Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock

Your previous book, Beyond Glory, was about the great boxing matches between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling. How did you get from there to Little Rock, 1957?
Actually, I began the two projects at roughly the same time. While in Little Rock to do a Clinton-related magazine story in 1999, I visited the museum across from Central High School. Like so many others, I well knew the picture of Elizabeth and Hazel from 1957. So I was flabbergasted to see a poster there showing the two of them, now grown women, standing next to one another, smiling, apparently reconciled. How had that happened? It seemed inconceivable. So I began gathering material on it. The two projects share a lot, in addition to their racial themes; each focuses on a discrete event—the first, a fight lasting about two minutes, the second, an exposure lasting probably a sixtieth of a second—to reveal an era.

Was it difficult to find Elizabeth and get her to speak with you?
No, Elizabeth was in the same house she'd lived in the day the picture was taken. I had expected her to be resistant but she wasn't at all, particularly once we got going. Elizabeth has an enormous respect for history and the historical process.

And Hazel?
Hazel was much more reluctant. Though she left school at seventeen, she's read widely in the history of American race relations, and knew of the historic alliance between blacks and Jews. For that reason, among others, she feared that Elizabeth and I would gang up on her. I made a very poor impression on her in our first meeting, and as the fragile friendship she'd struck up with Elizabeth faltered, her position toward me hardened. It was only seven years later, after an early version of this story appeared in Vanity Fair, that she relented. Then she opened up to me, and I came to realize how remarkable a person she, too, is.

Did you have any idea that their personal stories would intersect in such a fascinating way?
I knew, from the poster, that they'd come together again. But only later did I learn that five years or so after the picture was taken, Hazel had called Elizabeth to apologize. That was enormously significant to me, a key to her character. It said to me that for all the skepticism and hostility Hazel has encountered over the years, she in fact did the right thing in the right way: early on, when no cameras were rolling.

The book took you twelve years to complete. Why so long?
Well, apart from the multitasking that all journalists must do these days, the story turned out to be endlessly rich. I interviewed dozens of people, some repeatedly, including seven of the other eight of the Little Rock Nine. I shudder to think how many times I questioned Elizabeth; whenever I told her I was almost certainly done she laughed, because she knew there would be more questions. Hazel also put up with a lot of me.

Can you tell us something about your most recent trip to Little Rock?
Though my reporting was pretty much finished, I accompanied my friend Larry Schiller as he took portraits of the two women. We thought it essential to capture how two faces that are seared into the national memory had evolved with time and experience. Two of those photographs appear on the jacket of my book. Being with Elizabeth and Hazel one last time, and recording them once more for history, was very moving.