Fuller High School was only seven or eight miles from Central, but they were about as different as two schools could be. It was utterly unknown, of no particular distinction, and very small—only about thirty students per class. All of them, of course, were white, and desegregation was far from their minds. For a time Hazel stayed in touch with Sammie Dean, who kept her apprised of events at Central. But those calls gradually became less frequent. Hazel came not to care; her life revolved around her new boyfriend, Antoine (pronounced ANtone) Massery. He hadn’t a clue who Hazel was, or had been; his family didn’t own a television set, and besides, mornings and evenings there were the pigs to feed.
Antoine graduated from Fuller in the spring of 1958, as Hazel completed her junior year. Her angelic image from that year’s yearbook, as radically different from the famous photograph of her taken nine months earlier as two pictures could ever be, would be as close to a graduation picture as she would have, for her high school career would soon end. By that fall, the two were engaged. It wasn’t a formal, bended knee kind of thing; she just wore his senior ring around her neck. This engagement stuck, even though there was unhappiness on both sides. Hazel’s church frowned on marriages to Catholics; the Masserys, too, had religious misgivings, and for a time, Antoine’s father walked out of the house whenever Hazel walked in. There were practical considerations, too: Hazel wasn’t big-boned, and therefore was ill-suited for farm work. One night in November 1958 they married, in Hazel’s church. There was no wedding party or photographer; there were people in the pews only because the preacher had asked the congregation, there for the normal Wednesday night service, to stay on. Only one-fourth of their parents—Hazel’s mother, who was in church anyway—was there. Hazel was sixteen.
Hazel and Antoine, spring 1958 (Courtesy Hazel Bryan Massery)
Hazel Bryan, Fuller High School (Courtesy Hazel Bryan Massery)
School rules, designed to discourage such early unions, required brides to stay away for the next six weeks; Hazel never bothered going back. Sammie Dean’s father got Antoine a job with the Rock Island Railroad. It didn’t pay much; during that first winter, Antoine drained the water from his car nightly because he couldn’t afford antifreeze. Sammie Dean married the following year—the two girls were always vying with one another—and for a short while the couples rented adjoining apartments in a neighborhood not far from Central. Hazel and Antoine then moved into a trailer on some land his family owned off a gravel road in West Pulaski County, about fifteen miles from downtown. The couple had two sons, the first in November 1959, the second in July 1962. Money was still tight. Unable to afford beds and mattresses, Antoine built some frames from plywood, then bought foam.
Despite her cousin’s admonition that she should hold on to something so historic, Hazel had long ago tired of the mint green dress from the photograph and gotten rid of it, probably bequeathing it to another relative. She had saved all those harsh letters from 1957 (it was the packrat in her more than any sense of history or desire for reflection), and they had landed in her mother-in-law’s barn. But cleaning up one day, she had burned them all, along with all the old love letters from various suitors (Antoine wasn’t happy about them) and other teenage souvenirs. If it was meant as an exorcism, it failed. The Kennedy era had begun, and the civil rights movement had intensified. Night after night there were stories on television, from places like Oxford, Mississippi, and Birmingham, Alabama, giving events a vividness and immediacy they’d never had in print, especially if one didn’t take the papers. Hazel watched it all, on the portable Philco with rabbit ears her father had bought her. Working in Memphis, Antoine was home only two nights a week; alone with her children, surrounded by forty acres of woods, without a car or, for a time, a telephone (the lady across the street had one), Hazel had plenty of time to ponder the racial turmoil, and her small but distinctive contribution to it. Her situation fostered in her a growing independence and sense of introspection; from the high school conformist she had been, she was becoming almost a contrarian.
Several years passed before she thought of Elizabeth at all. She was too busy being married and tending to her sons. But something—maybe a report about Martin Luther King, maybe seeing black protestors fire-hosed: she could never remember—touched her. She hadn’t marked the time, but some night in 1962 or 1963, when she was around twenty years old, Hazel found herself lying awake, thinking about Elizabeth, and about her own legacy. She wanted to be for her sons the role model on racial tolerance she’d never had herself. To put it more brutally, she didn’t want either of them to become the bigot she had been. Part of that, she believed, required her to get her own house in order. Spontaneous by nature—that was, after all, how she’d gotten into this fix in the first place—she was suddenly seized with an idea, one she didn’t discuss with Antoine or her pastor or anyone else: she would track down Elizabeth, then call her and apologize. By now the Masserys had a telephone, so she could do it in the privacy of her own trailer.
She was emotional about it, but not nervous; once she had resolved to do something, she never was. She dialed the first Eckford she found in the Little Rock directory. A man answered. Hazel introduced herself, explained who she was, and asked to speak with Elizabeth. Elizabeth remembered things slightly differently; the call came to her grandfather, with whom Hazel had left a message. Elizabeth wasn’t sure which of the girls in the picture Hazel was; far from studying the photograph, she had always avoided it. She certainly had never focused on the people in it, or bothered to separate the grown-ups from the teenagers or the teenagers from one another; Hazel was just one piece in the mosaic of white hostility that day. Left to herself, Elizabeth probably would not have called Hazel back. She wasn’t especially curious about her, nor sociable generally. But she always had considered her grandfather a fine judge of character, and he urged her to return the call. Then the stories, Elizabeth’s and Hazel’s, converge.
“I’m the girl in the picture that was behind you yelling at you,” Hazel explained when they finally spoke. (“Pitch-er” is how she would have said it.) There was really no other way to introduce herself. Hazel then said she was sorry—that what she had done was terrible, and that she didn’t want her children turning out like that. She was crying. Elizabeth didn’t say much, but she was gracious. She accepted the apology, not just because her grandfather and father wanted her to but because this woman sounded sincere, and so clearly craved forgiveness. Even though she had no children of her own yet, Elizabeth could empathize. Besides, though she still wasn’t sure which of the kids Hazel was, she knew that she wasn’t one of those who had harassed her all year in Central, some of whose names she remembered, none of whom had ever apologized. The entire conversation lasted five minutes, if that; there was really little else to say. There was no talk of meeting: this was still the South.
But in a way, the newly fortified bond, though fragile, persisted. Henceforth, Elizabeth felt protective of Hazel, just as she did of Ann Williams and Ken Reinhardt, the two students who had befriended her in speech class. White people, she knew, still paid a price for extending to blacks even the most rudimentary courtesies. So she protected her anonymity: whenever asked to identify the white girl with the hateful face, she declined. (Before long she had forgotten anyway—first the last name, then the first.) But the picture kept reappearing, especially as the anniversaries got bigger. After fading for a time, it was becoming famous again, this time for keeps.
Hazel and Antoine had a third child, a daughter, in 1966. The television repair and satellite business they’d begun—after taking a class in accounting, Hazel did the bookkeeping, and often climbed roofs to do installations—did well, and they built themselves a home where the trailer had been. Hazel wanted it to look organic, as if it had grown out of the ground, like a mushroom. The Arch Street Church of Christ consumed much of their sparse spare time. Antoine had converted, and had become a deacon. Three times a week there were services; if they didn’t show up, someone called to ask why. On still another day, Hazel taught teenage girls about love and marriage, urging them to move a bit more deliberately than she had. Twice a year there were revivals, which meant church every single night. Theirs was a strict, fundamentalist faith: no dancing, swimming, drinking, gambling. Do any of them and you’d burn forever. For a free spirit like Hazel, it wasn’t easy. Though few people around Little Rock knew much about Doctor Lamaze, she insisted upon having her third child naturally, read books on yoga, wore pants and short skirts. Increasingly, she felt smothered.
