Elizabeth had grown claustrophobic during the crowded reception and, taking a break, looked out the windows of the Rainbow Room. It was after dark, and in all directions from Rockefeller Center there were spectacular panoramas of glistening Manhattan. She pointed toward a nondescript, generic apartment tower, somewhere around 56th or 57th Streets, just south of Central Park. Was that the Chrysler Building? she asked.
In April 2007, five months short of the fiftieth anniversary of the events in Little Rock, the Nine came to New York to be feted by the African American Experience Fund of the National Parks Service. Elizabeth had heard it all before, and despite the featured attractions (the professional power broker Vernon Jordan was to be the latest to salute them), she became restless during the umpteenth round of speechifying. She was visibly relieved when the evening ended. She was getting up in only a few hours—at 4:30 the following morning—to catch the plane back to Little Rock: she wanted to put in a day’s work at the courthouse. Besides, this was really just a dress rehearsal. The real celebration would take place that September.
Elizabeth’s wasn’t the only case of commemoration fatigue. By this point, truth be told, many whites in Little Rock had had quite enough of the Little Rock Nine. They wouldn’t say it aloud, but they felt the black students had been honored—and the white students trashed—long enough. Whenever the topic came up, they would tune out; when stories appeared on television, they would reach for their remotes. As usual, Ralph Brodie captured it best: “There was the fifth anniversary, the tenth anniversary, the fifteenth anniversary, the twentieth anniversary, the twenty-fifth anniversary, the thirtieth anniversary, the thirty-fifth anniversary, and the fortieth anniversary. Now there’s the fiftieth anniversary. It gets real old,” he said.
This time at least, Brodie wouldn’t have Hazel to worry about: she was sitting this one out. The man who had put her on the poster, Skip Rutherford, feared that her absence would be glaring, and much commented upon. Hazel wouldn’t dare not show up, he predicted; that would only prove that the last time wasn’t for real. In fact, to Hazel, that hardly mattered. She had learned her lesson. Folks would surely ask all over again what she was doing there, why she wanted the attention, what was in it for her. So when the reporters left messages, she didn’t return their calls. When I tried contacting her through an intermediary, she said she was “out of that loop,” and never going back.
Naturally, she could never be entirely absent. The commemoration would include the dedication of a new, enlarged visitor center, replacing the one at the gas station; what Brodie called “the negative picture of Elizabeth” would, for all his complaints, be even bigger. Also, writers—like this one—remained interested in the white girl in the picture. “I don’t really know how to say this but I wish you could get over your obsession with Hazel,” he wrote me. “Too much has already been made over that young woman. Ignoring her may really be all she deserves.” On another occasion he added, “we are all a bit paranoid about that picture and Hazel.”1
Elizabeth would gladly have stopped giving speeches long ago had she not needed the money. She also would have happily skipped the anniversary events could she have gotten away with it. Annie Abrams had wanted Wal-Mart to mass-produce her original outfit for the commemoration, so that on September 4, 2007, schoolgirls everywhere could wear replicas, in admiration and solidarity. Elizabeth was dubious—why, she asked, would anyone want to wear that thing?—and nothing ever came of the idea. As for the original, someone finally ventured into Elizabeth’s attic, where Elizabeth had always assumed it sat in mildewed tatters, and discovered that it wasn’t there. One of her sons, who periodically and rather unselectively cleaned house, had probably dumped it in the trash.
Fifty years earlier, Grace Lorch had told the angry mob surrounding Elizabeth that in six months they’d all be ashamed of themselves. There was little evidence that she was right. Apart from Hazel and Mary Ann Burleson, who had apologized on Oprah, no one in the photograph or in the crowd that day or in the mob inside Central that year had ever come forward.2 For some, like Olen Spann (the man in the hat and pressed khakis) or Richard Stinnett (the boy in the striped shirt just behind Elizabeth) or Lonnie Ward (the boy behind Hazel), it was too late: they had died. Richard Boehler, Frankie Gregg, Kenny Vandiver, and all of the others whose names pop up in Mrs. Huckaby’s disciplinary files, had led their lives, some in Little Rock, never to be heard from on this subject again. But to Hazel, they were the smart ones. No one ever gave them grief.
On September 23 the latest anniversary extravaganza got under way. All of the well-practiced and increasingly elaborate rituals were again reenacted, bigger and bolder than ever. But the revisionists were ready, too. The Democrat-Gazette reported that the consensus among a gathering of Central graduates from fifty years earlier was that only “a handful” of students had misbehaved and that the Nine had generally been embraced. A former Central teacher insisted that the press had exaggerated what had been “routine misbehavior, not uncommon in any high school of the time.” Much of white Little Rock quietly agreed.
What was different on this anniversary was a newly assertive Elizabeth. She, too, had read these claims, and at a press conference the next day, she called them “very, very annoying.” A handful of students did stand apart, she agreed: the handful who had treated the black students like human beings. Among the nine of them, she speculated, they had encountered maybe five whites who fit that description. She made the same point even more strongly when she spoke at the dedication of the new visitor center.
Carlotta LaNier, who parceled out the assignments, had selected Elizabeth for that task because of her love of history. But Elizabeth had warned that LaNier might not like what she would say. The newly created Little Rock Nine Foundation, which was to provide scholarships for needy students, was holding a fund-raiser that night; with hopes high for donations from the white community, this was no time to reopen old wounds. But the article, Elizabeth felt, had to be addressed. “I stand before you as a once shy, submissive child,” she began. Then she departed from that role. “I was very dismayed when I read in yesterday’s paper that the student body ‘welcomed us.’ I didn’t feel it,” she said. Scattered nervous laughter rippled through the crowd. “Or that there was only a ‘handful’ of students that harassed us. Each of us was followed from class to class by an organized group who assaulted us daily. And ‘harassment’ is a very, very mild term. I’ll tell you what it was to me. It was to be scalded in the shower. It was to be body-slammed against the wall lockers every day. And my only protection was my binder that I held close to my chest.” By this point, her eyes were red. She spoke of the pins she had placed around the binder. “Very soon after that a girl reported to the vice principal that I had scratched her,” she said. “Meek, mild Elizabeth scratch someone? No. No. Didn’t happen.”
The next day, four thousand people gathered in front of Central for the main event. Several of the Nine reached their seats either in wheelchairs or by clinging to the railing, a reminder that, as Elizabeth put it, some of them would soon start slipping over the hill.3 For the first, and last, time, at an anniversary commemoration, each of them spoke. The tone was generally upbeat. When her turn came, Elizabeth talked about forgiveness, and the burden it lifts from the forgiver. But one had to ask, she said, whether an apology was real. “I know the difference between an apology and someone who is just trying to make themselves feel good,” she said. “If you can’t name what you did, it’s not an apology.”
As the crowd dispersed, Peggy Harris of the Associated Press spotted Elizabeth walking away—on the same sidewalk she had trod fifty years earlier, once again alone. Elizabeth looked straight ahead, resolute and self-contained, just as she had the first time around. You could see how far Elizabeth had come, Harris thought, but also the fifteen-year-old girl she’d been. Harris weighed approaching her but quickly thought better of it.
The festivities were widely reported. One listener told National Public Radio that after hearing a segment about Elizabeth’s walk, he had pulled over his car to weep. A second listener asked whether the white girl in the famous picture had ever been identified, or expressed any remorse. Yes, he was told, her name was Hazel Bryan Massery, and yes, some years afterward she had apologized, and yes, her apology had been gracefully accepted. Two weeks later, in another public radio interview, Elizabeth complained about Hazel’s “amnesia” and suggested, mistakenly, that she had remained close to segregationist students inside Central even after she had left. Talking to others, Elizabeth was harsher still. Hazel was in this for herself. Hazel craved money and fame, and when she didn’t find them, she wanted out. Hazel really had nothing to say or teach. Hazel was jealous of her. Hazel was physically repulsed, maybe even allergic, to her. Hazel wanted her to be instantly, magically cured, just so she would no longer feel guilty. Hazel was a liar, a show-off, an exhibitionist: Hazel thought she was famous, when in fact only the picture was.
Elizabeth’s feelings grew more extreme because they festered; with even the slightest resistance, she would back off. (For someone raised prejudiced, I pointed out, going to a spa together—undressing and bathing together, massaging each other’s feet—was surely significant. She hadn’t thought of that, Elizabeth said. Hazel really had come a long ways! My goodness!) Perhaps she didn’t entirely believe what she was saying, or even want to. She admitted missing Hazel, especially at certain times of the year, like during the annual flower shows. Were she to see her again, she said, she would embrace her—not to rekindle their relationship necessarily, but because that was how she would feel. She wished she could tell Hazel how much she had helped her, but she wouldn’t, or couldn’t, or shouldn’t: after a lifetime of deference, she had grown “uppity.” When she talked about Hazel, Elizabeth’s head would droop, and her eyes would begin to water. But she would not let herself accept Hazel. To Elizabeth some things, like principles, mattered more than love. As hard as she was on Hazel, she was even harder on herself.
Similarly isolated, Hazel’s heart similarly hardened. Whites weren’t ready for desegregation in 1957, and blacks weren’t ready for reconciliation now. Elizabeth didn’t want reconciliation; she wanted revenge. She, and people like her—like most of the Little Rock Nine—could not accept that most white people aren’t evil; they want white people to suffer, too. Maybe Elizabeth wasn’t that vulnerable: maybe some of it was for show. And maybe she hadn’t even soured on her; maybe she had been hostile from the very beginning, agreeing to the second picture only because disagreeing would have been disagreeable. Elizabeth might still be stuck in 1957, but there was no way that she, Hazel, would sit around forever in sackcloth and ashes.
But some of her anger, too, was clearly for show. She still thought of Elizabeth on her birthday every October, and on New Year’s Days she thought of Erin. The more she read up on her history, the more she understood why black skepticism, and bitterness, were so deep. If she were black, she would feel the same way. These things would take years, or decades, to abate; she had just tried to speed things up a bit. She never did throw away the poster. When she talked about Elizabeth, her eyes teared up as well. Never would she reach out again as she had. But would they ever see each other again? Well, the story wouldn’t really end until one of them died.
The poster continued to hang in the office of Central’s principal, Nancy Rousseau, though more as an ideal to be sought than a reflection of reality. It was all heartbreaking to her. “I just had hoped that I could show this picture and say, ‘This happened, and that happened, and now …’ and there is no ‘now,’” she said. “And that makes me sad. It makes me sad for them, it makes me sad for the future students at our school, and for the history books, because I’d like a happy ending. And we don’t have that.”