Women's Bodies and the Myth of the "Post-Racial"
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In the final minutes of the 2011 hit movie, The Help, a Southern white woman, Skeeter, and two Southern black women, Aibileen and Minny, come together for a final farewell. Aibileen and Minny have launched Skeeter's career as a writer by making the risky choice to narrate to her their experiences as domestic workers in white women's homes. As a result, Skeeter has a job offer in New York, one that Aibileen and Minny urge her to accept despite her misgiving that "I can't just leave the two of you here. Things are getting bad from the mess I created." As the music swells, Aibileen and Skeeter clasp hands and Aibileen declares, "Go find your life, Miss Skeeter!"1
I begin with The Help not to add to debates about a film that evoked cheers and tears from fans across lines of gender and race and prompted condemnation from the Association of Black Women Historians (among others) as ahistorical, at best, and as reducing "systematic, violent racism, sexism & labor exploitation to a cat fight," if not worse.2 Rather, the tremendous popularity of The Help, even alongside significant critiques, suggests the appeal that narratives of reunion across lines of race have. The film highlights the ways in which women's bodies may tell a story of racial reunion, standing in for the passage into what some have come to describe as a post-racial era; indeed in The Help, women's bodies perform the romance of the post-racial.
It is this set of images and ideas—sisterhood between white and black women as signaling a new post-racial era—that David Margolick, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, shatters in his marvelous new book, Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock. "Shatters," though, is perhaps too strong a word, for Margolick tells his multi-layered story with a rich narrative and compelling characters, without ever announcing, "Here's the important point! Pay attention!" The book seems to be about the two fifteen-year-old girls who appeared in a famous photograph that Will Counts took on September 4, 1957: the day that Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas mobilized the state National Guard to block nine African American students from entering, and [End Page 150] thus desegregating, Central High School. In the photo, Elizabeth Eckford, an African American girl in a white dress, wears sunglasses, carries books, and looks composed—but with her head ever-so-slightly bowed—amidst a crowd of jeering and angry white men and women. Hazel Bryan, a white girl several feet behind her, has her mouth open and her face filled with hate as she utters what cannot be heard but must be imagined by anyone looking at the photograph. Margolick tells us: "Her eyes narrowed, her brow furrowed, her teeth clenched as if about to bite, Hazel shouted, then shouted some more: 'Go home, nigger! Go back to A-' Click. '-frica!' Will Counts had his picture" (p. 37).
In fact, Margolick weaves together many more strands than that in Elizabeth and Hazel. This is a "biography" of the image itself—its photographer and composition, its circulation and reception; it is the story of the two teenage girls, how and why their lives momentarily intersected in 1957, diverged for decades and intersected again. It is the story of illness and health, of personal transformations, and of class mobility and obstacles to that mobility in women's lives; and it is the story of the contested terrain on which a city and nation remember civil rights activism. As with his earlier books, Strange Fruit: The Biography of a Song (2001); and Beyond Glory: Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling, and a World on the Brink (2005), Margolick hones in on an episode, but moves forward and back in time to illuminate a complex history of race relations that defies neat packaging. In the case of Elizabeth and Hazel, this approach especially defies what readers might expect...
