Virginia Hamilton: An Interview about Her Work and Children's Books

When Virginia Hamilton began writing she reached back into her heritage for much of her material. Hamilton's grandfather was a fugitive slave who by way of the Underground Railroad settled in Yellow Springs. The Hamiltons still make the village their home and Virginia's rich childhood years gave her much to draw on when she later began writing children's literature. To date Virginia Hamilton has written more than a dozen books with more on the way. She's what you might call a yellow Spring success story having won international acclaim for her children stories which captivate adults as well. Being born and raised in the village I wondered what it would be Ginia Hamilton's earliest memories of Yellow Springs. My earliest are not of the village. My earliest are of our farm I would say. We had a small farm along Dayton street and my uncle had a farm across the street another uncle behind his so that end of town I felt was mine. I could roam for seemingly hours and still be on family property. So. It was very nice I have very pleasant memories of my childhood of clothes flapping on the

line of berry picking you know all those wonderful things and it was quite true. Sounds like a cliche. How do you think growing up in Alice Springs shaped your writing and the kinds of things that you were writing about especially when you're writing children's literature. Well most of my books I have rural settings and one of them planted you Brown takes place in New York and that comes from my years that I live there. But most of them have country or hill or river backgrounds. And I think they that has influenced the prince's influence that the rural community in the background of my stories. Why did you start writing children's literature. I didn't. I majored in writing here at Antioch and I was simply writing stories and for many years tried to get published. I had an agent I had a long correspondence with the New Yorker about stories I always wanted to be a New Yorker writer but I couldn't quite fit into that mold. But they were very nice and very encouraging and I was

writing in adult stories and I had a friend who went to Antioch who was working for Macmillan and half of you working in the Children's Book of Mormon. She remembered my stories for Mattie I can see they would make a good children's book so I said What's a children's book. Because I didn't know. So one of those stories which was called the Westfield became my first book Seeley and I had no problem published getting published once I started writing children's. So you just adapted what you had written. That's right. Religion and it took me about a year to understand what a children's book was and after that it wasn't too difficult. When you sit down to write a children's book what kinds of messages do you want to convey to young readers that you're writing for. All right I think I don't sit down to write a children's book I write as I would write and I know the kind of things that make young people's literature different my books go from anywhere from 8 years old up to 16 or 17 or junior college level depending on what I'm writing. The message is simply come through the story because I don't think you can. If you are a

black writer writing about black subject matter you can stop from being symbolic It just simply happens. You know and anything that any problems that I might have in this society comes through my literature I don't even have to draw it just is part of the stories that I tell you. I believe that I don't go about trying to make put messages in there just there. I was reading some parts of the House the House of guys dear. And it's so steeped in the Underground Railroad I'm writing history. Did that growing up here and this area which is also steeped in writing and black history. How did that affect your writing I think it was very it all came together. There are many houses here that were stations or part of the Underground Railroad we have the octagonal house which that architecture was designed to hide slaves there the old Stanley Hall had passed underground passages and so forth many houses like that. And I grew up knowing those things. Of course my my grandfather was a fugitive on the Underground

Railroad he came here as a young boy with his mother. So I knew all these things and I had to do a lot of research for the house of Dyce year because I wanted everything to be possible. You know I had to know where the underground railroad came up I don't know what kind of houses how they looked inside and so forth all the things that I want to do I want to make sure they were possible. They didn't have to be historically true they just had to be possible. You know if you if you have a true historical situation A and B in between A and B are all kinds of possibilities. That's what I had to research. His father had given him a book for his birthday. It was a raw bound in real leather

about the Civil War the Underground Railroad and slaves. Thomas love the smell of real leather and he rubbed the book lightly back and forth beneath his nose and he leaned back looking idly through the pages. In a moment his brothers were nestled against him but Thomas did not even notice. He had come across a curious piece of information earlier of the one hundred thousand slaves who fled from the south to Canada between 1810 and 1850. Forty thousand of them had passed through Ohio. Thomas didn't know why this fact surprised him. Yet it did. You know a lot about slaves. His father had taught civil war history in North Carolina. He would be teaching it in Ohio in the very town in which they were going to live. He had taught Thomas even more history than Thomas cared to know. Thomas knew that a large Anderson had been the superintendent of the Underground Railroad in Ohio and that he had finally died in prison in Kentucky. He knew that in the space of seven years one thousand slaves had died in Kentucky. But the fact that forty thousand escape. Slaves had fled through

Ohio started him thinking. Well hio will be my new home he thought. A lot of those slaves must have stayed in Ohio because Canada was crowded and they could have believed. Or they had liked larger Anderson so much they'd stayed with him or maybe once they saw the Ohio River. They thought it was the Jordan that the promised land lay on the other side. The idea of exhausted slaves finding the promised land on the banks of the Ohio River plays Thomas he never seen you know however what he could clearly imagine freed Slayer's riding horses up and down its slopes. He pictured the slaves living in great communities as had the Iroquois and they had brave leaders like old Elijah Anderson. All. Old. It sounds like when you were growing up it was something. Maybe I'm picking this up just from the.

The main character in the house of Di's dear who who really wanted to learn about black history and we are really excited by that in fact that this was a house in the Underground Railroad right. Well his father was a historian so naturally some of this rubbed rubbed off on him. Do you think that young people are interested. Do you think that they crave to learn about that. Oh I'm sure I get all kinds of letters and that's one of my most popular books in paperback and hardcover. It's interesting that the west of Kansas kids don't know about the Underground Railroad because they don't have it out there is not part of their history and they're very curious they think it's a railroad that there were trains I mean you really have to explain really basic things. But they are fascinated by that part of history and our textbooks are getting better in schools and we know more about that. We emphasize that in Spanish history and not too much Jewish history but a lot of black history are going into the history textbooks so they're learning about it in this kind of stories very

intriguing. So you think that something like a mystery anything that's a mystery in the first place kids are intrigued by it but if you have all these other elements it's even more interesting for you. Now you moved away from Yellow Springs right. I hated it. I did. When I was a teen I hated this. And I mean when you're a teenager in Yellow Springs Ohio Nothing could be more boring right. And I couldn't stand it I couldn't wait to get away. So I went to Antioch of course and my first job was in New York because I had to get to New York and that was my big dream at the time. So I worked for the Community Service Society and I work for the Urban League and you know whatever to go to New York and it was just great getting away you know and seeing the big city and all that kind of thing. And of course when I grew up and became an adult and married and had children I couldn't wait to get back. You know I love New York until the day I hated it. So that's the way it was when I lived there about 15 years. So you needed

that. Oh yeah you know yeah. You started moving towards a fantasy type wellness which I guess you consider for kids and adults. It's hard to categorize me in England I'm considered and reviewed as though I were an adult writer because they don't make that clear separation we do here young English young people read tremendously and are extremely sophisticated so they can read all kinds of things where our kids aren't quite so sophisticated many of them are some of them are. There's always been fantasy elements in my writing from the very beginning in the first book zealot who looks like I want to see you know she's an American girl six and half feet tall in the night traveler that represents the fugitive slave and so forth. There's a kind of surreal background because I think Ohio is so real I've always felt that way. There's certain times when you look at farmhouses in the sunlight or in the shade that it's in this vast land of. Of farms and

planes and so forth it's very surreal to me and I think it was a very lonely kind of aspect when I was a child to the nights in the evenings in the silence a very very quiet in the country. And it was said in many ways it was frightening. You know there were there was a lot of emptiness that I remember although much of it was happy I remember the silence and the emptiness and the surreal quality. You know although I could name it. So I think that it all comes from that and more and more I'm interested in fantasy I became very involved in science fiction and I've done the last thing I've done as a trilogy which I call the justice cycle. I call it psychic fiction because it has to do with amazing powers of the mind among a lot of children and they go to the future in a future world etc. So that was very difficult for me because it was outside of my realistic community here and very hard. And I'm glad I did it but I don't know if I'm going to do anymore you know.

What do you think that type of story says to kids. Well it's based on my feet my fear of a devastating destruction. And my concern about what we can do. As we develop as humans to counter-act I'm my theory is that. Nothing happens by chance that our genetic structure will change as the need for another kind of security changes. That is we will evolve so that we can protect ourselves. You know if you think of it as our bodies as spaceships for our genes who will protect themselves at all costs then I think we will change tremendously in order to to exist in the future so that's that's why I did that kind of book and that's what I was trying to say. Thomas and Levi being identical and inseparable had known to each other's extrasensory ability since childhood. Justus had known of her superior

powers only this year and with the help of Dorian and his mother the sensitive. But from the beginning Thomas had suspected she had the power and he had shown often enough through the years that he never liked her. Now that your read extrasensory she had could offset the combined forces of the others. Thomas Dorian Levi and even that of the sensitive it was she who had formed them into a unit so they could mind jump to the future. A person over there has to be joined. There's no other way to survive. Thomas had sworn he would never become part of a unit a monster machine he called it controlled by her. But they had become the first unit under her direction and Thomas had built up enough grudging malice against her to do her harm somehow. He found a way to overcome her. Their first trip to the future ended after the second day they created the cool and cleansed it. They had heard no unusual sounds had seen nothing beyond the dust. With the feeling of let down they joined into the unit and mind jumped back to their own time.

A few days later the four of them made a second trip to dust when they came upon a marvelous creature. They were again the unit the unit had passed through the crossover between past and future. It had concentrated its energy on the one certainty it had just planned. The watcher had protected it through surrounding it with its He meant force. The unit materialized in the putrid place Raul was the same murkiness of dusk. The watcher created from them and they were again their separate selves. It's just like. We can jump whenever we want to. So what if we want to come to the same place. But it might be a different part of it. Well who cares. This is the future you can have it buddy. There's not a bloody thing. But he was wrong they had not been long became aware of a creature galloping across the wasteland. Right now I'm I'm I'm considered an experimenter.

And right now I'm doing a serious contemporary ghost story a novel which has to do with ghosts and I'm also doing at the same time for Harper and Row that's for film no division of Putnam but for Harper and Row I'm doing a novel a very funny book I think set in the period of reconstruction having to do with a god and a goddess who come down from Mount Kilimanjaro and disguised as albatross's to help the blacks who are coming across. And then during the Middle Passage and they they hide themselves in southern soil to wait and to help the black people it's very funny. So I'm trying to do all kinds of things you know there's no reason why we can't bring in our myths our superstitions and so forth I believe we carry all these things around with us anyway. So all I'm doing is personifying them and bringing them out. Writers frequently say that the most difficult thing in the beginning is is getting published trying to get somebody who will publish it right. Did you find that. I mean that's a that's a strike against you in the.

Just to start out with your right to try and it is extremely difficult and it is probably the worst system I've ever encountered in any kind of business. You know you would think you would make it easy for people to get in it but it's not it's very difficult it's still the kind of business that if you know somebody it's a lot easier. Only in the in the fact that you can get to the people that you need to get to. Now I couldn't get an agent for about five years and I couldn't get an agent because I wasn't published. You know and I just want to around and around I couldn't get published because I didn't have an agent you know. And it was very important to have an agent. When I finally got an agent through a sheer fluke you know. The next day I had a publisher interested in what I wanted to do. But it's just extremely difficult and we help a lot of people. People in this town who have gotten published because we knew where to go to get the stuff and you still have to have the goods but sometimes you have it and you can't find the right publisher or you don't know where to go. So as a writer who has been successful in getting published and it has become a

successful writer you feel a responsibility to help. Oh and yes we read a lot of stuff and my husband acts as an agent for about 30 writers and the area of Chicago also out on the West Coast. So there's a very thin shade between the one level of almost ready and ready you know and so you can cross over in a day or a week or a year and you never quite what you know when you see it. If I if I read something I know it once you know and I've had extraordinary luck I've had it. I think uncanny publishers who looked at some really bad stuff of mine and saw something that they felt if they worked with me they could develop and they that's the kind of people I I ran into people who are willing to work with me and to show me how to do certain things. So that's what we try to do roles. In the House of Di's drearier the main character was little boy right. And as I was reading just a set of

brothers and I slammed the main character was a little girl. Do you identify more with little girls or little boys. Well I haven't checked about the number of girls or boys that are my protagonists in the books I would imagine they are slightly more boys because I grew up with two older brothers and I think probably when I started I was interested in and having the freedom the boys had in my stories and so I had main characters that were boys. Now I didn't know that books that have male protagonists better. Folks that have curious what they do and it's I don't know why it's that girls and I suppose this is the system the girls will read boys books first or more so than they will their own books because that's still in our society of emulating the boys even though it's changing they still look up to the boys and they were read boys books but they're still read girls books too. But boys said won't necessarily read girls books which

lead character that's a girl you know so what I try to do is to do both. Usually I have three characters that in some way are related in that and that are you know important to the story. Do you think that's changing. Oh I think it's changing yes. It's very slow to change I have to do is to go to a high school or middle school basketball game you know boys basketball game and you see the whole system hasn't changed a bit. You know the girl the cheerleaders and you know the whole thing. But slowly we're getting girls to understand they can do other things you know they can play basketball too. And that kind of thing. My daughter was on the baseball team boys baseball team in their earlier years you know it was difficult because she wasn't very strong. She was small on the small side then she found track and soccer and that kind of thing where they can be equal in in a sense. Did you find it all while you were just beginning to get published and to write that being a woman for him to do it. Well you see and children's or young people's publishing it is the only area of

publishing where almost all the people you deal with are women up to the vice president level. Even the vice presidents are women so I've never had a problem. We've all been women working together and that's been really great. You know so all I began supporting myself at about age 14 and I've never had any difficulty you know with males or females I don't think of course I had only menial jobs in he or Clark typing in filing in bookkeeping that kind of stuff. But that's all the skill I had to you know I never had to go out and be an executive like many of the women I know who get less money and so forth and than their male counterparts but even that is changing they have had their unions now and that's making a very big difference. And you've also written a couple of nonfiction. Yes I have three nonfiction works one biography of the beat a boy's biography of Paul Robeson and then a collection of the voices writings with my own commentaries which I think is a very pretty book and I like it.

Was this something strange to you to do after writing a lot of. Well I I wrote the let's see I think I wrote the ropes in book at the same time I was writing MC Higgins the great I was doing MC in the morning and Rowson at night and that was obviously younger then. I had no voice training to do I don't know I it really worked because I know the different kinds of writing seem to complement one another and one was a relief from the other. I've never wanted to do any more broader views at that time I was in the forefront of doing that kind of biography. It was a time when when I started doing that a boy spoke most of the boys writings were out of print they were just coming back into print. When I did the ropes and book I couldn't find material that had been confiscated from all over the country. And then after that is when everything began to come back into print and a lot of people started doing biographies young people's biographies about different kinds that had been done before you know serious biographies.

So I've never wanted to do others they're very hard to do. My experiences with those two books anyway because of the subject matter and the material was very hard to to get material and it took so long it took about five years for each one of those books that it's you know I couldn't do it anymore. Why did you pick those two. Well they had a boy's cousin married one of my father's relatives and he was there to people you couldn't speak against in my household one was FDR and one was a boy so you know they were gods. And the Crisis magazine came into our house every you know every month and I just grew up knowing something about him and when I somebody asked me to do a book I said well I'll do it if I can do it on two boys and they said fine. I knew nothing about it if I had known he'd lived to be 98 or whatever 93 and he wrote every minute. I have never done of the masses of material I had to go through was incredible. You know what I learned a lot. I learned to keep my mouth shut anyway. What kind of writers influenced you as you were.

Well I think that not children's writers because I did know there wasn't really a huge industry as there is now it's a billion dollar industry both foreign soil and here I was influenced by a classic education here at Antioch I read full honor and Thomas and Hemingway and all the people that I was supposed to read you know. And I think really Falcon was my greatest influence I loved his writing and I loved that Southern writers. Eudora Welty Truman Capote and all of them. And also Dubois is writing I'm very interested in the way he wrote and he used to put on huge pageants. There was a period when you wrote pageants and 10000 black people would come by Riverside and they would put on these extraordinary pageants. Well that's gone out of our consciousness we don't do things like that anymore but I sometime want to write about that kind of pageantry I think in the reconstruction book I can do it. But those that kind of writing influenced me a lot. And and the fact that I always read I read

everything from a very early age my father. I had all of Poe's work in the house he said. Subscribe to The New Yorker I don't know why here is this man living in Yellow Springs Ohio and working at the college you always got a New Yorker every week. I love the New Yorker. So I grew there and you know I grew to love it too. So that's kind of how I got influenced. I like to just ask you about the process of writing. What is your process from the beginning of the germ of the idea for the story and Iris. That's what I was doing in Chicago yesterday telling everybody about the creative process. And you wind up saying I don't know how I do it. I get all I can say is that suddenly I have an idea and I don't know where it comes or I have a picture or I have an image you know. And I began to play around with it usually it's an idea. I have my editor who is the editor in chief William Morrow Greenwalt books says that it's not true that this is a story I've made up I really start with characters.

And she says whether I'm aware of it or not I have a character in my head first and I've denied it for 10 years but she's probably right I'm slowly coming around you know trying to slow down as this is a lightning swift process is something that you don't really think about that it's happening. It just starts happening and I think she's absolutely right I start with a character and character is defined plot in action. They defined the book. It's what your characters do that make history. It's not the story first and then the characters. I think where do you draw your characters from. Do you find yourself drawing them from your every day life and the people that you see every day or the people that obviously you've John some of them from your childhood. Yes I think in the early books more so certainly in a realist sundown. It has to do. I don't know if you know that book. It has to do with Indian Amerind and black heritage combined which there was a great deal of in this area of Ohio. You know the Indian heritage heritage has always been subjugated to the

black people who are who look Indian and so forth are really living as black people although they have these strange culture things that are unaccounted for. You know in their own culture. So I was very interested in that and I found characters in my mind that could demonstrate that. I think that the young woman in the story appears to be light skinned black. She has a brother who has managed to make himself look totally Amerind and who flaunts his Indian as you know so she's having a very difficult time knowing who she is. You know she has this flamboyant brother that everybody's you know you know and who is she you know. So perhaps some of that comes from my own questions of my own childhood you know I think every kid goes through wondering if they're adopted or what. You know and I think that might have been so with me. I think that. It's always so funny when I ask any kind of artist writer or artist about that creative process because I think it's hard for people who aren't who don't have that there really

is creativity to understand. I mean I just keep thinking when I talk to people. How how do you do it. You know I don't know. And it's very difficult like I have a daughter who's 17 who is extremely talented and she suddenly realizing that there other people don't have these talents and it's very she finds it very curious that the things that she can do without even thinking other people can do at all. You know and I think it is is something that you know you realize is really kind of a give you know that it does and I can do stories and stories and stories. And I don't really have to think about them the night before I sit down and just write them. You know there's something very logical about the unconscious for a for people who are creative. You know it's all there. And my my my theory is that if you have an idea someplace you also have the mechanism for creating a whole system for that idea.

And so far it's been so you know but the creative process is extremely elusive and I don't know how you can ever explain it although that's what I do hope that I go around the country trying to have people say wow where do you get your ideas and how do you do it and those are the hardest questions because I can't tell them you know really I can only do it I suppose if I could tell them I couldn't do it you know. So I guess us and creative people have disappeared. I don't know maybe there's a way of tapping it. I think people are creative and they may not realize it. You know there's one branch of my family that people can do all sorts of things with their hands. You know they just have this extreme ability. And to me that's just fascinating.