Though Elizabeth allowed few people into her life, she made an exception for students. Young people, she believed, were still untainted by racial prejudice, and less likely to exploit her. Now, thanks to a persistent high school history teacher from northern California named Jeff Steinberg, her sessions with them became a regular occurrence. For a program he called Sojourn to the Past, Steinberg, who had long taught about the Little Rock schools crisis, hoped to bring some boys and girls to Central in 1998. When he telephoned Elizabeth to ask whether he could, she was noncommittal. But when 150 of his students wrote her letters, she almost had to relent. Besides, she thought the session might provide her a kind of therapy, helping her to overcome her posttraumatic stress disorder. She consented to see them the following February, but with one stipulation: that Hazel, too, take part. Steinberg happily agreed.
Coming to learn of Elizabeth’s sensitivities, Steinberg devised a code of conduct for his students: no hugging or crowding around her, no loud noises, no picture taking. (That last item was Elizabeth’s idea: after all, she thought herself ugly.) Elizabeth developed her own rituals. She would never eat or drink beforehand. She would always keep a lined wastebasket and paper towels nearby, just in case she got sick. She wouldn’t wear her glasses, so she couldn’t make out any disapproving faces. Reading off cue cards, her hands visibly shaking, she would describe Jim Crow Little Rock, her family, her decision to attend Central, her experiences there. She’d speak of the two students who befriended her, and encourage small acts of kindness. She would speak fast, the better to exit quickly.
Hazel, too, enjoyed children (and grandchildren, and, as of 1997, great-grandchildren) but talking about her past also presented a challenge. She had to overcome other people’s skepticism (or hostility) and maintain her composure. From one of her self-help books she’d picked up some “affirmations” that she’d review beforehand: “Perfect wisdom is in my heart.” “I am dynamically self-expressive.” “Communication is a contact sport.” “Goal of communication is to become: 1) RELAXED 2) AUTHENTIC 3) CONFIDENT 4) PERSUASIVE.” “Be your natural self.” “Make emotional contact: be honest-natural-likeable-believable-credibility-trustsmile-winning manner connects to people.” She’d write out cues for herself: “Why did I do it?” “What made me change?” While Elizabeth was historical, Hazel focused more on the future. She’d quote Lincoln and Martin Luther King. She’d stress the importance of listening. Often, she would end with a parable: a coal mouse sits on a branch, counting snowflakes as they fall on it. Soon there are 3,471,952 of them. Each weighs nothing, but when just one more lands, the branch breaks. Perhaps, the coal mouse tells a white dove, the world works this way as well: with just one more voice, peace can come.
In June 1998 Elizabeth and Hazel went to Mobile, Alabama, where, as part of Little Rock’s submission to the All-America City competition, they read a script on racial reconciliation. In effect, the city was putting them on display. An even more exciting project was the book they now planned to do. The force behind it was Linda Monk, the lawyer from Mississippi who had identified with Hazel, then written about her. No one seemed better equipped to braid their stories together: Monk could empathize with Elizabeth, too, for she had relatives who struggled with depression. And she had long been interested in racial rapprochement. The topic was timely: Bill Clinton had just created a presidential commission on race and called for a national conversation on racial reconciliation. Hazel initially hesitated—her motives would surely be doubted—but she soon signed on. Together, she and Monk worked on, and wore down, Elizabeth. Monk proceeded gingerly with her, hoping to make her feel safe and strong enough to tell her story without inhibition.
Putting it all together, Monk warned, would not be easy. The two women would have to go to what she called “the depths of the depths together,” starting that candid conversation about race that most Americans avoided. Hazel was ready to go. Elizabeth said that as long as she took her medication she could proceed, but she had a couple of caveats. First, nothing could preclude the children’s book she hoped one day to write. And second, the book could not be a tearjerker. “I don’t want to be crying in it like Tammy Faye Bakker,” she declared, referring to the disgraced televangelist. “Her crying was tiresome.” (“Well, you don’t have the mascara,” Hazel noted.) As for the proceeds, Elizabeth had it all worked out: thirty-three percent each for Hazel and Monk, and thirty-four percent for her. (Given all she’d been through, she thought she deserved a bit more.) Generally, she was upbeat. “For me, things are a whole lot better,” she said. She’d become more tolerant. She wanted to live.
Over that Fourth of July, Monk came to Little Rock. Like everyone else, she needed to convince herself that Hazel was sincere (that part proved easy) and that Elizabeth believed in racial healing (which was harder). But Elizabeth, she could tell, was clearly emerging from the darkness. At Hot Springs the three women took mineral baths and massages together, a tradition for white Arkansans maybe but experiences Elizabeth had never had. (She seemed afraid of the water, climbing into the tub very timidly; Hazel and Monk helped her. Then each massaged one of her feet.) Monk returned over Halloween, when they cooked hot dogs and toasted marshmallows together around a bonfire outside Hazel’s house. Watching the flames illuminate these two famous faces, then reach skyward, Monk felt something almost supernatural in the air.
She fashioned a collaboration agreement and book proposal. As she saw it, Hazel’s apology to Elizabeth was only the start of their story. “With fear and trembling,” she wrote, the two had now entered the thicket of race, and were committed “to developing an authentic relationship of reconciliation, not papering over differences or ignoring conflict.” Once they had embodied racial strife; now they could inspire racial harmony. The book, she continued, would appeal not just to activists but to optimists. The pair would be available for school appearances, conventions, television, corporate retreats, training sessions; companies seeking diversity could order the book in bulk. Their tale was “a natural” for Oprah Winfrey, addressing “the themes of triumph over adversity and redemption out of suffering that Oprah finds so compelling.” All they had to do now was write their story. And, before that, to live it.
In November 1998, as he signed legislation making Central High School a National Historic Site, Bill Clinton signed a second document, awarding the Congressional Gold Medal to the Nine. (A formal presentation would be held the next year.) Along with the others, Elizabeth came to the White House for the signing ceremony; afterward, she was invited to fly back to Arkansas with the president on Air Force One. She was far too flustered to say much to him in the few minutes they had together, and she felt bad about it: the Monica Lewinsky scandal was then engulfing him, and, she thought, he could have used a boost. Things had progressed with Hazel to the point that when Elizabeth had happy news, she wanted to share it with her as much as with anyone else, and Hazel was among those she called from the plane. Hazel saved the message, and played it for her grandchildren.
For Hazel, the benefits of the relationship were immediate: an enormous weight had been lifted from her shoulders; the world could begin to see what she had become rather than who she’d been. She had made herself a new friend, and found herself someone else to help. For Elizabeth, it was just one component of something larger, something she came to call (and she was hardly given to overstatement) her “renaissance.” In the spring of 1999 she took an even more dramatic leap.