AUG 27, 2024
I’m always telling people, THE KIDS WILL SAVE US!
I was in the bookstore over the weekend and the bookseller let a customer know that I was a children’s author and handed her my book. The customer was shopping with a man and two girls. We exchanged smiles, small talks, and pleasantries. We stood there in the middle of the store chit-chatting about books and writing. I’m watching her fingers and eyes. Her fingers flipped through the pages of my book, THE WALK illustrated by the amazing artistrator E. B. Lewis. Her eyes poured over the amazing illustrations. At one point, I watched her placed the book in one hand so the other hand can trace the faces on the page. When we were almost finish talking, she began reading the book right there in the aisle, her mouth moving releasing occasional whispery sound.
I moved about the store checking out the display and picking up books to buy even though I have too many books spilling out of my basement into my garage. I’m thumbing though a picture book when I felt a tap on my shoulder and spun around to see the lady standing beside me. In her hand, a stack of THE WALK.
“Do you mind signing these for me,” she says. “I want to give them to my book club.”
I fiddled around in my crossbody purse and pulled out a black Sharpie, my signing instrument for all my books. We moved to the counter where I can use the space as a makeshift desk to balance and sign. The whole time I’m signing, she’s telling me about her political pass and her life, telling me about how she is not voting today the way she voted in 2016 and 2020, telling me she grew up in a Republican household and that she has always voted that way, and telling me she was born in Alabama, raised in South Carolina, went to college in Tennessee, married a man from Florida who joined the Navy and was stationed in Groton.
I was signing the last book when a little girl around eight or nine came and pressed her pale face against the woman’s belly. The woman tussled the girl’s hair and then proceeded to tell me that the pale face girl was her daughter. And that she’s changing the way she have always voted because of her.
It caught me off guard. To me, she didn’t see the need to switch up the way she voted when children were being put in cages; cops were killing Black and brown folks at an alarming rate; Indigenous brothers’ and sisters’ water supply was being threatened by pipelining; and crazy, chaos, hurt, and hate were running rampant through the country like wildfires. She pledged allegiance to a man who bragged and boasted about grabbing women by the 🐱 and she had daughters.
After I put the cap on my pen and slipped the pen back in my bag, I had a question for her. What was it that made her finally change her voting mind? What was the last straw that broke the camel’s back? What was the deciding factor that made her say, enough is enough and time to make a change.
She paused before responding, dropped her head as if embarrassed, and before smiling at her daughter. It was as if the gears in her brain were turning and she was trying to find the right answer. Then she looked at me, her daughter’s cheek now pressed against her side. “My daughter told me to vote for Kamala because Kamala is a smart woman and she’s going to make sure girls have equality,” she said.
I’ve never heard Kamala say that. But I’ve always felt that girls’ and women’s rights were part of her core value and part of her political platform.
I nodded and smiled and before I left, I picked up a copy of SOUL FOOD SUNDAY and handed it to her saying, “I wrote this one as well; and The New York Times chose it as a Best Book of the Year.” I kept glancing back to see if she had returned it to its shelf home, but she didn’t. She added it to the stack of sign books under her arm and went about her business.
It left me feeling giddy inside. Because I always knew it, always said it, and will always believe that THE KIDS WILL SAVE US!!! ❤️