By Virginia Hamilton

A PROLIFIC TELLER OF AFRICAN-AMERICAN TALES RECALLS GETTING HER INSPIRATION FROM A CHILDREN'S LIBRARIAN BEARING BOOKS OF MANY SIZES AND HUES

Mother was a farm wife, a flock owner with some 600 chickens. "Go take a look at the rainbow layers," she'd tell me. "I bet you can gather a heap of Easter eggs." I had many names as a child. One was Baby, until I grew out of it. Another was Ginny, which stuck to me all through school until after college, when a coworker in New York named me, of all things, Gin-Gin. But for Mama, Etta. Belle, the flock master, I was Virginia, the egg gatherer.

And as the hens milled around in the chicken yard, I went to the hen house to empty their nests. Occasionally, I would find variously colored eggs in some of the nests. Turquoise and olive eggs, pinkish eggs and eggs in shades of brown. They weren’t as brightly hued as were the ones we hard-boiled and painted in the kitchen with food coloring. But they were beautifully tinted by nature. Mama's rainbow-layers laid eggs in colors. They were the exotic Araucana chickens she sent away for. I believed she got them out of the Sears catalog, because most every thing came to us from it. But now, I'm no longer sure about that. She got baby chickens from somewhere, some of which grew into the proud Araucanas.

I knew that chickens laid tinted eggs long before most children had heard the news.

When I told my class at school about my job as colored-egg gatherer, some of the town kids snickered, "Both you and the eggs are colored!" The country kids who came by bus, knowing that all manner of mystery happened on farms, kept their mouths shut.

I was on my own with rainbow chickens and colored baby chicks.

I told Mama and she said, "Go take a look in the library."

"For what?" I wanted to know.

"For the rainbow-layers," Mama said. "There's more than one kind of chick with color. More than Araucanas." And then she gave me what I thought of as a secret smile.

So I took a look in the library. I was interested in getting a book about exotic chickens.

But I ended up with Puss in Boots and other fairy tales. I'd get sideswiped every time by all those straight-back silent sentinels in long still rows.

Short books and tall books, blue books and green books. What's in them? I would wonder. They had more colors than the rainbow- egg layers ever thought of. And a greater supply of subjects.

Today, I realize that was my mother's point. Get Virginia to the library and she will find out many things.

As soon as she entered our class, we forgot everything about school. We eagerly lined up, boys and girls in separate but mostly equal lines. The Story Lady then paraded us out of the school building, into the winter cold.

"Watch out for ice, children. It's slippery, be careful," said she. Not far through the cold, was a glorious plot of snowland surrounding a massive white mansion that was a feast to my eyes the whole of my childhood on the trips to the library. We crossed a very short street with four buildings, one of which was a house that was cousin to the house Hansel and Gretel made the mistake of entering. It was a lovely little cottage, shaped like a gingerbread house and made of gray fieldstone, with a red tile roof. It was our local-library. For years, I thought the Story Lady lived there and owned its world of books.

All the way, she never stopped talking. "Ice storm last night, you were asleep -- look up to the telephone lines. Hear them hum? Children, they are singing about books!" We stopped a moment to listen. Sure enough, the wires hummed as though high voices were streaming inside them, urging us to the library.

"And up there," she told us, "see all the little sparrows lined up side by side on the wires? See how they are covered in little sheets of ice? Poor things, they’re dead! Caught by the storm and frozen like pieces of meat at the market. Do you see, children? Mark my words, by the time we get back, they will have thawed, and gone plop, plop, plop, to the ground."

We stared in awe. Our Story Lady showed us the world around us. If it was there on the way to the library, we were sure to see it. The white mansion we walked by each week was owned by a philanthropist named Mills, she told us.

In the library, we would sit on a large hook rug and listen to the Story Lady read aloud to us about Ali Baba, Cinderella, Rumpelstiltskin, Thumbelina, and other stories whose names I don't recall. But I remember the Story Lady's sparkling voice. I won't ever forget how she held the book cradled in her arms as she read. I felt she was not grown up, like my parents, and not a child like me. She was a treasure, a precious gift brought to us children by the magic in books.

I first heard the legends of John Henry and Paul Bunyan from her. A great reader aloud, she made stories come to life for me. And after our story time, we were free to find books we wanted to check out and take home. I usually took four or five.

I couldn't wait to read them. I didn't know what I might find in books. Most of us children didn't own anything more than comic books. We chose them because of their sizes, their pictures, the color of their covers. But we loved to read. I do believe the Story Lady was partly responsible for that. Some kind of freedom she gave us. Never did she censure us for interrupting a story to ask questions. Like my mother, she was a giver of learning. She gave it out freely.

Afterwards, on the way back to school, our Story Lady showed us where the poor sparrows had plopped in the street. "What goes up, must come down," she said, emphatically. "Stars do fall."

It might seem that I’ve presented a bit of whimsy here about a farm woman who kept chickens and a librarian who lived for show-and-tell. But they were both what libraries are about, I think. Libraries are the repositories of our collective memory, our history, our traditions, our yesterdays, our news of the day and our tomorrows. They allow us to know about all of us – or they should. They keep accounts about those of us who prosper as well as the lives and times of the poor and the enslaved who have little or nothing. They tell about good and evil. They never let us forget who we are, for their worth stands by the knowledge they keep and save for us.

Nothing can shut them up, or down, as long as they and their librarians remain givers of learning, given freely to everyone.

For me, the American library is a living entity. It is consciousness that thrives and grows in those who partake of it. Perhaps I have acquired from libraries in more ways than most. I have studied in them, been helped by librarians in them all of my life. In my childhood, when I tired of my cousins and friends, of playing hopscotch and ring-a-levio, and jumping double-dutch, I walked the half-mile into town to the library. I would enter the goodness of it. No one and nothing bothered me there, not even the quiet. I was free to look and see. I’m sure the librarian must’ve had her eye on me as I grew and changed from child to teenager.

I had the luck to discover, at age 14, Shirley Graham’s There Was Once a Slave, about the life of Frederick Douglass. It was the same day I picked out Forever Amber, having heard older children gossiping about it. I don’t remember whether I took Forever Amber home. I rather doubt my dear mother would have liked me to. I scanned the novel standing there and couldn’t understand what the fuss was about. Such steaming romance was a part of the library. And so, too, was the life of orator and abolitionist Douglass, the former slave.

Since the beginning, and since I was a child, public libraries have been the only place poor children could obtain books for free on the widest variety of subjects. It is one of the places where free information is considered a public good and an imperative. I have used the public library as a child reader, as a student, as a researcher, and finally, as a writer-turned-lecturer on the subject of my books and writing.

On a cold, terribly windy January evening this year, I presented a program at the Wright Memorial Library in Oakwood, Ohio. I’d not been there before. We drove, my husband and I, for 45 minutes through the windswept, snowy landscape to get there. I was certain we would not have many people this bitter night.

We were ushered into a lecture/meeting room that seated about 75. People came in slowly. Before a presentation is the time when I gather my nerves and my thoughts, and hope that my written talk will be variously amusing, thoughtful, and of interest to the audience. But one never knows for sure. Then it was time.

I was introduced by Tony Walder, director of the library, and I made my way to the podium. Reading my lecture, I looked up to discover the room was full – and still people came. Every seat was taken.

People stood three deep in the rear. They lined the walls, and children sat in bunches in front on the floor. Nothing so thrills an author than the effort the public makes to come hear her.

I always like my audiences in libraries. They are multi-generational – children, parents, grandparents. They are of variety, of diversity. They are teachers, librarians, other interested writers. All are singularly devoted to books. They understand they are the other side of the coin. The other hand, too, of the author. If I am the call, the audience is the response. I joked, saying they had all gone stir-crazy over the long capricious Ohio winter, and decided at last to get out of their houses this winter night, no matter what the "show" or the weather. They smiled, but weren’t to be dissuaded from their serious interest in my books for children.

I talked to them about what I do and why, about parallel culture communities, about cultural learning to be found in the literature I make, and what it means to be African American in this society. I told them that we of the parallel cultures want to be counted as givers to the learning process of children. We want our heritages and our contributions to society to be seen as significant contributions to the social order. We want our books in libraries so that all children can know about all of us. We learn about one another through the books we read and enjoy. Finally, we want to see our books as sentinels – brown, black, yellow, white, green, or purple – on the shelves.

I think I know what more I would like to see. As honorary chair of the Coretta Scott King Award Awareness Campaign for the next three years, I would like to see more recognition for the black artists and writers who have been honored with a Coretta Scott King Award (www.ala.org/srrt/csking/index.html); I would like to see a special place in public libraries for Coretta Scott King Award Books, displayed in a public manner in a place of honor. It certainly would be an aid to students doing projects during Black History Month. I, myself, am ever so popular that time of the year. But I must say, schoolchildren read my books, far beyond just The People Could Fly, all during the year. It would be nice if I could send young people off to their libraries knowing they would have all the information on the wonderful Coretta Scott King Award books right at hand, every day of the year.

This article presents a rare opportunity for me to speak directly to librarians and colleagues throughout American libraries. We have been true fellow and sister workers for the 30-plus years I have been writing books. You are a hand up to authors and readers both.

There will be activities sponsored by the Coretta Scott King Task Force of the American Library Association’s Social Responsibilities Round Table over the next three years that will continue to open lines of communication between black authors and illustrators and American libraries. And as we renew and strengthen our focus on public education and reading, we increase our efforts in support of the finest literature for the young and the active participation of librarians.

We of the parallel cultures want to be counted as givers to the learning process of children.

VIRGINIA HAMILTON, celebrated children's author, has won three Coretta Scott King Author Awards and six Honor Book Awards over the past 20 years. Her newest book, Bluish, is scheduled to be published this fall.

American Libraries * June/July 1999