In The Walk, a child and her grandmother put on their jackets and hats and leave their house.
They stop at home, stores, and even the barbershop — smushing their faces up against glass windows, knocking on doors, inviting friends and neighbors to join them on their walk. The group is made up of young and old — one woman with a walker, kids holding hands. The procession grows and grows as they reach their destination: the polls. It's time to vote.
"The message is clear," says author Winsome Bingham, about her 2023 children's book. "We're stronger together. That's the message."
Bingham grew up in a tight-knit community where she says the whole neighborhood went to the polls together to vote. "School is out. And the kids in the street," she remembers. "I did not realize how important and central that was to my life."
The Walk is illustrated by E. B. Lewis. "All those scenes that you see in the book are real," he explains. To illustrate it, Lewis first created thumbnail sketches — then he traveled to Huntsville, Ala. "This little town got together this procession for me," he says. "The cops actually stopped traffic." Lewis essentially directed a live-action version of the picture book — while using his phone to film and photograph the scenes, which he later turned into watercolor paintings.
"We went to a barbershop and all the people in the barbershop at that particular time, they actually were part of the book," Lewis remembers. "And what I did to pay them — everybody got a free haircut on me," he laughs. "So it was fun."
Unlike Winsome Bingham, E. B. Lewis didn't grow up in a household where voting was a big event. "My parents went and it was a secret, almost," he says. As a result, he didn't vote until he was in his late 20s. "That's the importance of this book," he says. "Getting kids to understand what… democracy looks like." Kids don't do what we say, he points out, they do what we do.
Bingham and Lewis hope The Walk helps parents, grandparents, babysitters, friends, caregivers — anyone — talk to kids about voting and about civic duty. No one in The Walk will tell you who they're voting for — there's no preaching, and there are both red flags and blue flags around the town. As Bingham said, the message is clear.
"We think about voting and we individualize it so much," says Bingham. "But at the end of the day, one person doesn't elect [the] mayor or school board member or city council or the president. We need a collective community to make that happen, to make that work."
As the grandmother tells her granddaughter in the book, "Leaders are not born, they are made through molding and modeling."
Copyright 2024 NPR
