Growing up on a small farm near Yellow Springs, Ohio, in the 1940s, Virginia Hamilton was lovingly embraced by the sights, sounds and smells of rural America, and by a big extended family of cousins, uncles, aunts. All these things would come into play in the children's stories Hamilton would spin as an adult. But probably the biggest influence on Virginia Hamilton -- whom Entertainment Weekly has called "a majestic presence in children's literature" -- was the fact that her own parents were storytellers. And what stories they told! Hamilton's maternal grandfather, Levi Perry, had escaped as a child, from slavery in Virginia, by crossing the Ohio River to freedom. He had also had plenty of company in this resolve: Fully 50,000 slaves passed through Ohio or settled there during antebellum times, aided on the Underground Railroad by Shawnee Indians and white abolitionists. The aging homes where the escaped slaves hid became catacombed with secret passages and hiding spaces. And all these years later, the description of what happened in those hiding places and "stations" on the Underground Railroad still makes modern children's eyes grow wide. Young Virginia, named for her grandfather's home state, was one of these children listening at her mother's and father's knee. "My mother said that her father sat his ten children down every year and said, 'I'm going to tell you how I escaped from slavery, so slavery will never happen to you,"' the author related in a telephone interview. She added that she traces her own interest in literature to the fact that her parents were "storytellers and unusually fine storytellers, and realized, although I don't know how consciously, that they were passing along heritage and culture and a pride in their history." Hamilton has picked up on those strains, writing or editing stories for more than 30 children's books, including contemporary novels about teen-agers, biographies of the historical figures Paul Robeson and W.E.B. Du Bois, and collections of African-American folklore and slavery-era "liberation" stories. For her work, she has been repeatedly honored with the National Book Award, the John Newbery Medal, the Edgar Allan Poe Award, the Coretta Scott King Award, the Boston Globe/Horn Book Award, and, most prestigious of all, the Hans Christian Andersen Medal. Still, probably her most satisfying award has been knowing the contribution she's made for children who didn't have family storytellers to tell them of their rich ethnic culture. "Up until this year, I think," Hamilton said in the interview, "5,000 new children's titles were published every year. And out of that, maybe 40 of them were African-American books." Thanks to Hamilton, who has lent her name for the past decade to an annual conference on multicultural children's literature -- and thanks to writers who have followed her lead – the dearth of literature about the ethnic experience is beginning to change.

Always Sure of Her Vocation She was born into a big farm family, the daughter of Kenneth James and Etta Belle (Perry) Hamilton; for company, she had two older brothers and two older sisters, hogs, chickens and other farm animals, and endless numbers of relatives who lived on surrounding farms outside the college town of Yellow Springs, Ohio. "It was conceivable you could range a whole day and never leave family land," Hamilton said in the interview. She describes her family as "rural people with not a lot of money"; her father was both a farmer and a dining hall service manager at nearby Antioch College. But, she says, her childhood was a tremendously happy one. Hamilton received a full scholarship to Antioch College and after three years transferred to Ohio State University and went on to New York and the New School for Social Research where she continued her study of writing. Unlike others of her age who are so often confused about vocation, Hamilton was always set on being a writer; "I started writing as a kid; it was always something I was going to do." Taking off to see the world, she settled in New York City, where she studied writing at the New School for Social Research and fell in love with a young poet, Arnold Adoff, whom she married in March 1960. The couple began a life together in the big city, writing as much as they could, making a living at whatever they could. During those early years, Hamilton relates, she worked at such varied jobs as cost accountant for an engineering firm, nightclub singer, and museum receptionist. Virginia and Arnold have two children, a daughter Leigh, and a son, Jaime Levi. In 1967, Virginia published her first book, Zeely, and shortly thereafter, she and her family moved back to Yellow Springs. Zeely is the story of a young girl in rural America who fantasizes that a tall majestic young woman in her town is an African queen, only to find out that she actually is. "It was one of the very first books where black characters are simply being people and living; it's not a problem book about integration," Hamilton said. As a result, Zeely attracted considerable attention. This was, after all, the era of racial strife across the country, mixed with a rising credo of "black is beautiful." The time was right, and besides, editors at the MacMillan publishing house were suitably impressed by the short story from which the book evolved; Hamilton had been lucky enough to have a college friend working at MacMillan and pushing from the inside for the editors to pay Hamilton attention. Not satisfied to rest on her laurels, Hamilton quickly turned out her next book, The House of Dies Drear, in 1968. Dies Drear received the Edgar Allan Poe Award for best juvenile mystery of the year. It was rich with the historical research that would underline many of her subsequent works. And it harked back to the stories of liberation Hamilton grew up with in Yellow Springs, located just 60 miles north of the Ohio River; the legendary boundary between "slave" states and free. Hamilton's book told of a modern family that leases an old house that has been a "station" on the Underground Railroad and, besides being the scene of the deaths of its owner, Dies Drear, and two slaves, holds an incredible secret as well . Published just a little over a century after abolition, the book delighted young readers, much as those old stories and secret passages had delighted the young author. Stories of Liberation "Basically," Louann Toth, book review editor for School Library Journal, said in an interview, "Hamilton is a marvelous storyteller; and so she brings that sense of narrative and just a wonderful sense of language to everything she does. "Many of her novels have many levels, but first and foremost they are good stories," Toth continued. "Several of her books have boys as main characters and she seems to be able to get into a boy's head as easily as a young girl's. And I think that's really a special talent." Hamilton followed her first two big successes with a long line of books covering different genres: The Planet of Junior Brown, in 1971, was a story of urban life in New York. Justice and Her Brothers (1978), together with Dustland (1980) and The Gathering (1980), comprised Hamilton's "Justice Cycle," and were her tribute to the genre of science fiction; The Gathering, for example, was set on earth a million years in the future. Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush (1982) delved into the supernatural, introducing a ghost to usher the book's characters into the past. "If you write well enough, you can get people to believe whatever you're thinking," Hamilton said in the interview, adding that she wrote the book to "put to rest" a childhood vision in which she believed she saw a ghost. In 1985, Hamilton published an entirely different kind of book, The People Could Fly, a beautifully illustrated collection of true narrative and fantasy dating from slave times and encompassing tales ranging from "Bruh Rabbit" to a fantastical story of a slave who helps others escape by teaching them to rise into the air and fly away from their hot drudgery in the cotton fields. Hamilton subsequently published two more books in this same genre: In the Beginning: Creation Stories from Around the World (1988), and Many Thousand Gone: African Americans from Slavery to Freedom. The latter retold the stories of such historical figures as Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and Frederick Douglas, as well as their lesser known contemporaries like Henry Box Brown, a slave who enclosed himself in a crate and mailed himself to freedom; and "Jackson," a slave who escaped north dressed as a maid. "None of these stories was ever written for children," Hamilton said in the interview, commenting on The People Could Fly. "They were just told; so I redid them, brought them out of the musty old manuscripts where nobody ever saw them. And people went for it strongly." En route, Hamilton began to include with these collections commentary on the tales -- who the collector was, who the teller was, whether the story was unique to African American literature or was an alternate version of a European story. "I go for the old manuscripts or out-of--print materials that are languishing in libraries," Hamilton added, noting that Central State University in Ohio near her home is one such resource, along with state folklore societies, and old 1930s Works Progress Administration (WPA) collections. In 1995, Hamilton published Jagarundi, a picture book for young children which offered a new slant on her liberation theme. An animal tale, Jagarundi was the tale of several little- known animals - among them a jagarundi or wild cat, a coati or type of raccoon, a kit fox, brush dog and capuchin monkey - all of which "discuss" among themselves the pros and cons of emigrating north from their home in the Central American rain forest, where their habitat is threatened by man, to an uncertain future in the southwestem United States. Hamilton calls her concern with the rain forest and other environmental troubles her "green theme": "I have a lot of books having to do with ecology," she said. " Drylongso (1992) is about drought, M.C. Higgins, the Great (1974) has a subtext about strip-mining. I grew up in this area where land and the importance of saving it is so very important." When she went to work on Jagarundi, influenced by having seen a jagarundi in captivity in Arizona, Hamilton said, she never dreamed she'd discover another connection to matters close to her heart. "The story parallels humans who escape their homelands in search of better, safer lands," the author told the Tenth Annual Virginia Hamilton Conference, in 1994. "I was astounded to discover the added bonus, with the animals, of a classic symbolism of fleeing North - crossing the Great River (the Rio Grande) into a Promised Land." A 'Good Story' - The Point Asked what she is trying to accomplish with each book, Hamilton -- who recently published two new books, Her Stories, African American Folktales, Fairy Tales, and True Tales (1995) and When Birds Could Talk and Bats Could Sing (1996) -- flatly rejected the notion. "That's not how you write a book," she said. "You're not trying to accomplish' anything, but tell a good story, and my books are full of good stories." These are stories that her readers, aged "8 to 80," depending on their reading level and interest, can identify with. Young teen-agers are particularly apt to enjoy Plain City (1993), a book in which Hamilton takes up the issues of homelessness and racial prejudice. Twelve year -old protagonist Buhlaire Sims is growing up in a small Midwest city and feeling like an outsider because of her rasta hair twists and honey-colored hair, which itself reflects an element of "vanilla" in her lineage. Buhlaire, who wants more than anything to know who she is, has always believed her father died in the Vietnam war. But one day, an adult points out that the timing of her birth makes this impossible; her father may still be alive. This revelation sends Buhlaire on a journey of discovery -- a journey that only begins when she finds her father living sadly and sordidly beneath a highway bridge, a homeless, mentally ill vagrant. En route, Buhlaire makes peace with her nightclub singer-mother who is never home, her aunts and uncles who hover but rarely connect and a strange boy in school who shadows her every move. "I was really interested in this winter tale," Hamilton said, "in having the reader feel the cold and know what it was like and what this kid who was always moving was like, and what that meant. She was restless, she was hunting something, she was always out on the landscape, and I wanted to put her in nature." If Buhlaire is on a journey, so is her creator, whether she's writing about contemporary teen-agers, animals in the rain forest, or slavery times. "I make choices about whom to portray, in writing books of history and liberation," Hamilton said in her acceptance speech for the 1988 Boston Globe/Horn Book award. "Liberation literature not only frees the subject of record and evidence but the witness as well, who is also the reader, who then becomes part of the struggle. We take our position then, rightly, as participants alongside the victim. We become emotionally involved in his problem; we suffer; and we triumph, as the victim triumphs, in the solution of liberation." In the interview, Hamilton added: "What happens when you tell a story and you're African American is everything you say or do somehow becomes symbolic as something else -- you don't have to try to say something because it's there, it's in your life, it's in your history. I'm strongly plot-oriented, I try to represent original ideas -- and good stories." "I collect frogs. Look at some of them. I also collect frog jokes. Do you have any? Send a frog joke to me at bodeep@aol.com. I'll answer back! Also, visit some of my favorite places." Bodeep/V. Hamilton Sources Acceptance speech for the 1988 Boston Globe/Horn Book Award for nonfiction, reprinted in The Hornbook Magazine, March/April 1989, p. 183. Entertainment Weekly, Feb. 5, 1993. "Living History With Virginia Hamilton," Instructor, February 1994, p. 64. Publicity materials supplied by Virginia Hamilton's publisher, The Blue Sky Press, an imprint of Scholastic Inc. 1995. Other: Telephone interview with Virginia Hamilton, April 24, 1995. Telephone interview with Louann Toth, April 23, 1995.