Blog - Kim Batchelor

Jan 19 2015

Selma and the Art of Storytelling

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Edmund Pettus Bridge Cropped and Compressed — **The Edmund Pettus Bridge into Selma, Alabama, site of the Selma-Montgomery marches.**

On an early evening in April, 1968, the news media broke into programming to announce that Dr. Martin Luther King had been assassinated. “That’s a good thing, isn’t it?” the twelve-year-old me asked my mother, ironing behind me. She mumbled something about how people shouldn’t be killed and didn’t say anything more. I now understand how uncomfortable she was with how she had shared her own prejudices with me.

The movie, Selma, is powerful storytelling of those times and the images embedded in the film serve as a reminder of how much families like mine tragically missed that connection to those who suffered. In one of the most powerful scenes I’ve witnessed in any movie, four little African American girls descend the stairs just before church talking about what little girls often talk about. Seconds later an explosion that ends their life. The attack by police on marchers over the Edmund Pettus Bridge is portrayed in a haze of white and slow motion and surrealistic horror as marchers are brutally beaten. And toward the end an African American woman pauses from cleaning a food tray for an elderly white patient in a nursing home. She watches a black and white broadcast of President Lyndon Johnson describing the Voting Rights Act he’s about to send before the Congress.

Statue from park commemorating the Children's Crusade of 1963, Birmingham, Alabama — Statue from park commemorating the Children’s Crusade of 1963, Birmingham, Alabama

There has been some controversy about the film that I consider minor quibbles, possibly unfair depictions of Lyndon Johnson whose domestic programs I admire but whose agenda was made possible by the organizing of the civil rights movement. I would have liked to have known more about the women who were the heart of the voting rights struggle in Selma. I’d suggest a film with these women at the center. None of these should keep anyone from seeing this powerful film.

The nursing home worker, played in a small role by Oprah Winfrey, reminded me of the nursing home where my mother ended up, a place where most of the patients were whites tended to by black healthcare workers. One of my mother’s last acts before her death in 2009—to vote for an African American president who told stories, stories that connected with her. When people say that no one can change so you shouldn’t try, I have to disagree.

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Jan 10 2015

A Martyr of Selma: Viola Liuzzo

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Just off the 50 mile stretch of road between Selma and Montgomery, at a slightly raised spot behind wrought iron to protect it from vandals, two memorials for the same woman sit side by side. There is no larger sign to announce the place just on the south side of the four-lane highway; look for mile marker number 111. That’s how we found it in fall of 2014, on the way back from crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge into Selma, Alabama.

I don’t remember exactly when I first heard of Viola Liuzzo. Her murder was a brief scene in a movie I watched on television, maybe the 1990 retelling of the story of James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, Murder in Mississippi. Bullets fired from a car with four Ku Klux Klan members riding inside killed the 39-year-old woman who’d come Mississippi after seeing the brutal beating of marchers during the first Selma-to-Montgomery march. She died instantly after being shot in the face, the same day she ferried participants who’d taken part in the third walk from Selma to Montgomery in March of 1965. Her one passenger, Leroy Moton, pretended to be dead and survived.

There are many, many martyrs to the cause of civil rights in the 1960s. I saw the reminders of their sacrifices on this trip to the south, a combination Civil War/Civil Rights “tour” for almost two weeks. The trip took us to the powerful Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Hotel, where Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated. As a native of the south, where family trees branch through documents of the sale of other human beings, we traveled to where my husband’s great-great grandfather fought for the Confederacy at Stone Creek Battlefield just outside Murfreesboro, Tennessee. After a few other stops, including a trip to the Civil Rights memorial in Montgomery, we found ourselves on Highway 80.

The trip, in part, was a pilgrimage to find Viola’s memorial along the road after seeing her name etched into the curved black granite monument created by Maya Lin in front of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery. I wondered about this woman not quite 40 years old when she was so moved by the beating of protestors on the Edmund Pettis Bridge that she felt the call to leave her family behind and make a dangerous pilgrimage “to change the world.” Among many who sacrificed, she became the only white female protestor to be killed during the civil rights period in the 1960s.
When she saw the beatings on television, Viola told her husband: “It’s everybody’s fight.” I was too young for that fight, and I wonder what I would have done if I had been an adult during those times. Until 8th grade, I held to the same prejudices as my family, as those who murdered her. By the time I reached high school, I tried to leave those prejudices behind to travel a new road. If I’d been 20, 25, 30 in the 1960s, would I have had to courage to be drawn to the center of that struggle for human rights? Hard to know. I might have believed that my white skin, my being female would have protected me. I won’t say that Viola believed the same, but I can tell that she embraced a mission to join those who’d suffered greatly to work toward their emancipation, and probably knew at some level that there would be risk in doing so.

I look forward to seeing the movie, Selma, in spite of some of the controversies. Those are not important. The film moved John Lewis, a hero of that struggle, brutally beaten on that bridge during the march that caused Viola Liuzzo to act. It’s one way to honor those who gave up so much—by immersing ourselves in their stories. And among those stories is a woman who deserves to be remembered, along with many others who lived their courage.

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Dec 29 2014

Year’s Midnight to New Year’s Dawn

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Some years are more difficult than others – 365 day periods when loss piles upon loss, when challenges appear at every turn. In the aftermath, recollections of pleasant events, travels and new friends may be hidden among the difficult memories of those times. If we’re lucky, the year passes and we move into a more hopeful period.

2014 has been one of those years for me, one I compare to the year 2000. In both years, my spouse and I each lost a parent. Well-loved pets died, three this year and two in 2000. For my husband Ron and me, the challenges of caring for each of our aging parents meant time away from each other as we helped wrap up our parents’ affairs and held vigil at the bedside when they were both in hospice care. It fell to the other one to take care of household tasks.

In his poem, “A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day,” John Donne called the longest night in December, December 21, “the year’s midnight.” When I learned of this poem, and especially that designation for the longest night of the year, the term especially resonated for me. The celebration of St. Lucy is one of light amidst the darkness, especially for peoples in the northern-most part of Europe.

Twice I have found in nature a balm for the bleakness. In the year 2000, Ron served as a Fulbright scholar in Chile which allowed us to travel this country of many countries–each of its five regions being distinct. A few days before we were about to leave for home, I found out that my father’s cancer had advanced and had become terminal. Our last trip in the country was to Chile’s lake region, a beautiful area south of the capital of Santiago. On our short visit, we’d both been disappointed as the lakes and volcanoes we’d come to see were obscured by a steady rain and thick fog as Chile’s winter approached. Near Lake Llanquihue, we stopped in a park and walked a path through a misty enclave surrounded by trees, the stones in the stream that ran through it illuminated by a bioluminescent and otherworldly green.

As we walked through that place showing signs of both life and death, the experience brought into focus that life-death cycle in a calming way, a way devoid of fear. I wished that my father could be there to experience it, too.

When we returned two years later during a Chilean summer of balmy weather and sunny skies, the volcano that had been so close to us as we walked that trail revealed itself. But as beautiful as the volcano was, the trail below it that I remembered had disappeared and in its place appeared a completely different one drenched in sunlight.

Early in the month of December of this year, two visions of the moon did their best to pull me back into that misty enclave. The moon appeared in a sky like I’d never remembered seeing, a sky at that point of blue turning to black and the full moon surrounded by a halo of light. The next night, after dark, I saw the moon through tree branches appearing to reach out for the lunar light. The branches belonged to a tree outside the house next door, once home to a neighbor who died just a few months before after a lengthy and debilitating illness. Both were life amidst the darkness, a sign of promise of a new day to come.

So I share this second moon with all who’ve passed and those of us left behind. We move into a new year with hope for more light and life. I wish that to everyone whose year has been a challenge as I pluck from John Donne these few lines that resonate with that hope:

Study me then, you who shall lovers be

At the next world, that is, at the next spring;

For I am every dead thing,

In whom Love wrought new alchemy.

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Nov 27 2014

Why Can’t a Girl be Peter Pan?

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I wanted to fly. I wanted adventures. I wanted to take to the night skies, skirting clouds under the full moon.

When I was a child, I wanted to be Peter Pan.

As news spread about the upcoming “Peter Pan Live” production by NBC , there have been a lot of tweets and comments questioning the decision to have Peter Pan played by a female; in this production Allison Williams of HBO’s “Girls” is Peter. For some children, especially girls of a certain age, Peter Pan has always been a girl, starting with Mary Martin in 1954.

Historically, from the beginning of Barrie’s play, females were cast in the role of Peter for practical reasons related to the theater of the time. (Aisha Harris in Slate Magazine wrote about this in an article, “Why is Peter Pan played by a woman?”)

The same children who grew up with Mary Martin also grew up with a boy Peter Pan in the classic Disney film. Still, I have to admit that when Robin Williams appeared as a live action male Peter Pan in the movie Hook, it seemed a little odd to me. The only other boy Peter Pan before him had been a cartoon.The years after Hook have featured Kathy Rigby in what seems to be a never-ending traveling production of a female Peter Pan on stage while Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson’s boy Peter Pan is a popular character for young children for the last decade in the Peter and the Starcatchers series.

So Peter started out as a flying girl and became a flying boy and in the upcoming movie, Pan, he’s a boy again. Why does it matter? Look at the great photo of Allison Williams dressed as Pan and you know what the character means to girls as well as boys. Girls want to fly like boys, to have adventures, to live perpetually as a child. Just as boys want to swashbuckle and fly and live perpetually in those early years of wonder. Or maybe both males and females just don’t want to let go of that essence of childhood.

So let’s put our hands together and clap, to bring back to life the idea that any child of any sex can inhabit the character who does all the things he or she wants to do. If we just believe…

You can own a copy of a modern re-imagining of the story of Peter Pan and Wendy Darling. Click here to find out more about The Island of Lost Children.

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Oct 06 2014

Road’s End in the Texas Hill Country

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“Traveler, there is no path. The path is made by walking.
Traveler, the path is your tracks. And nothing more.”
XXIX, Antonio Machado

We made the drive in September, the beginning of the season when day slips early into dark. My husband Ron says that fall is the time when the older folks in the Texas Hill Country pass away, and the death in autumn of his father, two uncles, and an aunt lent support to that belief.

We’ve taken the route dozens of times over the past 20 years, through small west Texas towns, skirting farm and ranch land now stressed by drought. This time, instead of our usual visit to family, we made our way to say goodbye to Ron’s mother, Alta Wilhelm.

Over the years, the road and the destination helped my mind birth stories. The rolling hills covered with cedar inspired Guadalupe of the Angels, a novel set in the turn of the 20th century about the friendship of two farm girls, one Mexican and one white, one the daughter of landowners, the other of sharecroppers. Along with travels through East Texas, the landscape of the countryside about an hour north and west of San Antonio easily places me in a world of 100 years before.

As we approached our final destination, the weight of sadness fell slowly, a vague feeling in the quaint German town of Fredericksburg that thickened the closer we got to Kerrville, the town where my husband Ron was born and where his mother had died just a few days before. Mundane places along the road—grocery stores, diners–melded into recollections of the past and acted as reminders of what would never be again.

My mother-in-law, Alta, the epitome of a homebody, set out in the 1940s for Washington, DC., and as part of the Women’s Army Corps, was posted in the US capital. There, Alta served as a cryptographic technician, a decoder stationed in the Pentagon. Her work along with the fragmented decoding of other pieces of a message were compiled in another place. One of those messages revealed information on the dropping of the atomic bomb. To have left at a young age to travel to an unfamiliar place must have been a disconcerting trip for a girl from a small town in Texas.

A few weeks before her death, Alta made the same journey to the Pentagon at 92 years old, this time in a wheelchair, and visited the Tomb of the Unknowns and the World War II memorial. In the 70 years between the two trips, she preferred to stay close to home, to be surrounded by the familiar. The path throughout her life was often short and safe. Her son took a different route–we have traveled to Chile, Guatemala, Peru, Paris, Spain, England, with plans to travel more and often. Each journey has changed us because we want to be changed by them. Alta was more comfortable with the safety and security of what she knew, which makes that decision to set out for an experience thousands of miles away even more amazing to me.

We will make the Hill Country trip again, leave north Texas for the southwest of the state via Highway 67, but it will not be the exact same road. The regular stops will not be the exact same ones. The stories to be revealed will be new ones.

“By walking you make a path,
And turning, you look back
At a way you will never tread again.”

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