pursuits, like playing the fiddle and harmonica and working wood, which he’d do while waiting to shoot squirrels for his family’s table. To Hazel, he was more nurturing, more mothering than her mother, forever loading up her and her baby sister and cousin on the back of his truck and taking them swimming or dancing or roller skating. Hazel was his favorite; whenever her mother or sister wanted something from him, they would always go through her.
Sometimes he’d bring Hazel to his favorite bar, stand her up on the counter, and have her sing, with his buddies chipping in afterward to buy her a Coke. Maybe this was when she first realized how much she loved to perform. She had shown some promise in school—her first-grade teacher once let her spend the night at her home because she was the best reader in the class—but Hazel never cared much about her studies. What she loved was being on a stage, real or make-believe. Of course, there was little place for such things in the fundamentalist Christian faith to which the Bryans had been converted by an itinerant college student who had come through Redfield once selling silverware. (From him, and from the purple book he left behind, Hazel first learned how to set a table, something the Bryans had never previously done.)
Hazel in Redfield, June 1944. Her father carried the picture with him throughout Europe during World War II. (Courtesy Hazel Bryan Massery)
Redfield was too tiny to be segregated. Living close at hand were elderly black ladies like “Old Nigger Eller” and “Boot Fanny,” who trod the town’s unpaved streets in giant rubber galoshes. Nonetheless, there were racial lines: when Hazel’s grandmother invited one of the black women onto her porch, her Uncle Charlie had reproached her. (One of the old ladies had a dog that followed her everywhere, a fact that amazed him. Imagine that! A dog could love niggers, too!) Sometimes Hazel played with black children; once, they pretended to be in church—a black church, of course: they were much more fun—with an upended washboard serving as their pulpit. After one such experience, her daddy had jokingly told her to check her hands: maybe some of their blackness had rubbed off on her. All this stopped when the black children got a bit older; because there was no place for them to go to school locally, they were around only in the summer.
Lore had it that there was some black blood in Hazel’s family—that after his wife died, her paternal great-grandfather, who’d had a plantation in Natchez, had taken up with one of his slaves and may have had a child by her. So livid was Hazel’s grandfather over this turn of events, the story went, that he renounced his family, and family fortune, signing away his rights one night by the headlights of a big city lawyer’s Model T Ford. And an aunt on her mother’s side had suspiciously kinky hair and big lips.
When Hazel was ten they had moved to the city so that Pauline Bryan could be closer to the Westinghouse plant where she worked. The family bought a small house in the industrialized southeast part of town known as Biddle Shop. The house was the same size, and shape, and vintage as the Eckfords’. (But for the Bryans it was more of a step up, with such unaccustomed luxuries as indoor plumbing, hot water, and a washing machine.) Politically, too, the two families were congruent: both were Democrats; both had voted for Faubus. The only thing separating them was race.
After Redfield, Little Rock seemed positively cosmopolitan. Only there, for instance, did Hazel hear her first symphony orchestra. But the segregation was more pronounced. Her new neighborhood was all white. In fact, she lived right off Confederate Boulevard, and passed Little Rock’s Confederate cemetery—640 rebel soldiers are buried there—every day en route to Central. As long as they lasted, Hazel rode on segregated buses, drank out of segregated bubblers, and, though they didn’t eat out much, sat at the segregated lunch counters of the five-and-ten-cent stores, without ever thinking much about it. Segregation and integration were, in fact, terms that Hazel barely recognized. When black performers like Bo Diddley came to Robinson Auditorium, there would be separate performances for blacks and whites. To her, blacks were the folks who picked up the garbage, or worked (and ate) in the backs of restaurants. The only black person ever to enter her home was the woman who came occasionally to iron. Hazel liked her—she found her motherly—and used to play sick sometimes just to stay home and be with her.
Matters of faith were just as segregated. The East Side Church of Christ had no black members. The preacher put it bluntly: “The birds don’t mix; why should the races?” (As Hazel remembered it, he’d had this smug, all-knowing smile on his face as he’d said it.) Sundays, everyone would sing, “Jesus loves the little children of the world / Red and yellow, black and white / We are all precious in his sight,” but the lyrics were about as far as it went. Theirs was an abstemious faith: no drinking, swearing, dancing. “A praying knee and a dancing foot don’t grow on the same leg,” the preacher liked to say. It was a hard regimen for an exuberant young girl to follow.
Hazel didn’t read the papers much and knew nothing about the Brown decision except that the grown-ups had grumbled about it, and about Martin Luther King, too: a “troublemaker,” they called him. As Central’s day of reckoning approached, she was almost entirely oblivious. To the extent she had any, her racial attitudes mirrored her parents’: for instance, her father would not let black clerks wait on him, and when stores began hiring black cashiers, he stood in other lines. (Of course, he’d also complain that blacks were lazy.) The one exception for Hazel was music. She actually preferred Johnny Mathis (and Little Richard and Chuck Berry and Fats Domino) to Elvis, though she didn’t exactly broadcast it.
Hazel had entered Central her sophomore year, when she was fourteen. Though it was all white, it was also stratified: poor whites like Hazel from Little Rock’s East and West Sides next to children from the more affluent Heights, from which the student leaders and academic stars generally came. Her extracurricular activities weren’t the sort that made yearbooks. To be more precise, what mattered most were boys, and she was the envy of her girlfriends. All the things teenagers do—dating, dancing, dressing up—she did well. Boys forever buzzed around her; during the seven nights of the Arkansas State Fair one year, she had nine dates. (A couple of also-rans had to settle for afternoon slots.) One suitor, named Billy, actually fired his gun unhappily into the air before she crawled out the window of her house to get him to leave before he woke up her father. Hazel acted, and dressed, older than she was. She experimented with makeup, and when she wasn’t starching crinoline slips for the full-circle skirts that were all the rage, she wore snug sweaters like Marilyn Monroe. Her girlfriends, like Sammie Dean Parker, thought her desperate to get married, which was really just another way of getting out of the house.
Hazel met her first real boyfriend, who worked in a parking lot downtown, in the fall of her sophomore year. Billy owned a Ford convertible, and she loved going on drives with him. At Christmas, he gave her a music box that played “Let Me Call You Sweetheart.” Her parents disapproved of the relationship, and Hazel, feigning illness, played hooky to see him. She failed some courses as a result, and the school summoned her father. Central’s vice principal for girls, Elizabeth Huckaby, remembered him as “a small, wiry, highly nervous man.” “Mr. Bryan was sure that Hazel had not been ill,” she wrote after the meeting. “He hoped, he said, that he would not have to whip her, for he sometimes lost his temper when he did that and whipped her harder than he intended.” (Hazel later insisted such things never happened.) Feeling the heat, poor Billy broke things off. Ever one for histrionics, Hazel promptly swallowed some aspirin and rubbing alcohol and landed in the hospital, having her stomach pumped. It had been a bit of a performance—she could get down only a little of the stuff, certainly not enough to be life-threatening—but the story made the papers, and Mrs. Huckaby sent the school nurse to check up on her. Hazel bounced back quickly. There was Gary, with the motorcycle. And James, who went on to become a doctor. But the most serious was Mickey, a lonesome young airman whom she met shopping at Walgreen’s in the spring of 1957, when he was stationed at the nearby military base. Before long he’d given her his class ring and then they were engaged, or at least he’d bought her a diamond, purchased on layaway before he’d shipped out to England. They agreed that she could date other boys in the meantime; for the hapless airman, that was not a wise move.
Hazel’s other diversion was Steve’s Show, the daily dance party program on a local television station. Every afternoon after school, Hazel hopped on the bus and headed for the studio. It wasn’t something a good Fundamentalist Christian girl should do, but Hazel loved dancing to rock-and-roll records, and having folks watch her on their brand-new television sets. A forerunner of American Bandstand (which made its debut six months later), the program brought together students from all classes of Little Rock; on the dance floor, everyone was equal, as long as they were white.1 Often joining her was Sammie Dean Parker, whom Hazel had met shortly after her thwarted suicide attempt. Sammie Dean thought of herself as a caregiver, and Hazel was someone who clearly needed care (and, could, incidentally, teach her a thing or two about boys). When they weren’t dancing together, the two shopped for clothes at Blass or one of the other fancy Jewish department stores downtown. Sometimes they bought themselves matching outfits. In the summer of 1957, as school administrators, police officials, lawyers, and parents braced themselves for desegregation, Hazel and Sammie Dean daydreamed around jukeboxes at Lake Nixon, Windy Beach, or Willow Springs.
In the year and a day she’d been going to Central, Hazel had generally taken the bus. But anticipating trouble, her father had driven her on the morning of September 4, 1957. Unlike Mary Ann and Sammie Dean, whom she met up with once she arrived, she carried no schoolbooks—only her purse and, improbably, a newspaper, rolled up in her right hand. Hazel’s mother was at the school as well: alarmed by the reports over the radio, Westinghouse had let parents with children at Central go down to the school to take them home, if necessary. But Mrs. Bryan hadn’t seen Hazel around the grounds and assumed her daughter had gone inside with the others. Hazel, who never knew her mother was around, would have, too—she hadn’t planned on protesting—but she was having too much fun: all those people, and reporters, and young men in uniforms! Rebuffed by the soldiers, Elizabeth was now making her way toward the bus stop, and Hazel, walking directly behind her, was hamming it up. To the extent she was even thinking about Elizabeth (barely), Elizabeth was less a person than the disembodied stand-in for something she’d been told was foreign and repugnant: the federal government, shoving something down Little Rock’s throat. So she started yelling awful things, awful enough for people to notice, even before it was frozen on film. As for Hazel herself, as soon as her words had dissolved in the torpid September air, she had forgotten all about them.