Elizabeth and Hazel by David Margolick

Author:David Margolick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2011-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-FIVE

How, nearly twenty-five years after Central was desegregated, do you place a help-wanted advertisement in the Little Rock newspaper declaring that “no blacks need apply”? Or parade around what had by now become a largely black neighborhood with signs shouting “Niggers Go Home!”? Small wonder that the casting director for Crisis at Central High School had his work cut out for him. In fact, he very nearly had a nervous breakdown.

Hollywood had finally discovered Little Rock. In 1981 Mrs. Huckaby’s recently published memoirs became a made-for-television movie, with Joanne Woodward in the starring role. School officials were portrayed much more heroically—or, in the case of “Grinning Chicken Jess” Matthews, more benignly—than they deserved. Knowing that Elizabeth’s walk was perhaps the most memorable moment in the story, the director, Lamont Johnson, insisted that it be added to the script. Johnson was struck afterward by how enthusiastically the extras had re-created the scene: they loved baiting the black girl and were delighted when he ordered a second take. Elizabeth hadn’t been involved in the program, except for requesting that her real name not be used. Hazel, who was not contacted at all, became a plump and particularly unattractive girl named “Billie.” They’d picked the name, she figured, because it sounded like white trash, and like “bully.”

When seven of the Nine gathered in New York in May 1982 to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of their entrance into Central, Elizabeth didn’t attend. She was under a doctor’s care, the paper reported. On the real anniversary that September, she told People magazine that she lived like a hermit, and she would not let herself be photographed. “I’ve got to get to the point where I can talk about this,” she said, dabbing her reddened eyes with a dish towel. “Until then, it will never be over for me.” A former neighbor of Elizabeth’s, Morris Thompson, returned to Little Rock in 1984 after several years away and was shocked at Elizabeth’s poor state. She seemed adrift—on good days, friendly and relatively talkative, but more often morose and antisocial. Her sons were more subdued than boys their age should be; her house was in disrepair. Thompson and his wife bought her groceries, and clothes, and things for her home, like a bunk bed for the children. It angered him that a hero had fallen so low, and that so many who had profited from her courage, including the more prosperous among the Nine, had let this happen.

Relations within the group remained surprisingly superficial. But by the thirtieth anniversary in 1987, they had begun to cohere a bit. Carlotta LaNier even proposed that Alex Haley, the Arkansan who’d written Roots, do a book about them, devoting a separate chapter to each.1 Elizabeth, though, remained reticent. She “prefers not to be asked about the 1957 desegregation crisis,” the Gazette reported. Those she spurned included the makers of Eyes on the Prize, though the widely watched documentary naturally included the familiar footage of her. Word reached some old admirers, like Roger Wilkins, that Elizabeth was in very bad shape, and it troubled them deeply.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.