Hazel’s family kept her very busy. As she liked to say, there was always someone being hatched, matched, or dispatched. Her children grew, married young (though not quite as young as she), and in some instances, remarried young, too; by procreation and acquisition, she amassed a slew of grandchildren.
Her family filled the void left by the church from which she had strayed, gradually at first and then decisively. Though she still read the Bible (and could rattle off its books in order), she came to wonder whether it was all made up. When prayers began with “Our Father,” she wanted to pipe in “Our Mother.” She questioned her church’s racial attitudes: nothing she’d seen in Scripture talked about separating people by color. She also questioned its hypocrisy, especially after one prominent churchman ran his finger up the back of her leg while purring about how pretty she was. Later on Hazel had trouble remembering the names of her fellow parishioners—her memory was sometimes selective, especially for unpleasant things—but they certainly remembered her: emotional, exotic, erratic, erotic Hazel. They remembered potluck dinners at her house, where she had painted a rainbow (actually, some abstract colored swirls) on the wall, kept a Buddha on the floor, and had them sit on pillows rather than in chairs.
Periodically Hazel stopped attending church, only to come back, seek forgiveness, then quit again. Her growing skepticism threatened her marriage, not just because Antoine continued to go there with the children, but because such rebellion—anything that might embarrass her husband—was something no upstanding southern wife was supposed to do. As she grew disenchanted with the church, the church grew disenchanted with her. At some point in the late 1970s she was “disfellowshipped,” excommunicated. She felt liberated, but very much alone. Still craving some sort of spirituality, she began exploring New Age alternatives: Shirley MacLaine, Earl Nightingale, Tony Robbins, Wayne Dyer. Wanting to dance, and to slake her interest in foreign cultures, she began studying belly dancing, traveling to Memphis, Austin, and Oklahoma City for workshops. To rehearse, she covered up those colored patches on her living room wall with mirrors.
To pay for all the exotic costumes, all those hand-sewn beads, she began doing singing telegrams. Several times a week, she would don top hat, vest, black bow tie, black satin shorts, fishnet hose, and stiletto heels, and, for fifteen to twenty dollars a pop plus tips, she would perform. On Valentine’s Day there might be eight or nine stops. Other times, there were luaus, in skimpy tropical getups. Most recipients loved it, though some, like the police chief of Benton, were not charmed. The more straitlaced people around her were appalled, and Antoine probably wasn’t thrilled, either, though, characteristically—he’d learned long ago that Hazel had to do her thing—he never said much about it. For adult birthdays, she would always begin with “You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby.” For children, she became Posy the Clown, making balloon animals and performing magic tricks.
Hazel as a belly dancer, sometime around 1987 (Courtesy Hazel Bryan Massery)
She stopped voting automatically for whomever Antoine supported, usually Republicans. She became increasingly political, branching out into peace activism and social work. One program focused on self-esteem for teenagers. She urged that the subject be taught in the state’s public schools, and, to that end, joined a delegation which, in 1990, met with Governor Bill Clinton. She took black teenagers who rarely had left Little Rock on field trips, climbing Pinnacle Mountain (some refused, for fear of falling off) and picking strawberries. And, putting her course work in child psychology to use, she counseled young unwed mothers, many of them black, on parenting skills. One was a twenty-six-year-old named Victoria Brown, who was about to have her sixth child. Hazel helped Brown, whose children were temporarily in foster care; she was, Brown thought, one of the few whites who didn’t assume she was bad because of her situation. Long after the class ended and Brown’s children had been returned to her, they kept in touch. On Brown’s birthdays, Hazel brought her presents; when one of Brown’s children died, Hazel and Antoine brought food to her home.
Hazel with participants in Teen Outreach Program atop Pinnacle Mountain, Arkansas, June 1991 (Courtesy Hazel Bryan Massery)
All this do-gooding with blacks, Antoine joked, was really her way of atoning for the picture. And maybe he was right. Her whole outlook toward black people had changed. At the Barnes and Noble in Little Rock, she perused the sections on black history. She bought Juan Williams’s companion book to Eyes on the Prize and Gordon Allport’s The Nature of Prejudice. She read David Shipler’s study of black-white relations in America, A Country of Strangers, a book Elizabeth herself had, without ever knowing it, helped inspire.1 And, after the syndicated columnist George F. Will praised it, she bought a book by the black author and commentator Shelby Steele. She also picked up the souvenir book of front pages from the Democrat and Gazette during the schools crisis, including her appearance in both papers. Sometimes, this created friction with her family. When Hazel’s mother called some relatives who had been romantically involved with blacks “nigger lovers,” Hazel objected. “Well, Mother, are we not supposed to love ‘niggers’?” she asked. “Well,” the older woman replied, “you’re not supposed to marry them.” “Why not?” Hazel replied. Her mother grew flustered. “Well, b-b-because we’re better than them.” “Why are we better than them?” The older woman grew more flustered. “Because our skin is white,” she finally said. Hazel didn’t press the point; she’d picked up what she’d set out to learn. Hazel also had it out with Antoine, who, she felt, had retained vestiges of racial prejudice himself.
Hazel maintained few ties with her past. In Dallas for an ice skating competition in the mid-1980s, she had run into Sammie Dean Parker, who had invited her and Antoine to the home she shared there with her second husband.2 They’d had fun together, talking in the easy way that only old friends can, but it did not rekindle the relationship. The two had taken very separate journeys. Sammie Dean admired Hazel’s adventurousness, but bellydancing? And while Hazel had lost her faith, Sammie Dean had discovered hers, dedicating her life to Jesus Christ. Hazel, in fact, had few real friends. Her life was her family, and even there, she had no soulmates or confidantes. Those intellectual adventures and spiritual journeys she took, she took alone. Isolated physically, provincial by background but worldly by temperament and aspiration, Hazel didn’t really fit anywhere.
She had setbacks. In 1990 she had been carjacked, forced at what she thought was knifepoint to drive her assailant until she purposely crashed and fled. She began locking doors, staying home nights, checking bathroom stalls before entering. Like Elizabeth, she came to hate elevators, especially when someone stood behind her. She felt less inclined to help people. Several times she testified at her attacker’s parole hearings, trying to keep him behind bars. But generally, life was good. With some money inherited from Antoine’s family, in 1987 the couple invested twenty thousand dollars in an Arkansas company—Wal-Mart—and as its stock split and split again, they had begun to provide for their eventual retirement.
Hazel still wanted to make the world a better place. When Murder, She Wrote became popular, she decided to try and sell a program called “Love, She Wrote,” collecting clippings from Parade and Reader’s Digest on great acts of human kindness. (She thought of contacting Jane Fonda or Ted Turner with the idea and, after taking a five-week screenwriting course, maybe putting something together herself.) Her civic involvement deepened. Surely no one concerned with the Little Rock schools crisis noticed in March 1990 when a local newspaper reporter wrote about the chairwoman of the subcommittee on recycling of the Solid Waste Study Citizens Advisory Committee, one Hazel Massery, chastising a local official for neglect. But it marked the first time that Hazel, now forty-eight years old, had appeared in print for thirty-three years, and the first time ever for something besides attempting suicide or badgering a black schoolgirl or decrying desegregation. A year later, the paper published its first picture of her since 1957, taken at a luncheon at the governor’s mansion honoring volunteers for the Centers for Youth and Families.
Occasionally, Hazel would tell people she was that girl, always appending how ashamed she was of what she’d done. They’d invariably gasp: so archetypal had that face become that it was hard to believe it belonged to anyone, let alone to her, let alone evolved. Like Elizabeth, Hazel did not discuss the photograph with her children, nor was there any call to. It wasn’t on television much when they were young, and once it was, her children weren’t particularly interested. “That’s my mama!” Hazel’s daughter, sixteen years old at the time, had exclaimed in school when it popped up during the twenty-fifth anniversary celebrations, but her daughter hadn’t been upset or embarrassed: the woman she knew had always taught her tolerance.
As for her apology, no one knew about it, nor, it seemed, would they. Hazel wasn’t about to broadcast it. And while it would have been nice if someone had reported it, that never seemed to happen. The press seemed content simply to run the picture over and over, without wondering who that angry white girl was or what had ever become of her. Will Counts, who had quit newspaper work in 1963 to teach photojournalism at Indiana University, never did try tracking Hazel down. “The rest of the world didn’t get the apology, I’m afraid,” Hazel told Tom Wagy, a professor at Texas A&M University who interviewed her for a book in 1991. Elizabeth continued to say nothing about it. Once again, Hazel thought of contacting her; she knew that an Eckford—Elizabeth’s stepmother—taught at a nearby school, and called her. When Mrs. Eckford wasn’t reachable (she was on medical leave) Hazel shelved the idea.
Sometime around 1990 Hazel became involved in Peace Links, a group of women agitating against nuclear war. She read extensively on the subject, hiding the books under the bed so Antoine wouldn’t think she’d become a Communist or something. Through a local political activist named Jean Gordon, she met Sara Alderman Murphy, who was writing a book on the campaign to reopen the schools Faubus had closed in 1958. When Murphy interviewed her in June 1992, Hazel described her path from closed-mindedness to public service and racial healing. “You’re doing some pretty neat things,” Murphy told her. She also recounted her apology.
Murphy in turn mentioned Hazel to the local Associated Press reporter, Peggy Harris. The girl in the picture? Really? It was a terrific story, and Harris quickly arranged to interview Hazel. Hazel struck her as colorful, energetic, sincere, and contrite, racially enlightened in spite of her background. (On the subject of civil rights, Hazel told her, “My parents have come maybe this far since the fifties,” holding up two fingers about a quarter of an inch apart.) Harris had an idea: how about reuniting Elizabeth and Hazel and writing about the two of them? But Daisy Bates told her Elizabeth was a recluse (an outcome for which Bates felt herself partly to blame); the reunion never materialized, and Harris didn’t write up the half story she had. One reunion that did come off was for Central’s “Lost Class” of 1959, the class to which both Elizabeth and Hazel had belonged; in 1994 it marked the thirty-five years that had passed since it hadn’t graduated. Hazel attended with Sammie Dean. The two even joined in the group picture, the first time they had been photographed together since … well, that wasn’t the kind of thing to discuss that night, or at any Central reunion.