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.