Looking for America

Virginia Hamilton -- School Library Journal, 5/1/1999

photo of Virginia Hamilton by Jim Calloway

Virginia Hamilton is honorary chair of the Coretta Scott King Award's public awareness campaign: "Images of the Past, Promises for the Future, 30-Plus Years of CSK Awards." Hamilton's latest novel, Bluish (Scholastic/Blue Sky) will be published in the fall.

I have a very clear childhood memory of being in my hometown's African Methodist Episcopal Church. I am tightly squeezed in the pew between my mother, who is plump, and elderly Miss Wing, who is bony. I rest my head against Miss Wing so I can be closer to her sweet scent of violets. She pats my knee. Mother tells me to sit up straight. "Shhh," she says, urgently. "Don't make a sound." I don't.

My father rises from the front pew and sits down in a carved wood chair, facing the congregation. He has his mandolin in hand, and he begins to play a classical piece. I think my dad has the only mandolin in Yellow Springs, Ohio. None of my uncles has one. I think he makes up the music he plays the way I make up stories. The sound of his Gibson 1902, patent-pending, ivory-inlaid instrument is stirring.

Kenneth Hamilton was an accomplished musician, who led mandolin clubs across America in the early part of the 20th century. In that period of 1902 to 1905, his groups were integrated, black and white, male and female.

That Sunday so long ago, my father's performance brought some new, melodic breadth into the AME Church and into my being. Always when he played, I heard Dad's voice in my mind, telling me stories. For he would play softly of an evening at home. When mother finished telling her household tales, he would quietly talk about himself, as a high school and college football player in Iowa, 1898, '99, and on, and the poetry he wrote. The whole time, his fingers whispered up and down the mandolin strings.

Dad told about grand places. He'd lived in Calgary, Banff, and Edmonton, while working on the Canadian Transcontinental Railroad. He spoke of vast ballrooms filled with twirling couples -- he was an exceptional dancer. He painted a vivid picture of the last great gatherings of the high plains Native Americans. I never forgot the images he drew with words.

Kenneth Hamilton believed that the more a child like myself knew about life and the world, the better she would be prepared for what might come. While my mother's tales were generally about her side of the family, the Perry clan, all of Dad's stories were lessons about looking out and around, and looking for America.

My parents' accounts taught me a sense of community, as well as the idea that there was more than one place to be in life. I learned the equal worth of peoples, of caring for the earth's environment. The farm life that encompassed my childhood, and the land, like a rich carpet undulating from the outward boundary of my country village and beyond, were lessons in preservation, in using and never wasting. They reflected my mom and dad's calm perseverance in the face of storms, drought, and relentless winters. I see a direct correlation between one's childhood days and nights and how these seemingly ordinary times, spaces, and places flourish in one's imagination. It is this natural process that has shaped what is most meaningful to me and has determined the kinds of books I write.

My first book, Zeely (S & S), about a black, six-and-a-half-foot pig shepherdess said to have descended from African royalty, was published in 1967. The Coretta Scott King (CSK) Award -- which is administered by the Coretta Scott King task force of the American Library Association's Social Responsibilities Round Table -- began two years later, during a time of great social upheaval, as many strove to gain individual and civil rights. Naturally, the task force and I felt keenly the popular assertion of the '60s, "Black Is Beautiful." And independently, we sought ways to champion the beautiful, while working for a more just society.

At the 1969 ALA conference in Atlantic City, two school librarians, Mabel McKissick and Glyndon Greer, found themselves vying for a last poster of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on display at publisher John Carroll's booth. They engaged in conversation with Mr. Carroll and shared their concern that "since the Newbery and Caldecott Medals were in existence, neither of these awards had been presented to a minority author or illustrator."1 (It was 1974 before my novel M. C. Higgins, the Great (S & S) won the Newbery medal and cleared one of those hurdles.) According to the historical record, Mr. Carroll then declared, "Why don't you ladies start an award to do just that?" And so they did.

The first CSK Award presentation took place in 1970, at the New Jersey Library Association's annual meeting. There, Lillie Patterson was presented with a plaque for her biography Martin Luther King, Jr.: Man of Peace (Garrard, 1969), a book that introduced young readers to Dr. King's struggle to achieve racial equality through nonviolence.

Today, we have a more racially and culturally connected generation than we had 30 years ago, when the CSK Award began. The youth of today have grown up with more exposure to other races through sports and school activities, music and television, dating, and the easy mobility of the population. Their world is multicultural, multiracial, and multinational. Their world is more diverse.

However, diversity means only that there is racial and cultural variety. It doesn't reveal the way individual groups understand one another or how much they care to know and learn about each other. But the time is ripe for organizations such as the CSK task force and for those of us who care about children's books to take the lead in teaching about race, racial equality, and also racism. It is important that the new millennium's children know how to think about the world they see. And we can help them to better understand the world by sharing our knowledge of children's literature.

African-American artists and writers have added strongly to the expanding canon of American children's literature, bringing a wide range of fresh literary and illustrative ideas into public view. CSK Award-winning titles such as John Steptoe's Mufaro's Beautiful Daughter: An African Tale (Lothrop, 1987), Faith Ringgold's Tar Beach (Crown, 1991), Walter Dean Myers's Fallen Angels (Scholastic, 1988), Mildred Taylor's The Road to Memphis (Dial, 1990), and Tom Feelings's Soul Looks Back in Wonder (Dial, 1993) are but a few of the books that have contributed greatly to the creation of a more inclusive, more tolerant society.

By means of the CSK task force's public awareness campaign, we hope also to catch the attention of promising artists and authors who need our support in order to grow. Somewhere out there, I suspect, there is more than one young Virginia Hamilton or Jan Spivey Gilcrist; there are Walter Dean Myers and Brian Pinkney fledglings. I knew very little about children's literature when I started out. I learned from publishers and editors. And I learned from an organization that gave a breakfast and awards honoring new makers of art and literature.

The early CSK breakfasts started small but grew large. They have become so vitally necessary that even I, a notorious morning grouch, no longer complain about getting up at a beastly hour to attend the overflowing, sumptuous breakfast. The best reward is the pleasure of being introduced to artists and writers who are experiencing their first taste of public recognition and are accepting what often are their very first awards.

I attend the breakfast whenever possible, knowing it is my joyful responsibility to be counted, to mean something to the ideal of heterogeneity, and to matter to those unknown bards and painters who will come up next. Besides, it's fun; it's exciting to be there. It's that progressive spirit of my Dad and others that I find there, and which reminds me that when one goes looking for America, one is bound to find it.

The CSK breakfast is a study in diversity; and when we go looking for America, it is one marvelous place to behold. The flowing summer attire of the attendees and the local schoolchildren (20 to 50 are invited) in their morning best, remind me of a hometown special Sunday. It's a pleasure to see my friends and to observe the camaraderie of other artists and writers.

Amidst the chatter and greetings of the breakfast crowd, I have to smile. I wonder what my dad would have thought of the conclave. "It started small, but now see what's happened?" my mind speaks to him, as I observe the more than 500 individuals being seated. I imagine Dad chuckling. "S'what happens when you go looking...!" he says, knowingly.

1 The Coretta Scott King Awards Book, From Vision to Reality, edited by Henrietta M. Smith, p. IX (ALA, 1994).

Coretta Scott King Award-Winning Books

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