Elizabeth was positively giddy.
We were at a barbecue joint on the outskirts of Little Rock, with Hazel and Antoine. On the table were piles of denuded ribs and chicken bones in spicy brown sauce, along with half-finished glasses of sweetened ice tea. When the check came, Elizabeth insisted on picking it up. When I resisted—I’d invited them, after all—she gigglingly explained why. She had just gotten her first credit card—it was one of the perks of having a job—and she wanted to see whether it worked.
In the spring of 1999 I traveled to Little Rock on another project. While there I made a pilgrimage to Central High School, a shrine I’d long known about but never seen, then to the visitor center. There, for sale in the gift shop, I first saw the “reconciliation” poster. I was amazed. Could these iconic antagonists, people whose faces I well knew, really have made up? How had it happened? Why hadn’t I read about it? This was a story. I learned of Lynn Whittaker, the literary agent who had been handling Monk’s book project, and quickly contacted her. She arranged to get us all together; I arranged for the barbecue.
Afterward we went to Hazel’s house and talked some more. It was, I thought, a friendly chat. Elizabeth did not let on that she and Hazel were having problems; the two of them were “very close,” she said. They talked a lot, she went on, maybe once a week. Other blacks had criticized her for their friendship, but she had brushed them aside; “I tell them the questions they’re asking are racist, that I choose my own friends, and that I believe she’s sincere,” she explained. Hazel was a bit more forthright about where things stood between them, but still oblique. “I think she still at times … we have a little … well, the honeymoon is over and now we’re getting to take out the garbage,” she said. Our conversation continued at Doe’s Eat Place, a Clinton hangout during his presidential campaigns. There, due to what I think was a misunderstanding, any chance that we would all work together—on an article, that is; I hadn’t contemplated writing the sort of book Linda Monk had envisioned—evaporated. In their own ways, both Elizabeth and Hazel had been naïve; it turns out I was, too.1
Most of Hazel’s critics in white Little Rock, particularly whites who had attended Central, kept mum. Defending themselves, they had concluded, was a sucker’s game; why put themselves out there, only to be dismissed as bigots? But sometimes their hostility broke through. That July, Hazel was treated to a letter in the Democrat-Gazette.
I read with interest another news item about Hazel Massery, the repentant harasser turned friend of Elizabeth Eckford, both students at Little Rock Central High School in 1957.
When President Clinton and the national media used this tragedy for their own gain, I recall they also used Massery, who was more than anxious to publicly confess and repent of her past despicable sins.
It is always good for one to repent of bad behavior, even if it is for notoriety and recognition.
This lady was a member of a small minority of the student body who either did not listen to their parents or were never taught that everybody they met deserved politeness and courtesy.
Like many others, I became Eckford’s friend in 1957 in Miss McGalen’s [sic] speech class at LRCHS, not because she was black, or for any publicity, but just because I liked her.
The majority of us were fortunate enough to have learned that if you were in school with someone you did not want to befriend, you left them alone; you did not torment them.
I applaud and compliment the vast majority of my classmates who 40 years later do not have to apologize to our nine black classmates because we were good citizens then as now.
I would like to tell the media, the president, and the country that the strength and stability of this nation are not headline-grabbers like the president and Massery.
In a couple of weeks, if you care to peek in on our 40th class reunion, you will find several people whose names you will recognize, not because they have ever made headlines apologizing for their sins, but because they have been good citizens who have contributed in a positive way to our culture.
R. W. Ross 2
Van Buren
Ross hadn’t known Hazel in 1957, nor would he have, coming as he did from the other side of the tracks. But he was saying, in effect, that Hazel hadn’t changed; whatever she did, she did strictly to get attention.
Both Hazel and Elizabeth had been invited to the reunion Ross mentioned, and planned for a time to go together. “That should be interesting,” Hazel wrote in her journal. Characteristically, Elizabeth eventually opted out; equally characteristically, Hazel did not. That was unwise. Many of the others on hand believed Hazel owed apologies not just to the Eckford One and the Little Rock Nine, but to the Class of 1959 Five Hundred, the Central High School Twenty-two Hundred, the Little Rock Hundred Thousand, and the Arkansas Two Million: she had sullied them all. Some were annoyed or indignant that she had shown up, and derisive, too. “She’s the one who was in the picture!” a woman at Hazel’s table (who’d also admitted to being one of those who’d jumped out the window when the black students entered Central) explained with a laugh to a table mate. A man Hazel had known both from Central and from church looked poised to say something unpleasant, only to muzzle himself.
All this galled Hazel. Everyone was acting as if only she had misbehaved. She had been made a scapegoat, she believed, and for her it was more than a metaphor: she remembered the story from Leviticus about the goat that was made to bear the sins of an entire people. Only as she left that night did someone say he admired her for what she’d just done. Hazel spent many sleepless nights wondering why she had agreed to talk publicly about any of this.3