A couple of years ago, after his mom died, Fry Bread author Kevin Maillard found himself wondering, "but where did she go?"
"I was really thinking about this a lot when I was cleaning her house out," Maillard remembers. "She has all of her objects there and there's like hair that's still in the brush or there is an impression of her lipstick on a glass." It was almost like she was there and gone at the same time.
Maillard found it confusing, so he decided to write about it. His new children's book is And They Walk On, about a little boy whose grandma has died. "When someone walks on, where do they go?" The little boy wonders. "Did they go to the market to thump green melons and sail shopping carts in the sea of aisles? Perhaps they're in the garden watering a jungle of herbs or turning saplings into great sequoias."
Maillard grew up in Oklahoma. His mother was an enrolled member of the Seminole Nation. He says many people in native communities use the phrase "walked on" when someone dies. It's a different way of thinking about death. "It's still sad," Maillard says, "but then you can also see their continuing influence on everything you do, even when they're not around."
And They Walk On was illustrated by Mexican artist Rafael López, who connected to the story on a cultural and personal level. "'Walking on' reminds me so much of the Day of the Dead," says López, who lost his dad 35 years ago. "My mom continues to celebrate my dad. We talk about something funny that he said. We play his favorite music. So he walks with us every day, wherever we go."
It was López who decided that the story would be about a little boy: a young Kevin Maillard. "I thought, we need to have Kevin because, you know, he's pretty darn cute," he explains. López began the illustrations with pencil sketches and worked digitally, but he created all of the textures by hand. "I use acrylics and I use watercolors and I use ink. And then I distressed the textures with rags and rollers and, you know, dried out brushes," he says. "I look for the harshest brush that I neglected to clean, and I decide this is going to be the perfect tool to create this rock."
The illustrations at the beginning of the story are very muted, with neutral colors. Then, as the little boy starts to remember his grandmother, the colors become brighter and more vivid, with lots of purples and lavender. "In Mexico we celebrate things very much with color," López explains, "whether you're eating very colorful food or you're buying a very colorful dress or you go to the market, the color explodes in your face. So I think we use color a lot to express our emotions."
On one page, the little boy and his parents are packing up the grandmother's house. The scene is very earthy and green-toned except for grandma's brightly-colored apron, hanging on a hook in the kitchen. "I want people to start noticing those things," says López, "to really think about what color means and where he is finding this connection with grandma."
Kevin Maillard says when he first got the book in the mail, he couldn't open it for two months. "I couldn't look at it," he says, voice breaking. What surprised him, he said, was how much warmth Raphael López's illustrations brought to the subject of death. "He's very magical realist in his illustrations," explains Maillard. And the illustrations, if not exactly joyful, are fanciful and almost playful. And they offer hope. "There's this promise that these people, they don't go away," says Maillard. "They're still with us… and we can see that their lives had meaning because they touched another person."
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