Kim Batchelor

Writer of magical realism and other imaginative fiction

Embracing Our History

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Today, the National Museum of African American History and Culture ( NMAAHC ), part of the Smithsonian Museums in Washington, DC, opens to the public. I’m looking forward to visiting this institution dedicated to telling the story of a people, their struggles and triumphs. I have written before about the prejudice of members of my family that transferred to me and which I’m still confronting, at times.

In fall of 2014, my spouse and I went on a driving tour through the south to visit some of the important civil rights sites and museums in Memphis, Selma, Montgomery, and Birmingham. When I go to important places in the civil rights struggle, I want to see, to be sad, to reflect, to learn. Yes, even at times to have my gut wrenched.

I do not go to feel guilty. The National Coalition Building Institute has a saying: “Guilt is the glue that holds prejudice in place.” The more civil rights memorials and museums I go to and stories I read and hear, the more I feel able to do the work of understanding and evaluating my own attitudes. I also don’t leave the burden on African Americans to explain it to me.

As a storyteller who wants to create diverse worlds, the journey through the history of African Americans is a helpful process. And as I strive to move readers, I benefit from being moved.

Both my husband and I trace our ancestries through documents showing that at least one of our relatives sold one human being to another. What African Americans have experienced is not something they as a people should just ‘get over.’  We would never consider telling World War II or Vietnam veterans to ‘just get over’ the wars they experienced that changed their lives forever.

The history experienced by African Americans is our collective and painful history. As we move into the future, institutions like the National Museum of African American History and Culture help us build that future without denying our past.

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Homage to Jack

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Jack Evans and George Harris, the first same sex couple to marry in Dallas County. (Photo from the Dallas Morning News)

Almost a year ago today, my friend Jack Evans gained some fame here in Dallas and even nationally by being a member of the first same sex couple to be married in Dallas County after last year’s Supreme Court landmark decision legalizing such unions. When he and his husband George Harris, together since 1961, were married by my friend Judge Dennise Garcia, he and George made the national news by virtue of the longevity of their relationship and the decision that granted them a right to marriage.

A few months before the day in June 2015 that made their marriage official, I witnessed Jack and George’s ceremony as they were married in a church by another friend, Rev. Bill McElvaney. For Bill, this was an act of resistance against the denial of marriage rights for same-sex couples and the Methodist Church that bans its clergy from performing such ceremonies, or from being lesbian or gay. Suffering from terminal cancer, Bill didn’t live long enough to see the former pass away.

Lack of these formal steps didn’t define Jack and George’s relationship of more than fifty years—the ceremony, the official marriage license. Those steps did, however, give long overdue acknowledgement of that relationship and the rights that come with equality of marriage under the law.

For eight decades, both men have been witnesses to the gradual changes in US society and how it treats its LGBT members. I wish I knew more about what those early days must have been like for the two of them. Recently, they both initiated a project to document the history of the LGBT community in Dallas, a project that has increased in commitment and participation. One of the efforts as part of this documentation is to collect and retain expressions of grief left by members of the Dallas community in the aftermath of the mass shooting in Orlando.

Jack lived long enough to be aware of the worst mass shooting in the United States, so far. Unfortunately, he died just a few days short of the anniversary when he and George made it legal at the Dallas County Courthouse.

I remember Jack as a kind and cheerful man, always literally a head above most members of the congregation of the church I attend. And George. When I taught a social media workshop, he was my most eager student. His posts on Facebook were exactly like he was in life—positive and uplifting.

Jack Evans will be greatly missed by all who knew him, but he leaves an important legacy behind. The community rallies around George just as he rallied around so many in the LGBT community. Without a doubt, I’m proud to have known him and will miss him greatly.

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A Reflection on Dr. Martin Luther King Day

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MLK Statue

My grandmother’s demanding voice came from behind me.

“Don’t drink out of that fountain!” Remove the word ‘that,’ add ‘the’ and the term we euphemistically call ‘the N word’ and you’ll have the actual quote. As a curious 5 year old, I wondered what the water tasted like.

Growing up in Fort Worth, Texas, racial dynamics in my hometown almost always revealed themselves in the Leonard Brothers department store. A trip to the store involved a trip downtown, and once through the revolving doors, the aroma of garlic bread coming from the store’s cafeteria wafted around the shoppers who stepped inside. It was there my grandmother stopped me from drinking from the water fountain and there where for the first time I saw African American women in the same restroom that I used.

The Martin Luther King holiday always brings back those memories. I’ve written before of the racism in my home growing up and seeking my mother’s approval by responding to a news story of Dr. King’s assassination with, “That’s a good thing, isn’t it?” Several years ago as an adult, when there were still pay phones at the mall, I once found myself faced with a decision to choose between two phones located side-by-side. I could choose to stand next to the older white man, what my brain told me was the ‘safe’ choice, or the one next to the younger black man. I chose the latter as a rebellion against my subconscious self, that soft voice that acts as a cheerleader for my prejudice.

Even though I know much has changed over the decades, stubborn prejudicial attitudes still persist, and I recognize them in myself. Aware or not, most of us grapple with these impulses that can impact the lives of people who don’t deserve it. This year we found out that even our literary hero Atticus Finch wasn’t exactly who we thought he was.

Our prejudices provide fertile ground for inspiration. I sometimes find myself mining that area in my writing, not to create strident stories to lecture the reader but as a way to consider where these attitudes arise from, how characters grapple with their ingrained beliefs and how those beliefs and attitudes affect the lives of others. I once wrote a story from the viewpoint of a female character, a character drawing from the fictional Mayella Violet Ewell, who accused Tom Robinson of raping her in To Kill a Mockingbird, and the real Carolyn Bryant, the woman who in 1955 maintained that 14-year-old Emmett Till whistled at her, provoking his brutal torture and death at the hands of her husband and his half-brother. Their culpability in these murders—one real and one resembling actual acts of false claims—merges with their own second-class status as women in that society. The results of their actions were tragic.

I try to keep in my thoughts all year the spirit of courageous people like Dr. King, Rosa Parks, and the multitude of other women and men of the civil rights movement. They put their lives at great risk, and sometimes lost them, taking on the challenge of overcoming these ingrained prejudices to claim the rights. We need more than one day to honor that legacy, and maybe the best way is reflect each day on how we can all do better identifying those micro-prejudices and rooting them out of our brains and our community as a whole.

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Imprisonment and Gratitude

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sunrise at Lake Atitlán 1 (2)It’s hard to believe that being incarcerated would be a situation to be thankful for. Hearing a group of women recently express positive thoughts about having their freedom taken away from them frankly surprised me.

Every month, I teach creative writing to women in the Dallas County Jail. Last session, at the beginning of November, we started with an activity to gauge the mood of participants—a group of 20 or so nonviolent offenders. All were asked what word best described how each one felt that night: content, happy, glad. Glad to be there. Glad to have been caught. Happy to be off the dysfunctional track of addiction, bad decisions, self-destruction. More than I would have expected expressed these positive feelings, at least for that night. A few assessed their mood in a way I might have expected—confused, upset, I can’t believe I’m here (in jail).

The curriculum for the class called for an activity that involved taking words of gratitude and creating slogans, then taking those same words and creating longer pieces. I heard thoughtful, well written pieces (for first draft), using repetition as modeled in a Wallace Stegner poem used as an example. One woman wrote a poem about the conflicted feelings she had about the man who accompanied her on that journey that led her to jail, telling him good riddance while still confessing that she would miss him. Or maybe it was about her dog that she really missed. She never confirmed which.

JailWho we jail and for how long has recently become a topic of debate. Too many of those women are in jail because they can’t make bail the way someone with more resources can. Still, over the last few months, several have told me how committed they are to getting their lives together again—returning to school, getting their children back, keeping out of trouble.

Even as I heard positive assessments of their conditions, I sensed behind them feelings of sadness. Those actions that got them to that place, sitting in a concrete room with the only windows showing the two windowless pods where they showered, slept, and watched television stopped their destructive routine. Unfortunately, nothing pulled them off that path before they arrived at that place. No doubt these women bear some responsibility for what landed them there. With unequal sentencing and access to bond money, we as a society  should ask what more we can do to create a more just criminal justice system.

Like so many, come Thursday, I’ll be grateful to the food on the table, the house I live in and friends and family. I’ll also be grateful for the ability to look out the window, walk out the door, go where I want. And I’ll also think of the women not able to participate in those basic activities of daily life, and hope that their optimism and gratitude lead them quickly to a time where they can while living the healthy fulfilled life we all deserve.

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A Martyr of Selma: Viola Liuzzo

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IMG_0819Just 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.

Viola Liuzzo Memorial 2The 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.

Viola LiuzzoI 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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