Lots of students, black and white, identified with Elizabeth. Anyone who’d ever felt abused, or alienated, or lonely, or just different from everyone else—and who in high school hasn’t?—would have. But Linda Monk, a young Harvard Law School graduate from Mississippi who had written on constitutional history and civil rights, was different. She also empathized with Hazel.
As a seventh-grader in 1970, living in the part of the state where Jefferson Davis had once raised cotton, Monk had tried to keep a black classmate out of a school play about Rip Van Winkle. How, she had asked, could blacks portray upstate New Yorkers of Dutch descent? She was haunted afterward by what she’d done, and many years later had called the black girl to apologize. So when she learned of Hazel—she had used the photograph in a book about the Bill of Rights—she grew curious about her. “I often wonder about Hazel Bryan,” she had written in the Baltimore Sun in 1994, in a piece marking the fortieth anniversary of the Brown decision. “What became of her? Did her attitudes ever change, or will she take her bigotry to her grave? I ask these questions because there but for the grace of God go I.”
Now, three years later, as a different anniversary loomed, Monk revisited those questions. After doing a bit of homework, she called various Masserys in the Little Rock directory and, upon reaching Hazel, said what Hazel so longed to hear: that she wanted to tell her story. Any misgivings Hazel harbored evaporated once Monk described her own brush with racism: here, Hazel concluded, was someone who wouldn’t belittle or stereotype her. “There’s more to me than one moment,” Hazel told her. It was a good line; Monk asked whether she could quote her. “Please do!” Hazel exclaimed. They spoke for almost an hour.
On September 4, 1997—forty years to the day after Hazel had stalked Elizabeth—Monk’s article about Hazel appeared in the Chicago Tribune. It described Hazel’s efforts at redemption, including her phone call to Elizabeth. It marked the first time Hazel’s story had been told, at least in a place where it would be widely read. Now that they’d been spoon-fed the information, all those journalists who had never managed to find Hazel, especially those in her own backyard, would surely clamor for her. But naïve about such things, Hazel and Antoine left for ten days in the Florida Keys just before it was published. Sure enough, when they returned, their answering machine was full. She spoke first to Nightline. After an inauspicious start—a black technician lit into her for, well, being that girl—Hazel got to tell her story. “We were just in the crowd and it was more like, ‘Hey, this is fun, you know, it’s exciting,’” she said. “I hope you get the part in there that I’m truly sorry and that I apologize for my behavior,” she added as the interview ended. “It was uncivilized, and I have grown.” That snippet was included, but the program omitted what to her was something equally important: that she’d apologized to Elizabeth thirty-five years earlier. Maybe that was why some viewers found her sincerity suspect. “Positive behavior evidently had no value to Niteline [sic],” she wrote afterward in the journal she occasionally kept.
Two days later, she spoke with Michael Leahy of the Democrat-Gazette. 1 Treading carefully, fearful that she might yet change her mind, Leahy did not bring a photographer. But he brought the photograph, and handed it to Hazel. She gripped it hard, Leahy wrote. But the real truth, he went on, was that the photo had a grip on her: it would not let her go. As they spoke, she scratched unconsciously at it, as if to rub it out. Leahy found himself staring at Hazel—staring at that mouth. It was surreal to see it now as a living, protean thing, and to hear the sounds of reasonability and conciliation coming out of it. It was even harder to connect the clenched jaw of the young girl in the too-tight dress and the pleasant smile of the middle-aged woman in denim sitting across from him.
Privately, Leahy thought Hazel a bit self-pitying. “I’d love to sit down with Elizabeth sometime,” she told him. “That’d be wonderful, that’d be miraculous. But the press doesn’t want that story. They want to keep me where I am in that picture. I’ve just about given up hope on that.” And he thought her memory a bit selective. How could someone recall exactly what she wore one day forty years ago, but forget mouthing off to the cameras twenty-four hours later? Still, Hazel seemed to be doing her best, and she didn’t duck. He thanked her for her candor. Soon, people all over Little Rock would know Hazel’s story. Before that, she believed, there was one conversation she needed to have: with Victoria Brown, the unwed black mother from her parenting class. Hazel had never told her of her peculiar claim to fame, and she wanted the younger woman to hear it first from her, rather than stumble upon it in the paper or on television. Brown was dumbfounded—“Hazel, are you sure you don’t have a twin somewhere?” she asked—and chalked it up to immaturity: everyone does dumb things when they’re young.
Leahy also interviewed Elizabeth. He marveled at her intelligence, too, and wondered what she might have been—a college professor, perhaps—had life treated her more fairly. As Carlotta and Melba held her hands, Elizabeth also spoke to Newsweek. On September 19 she was back in Central’s massive auditorium, for another presentation by Will Counts. “Don’t let me go without saying how delighted I am that this woman is in this auditorium,” Counts told the crowd. “To me she is the real symbol of the civil rights movement.” The audience applauded. In the most famous of Counts’s pictures, noted the Democrat-Gazette, “a woman sneers at Eckford behind her back.” It didn’t identify that “woman.” Nor did Elizabeth, but she did tell the gathering that the woman had apologized.
The day before, while planting tulips, Hazel had mused to Antoine about how nice it would be to have a second picture of her and Elizabeth, one that would supplement—and maybe even supplant—the first. By putting ideas out into the universe, Hazel believed, one could sometimes bring things to pass; in fact, nothing cosmic was required. Hazel was eager. Elizabeth was curious. When Elizabeth cut the black and gold ribbon at the dedication of the new visitor center on September 20 (she folded it up and put it in her purse as a keepsake), Counts looked on. Afterward, Jacoway gave him Hazel’s number. Later that day, he spoke to both women. They agreed to meet the following Wednesday. But why wait that long? Perhaps someone else would have the same idea! So on Sunday he called them back. Now they’d get together the following morning.
Counts took care to rent a van with Arkansas plates (so it wouldn’t look at all conspicuous) and dark windows. He and his wife picked up Hazel at the new visitor center, then headed for Elizabeth’s. The timing, Hazel felt, was propitious: it was her father’s eighty-seventh birthday. The van entered Elizabeth’s neighborhood, then turned left onto West 18th Street. The three of them got out and walked up the short brick pathway, past the last of that summer’s irises and tea roses, to Elizabeth’s front door. They were an odd-looking delegation, three middle-aged white emissaries from another world. They rang the bell, to the right of the iron bars. Forty years and eighteen days after their first encounter, Elizabeth and Hazel were about to have another.