Notes on Extraordinary Magic
The poems in Extraordinary Magic: The Writing Life of Virginia Hamilton are inspired by anecdotes that Virginia Hamilton shared in speeches, essays, and interviews. Below are notes on the sources for each poem.
Virginia
“She [Hamilton’s mother Etta Belle Perry Hamilton] named me Virginia lest I, or any one of us who were Perrys, forget the past.”
From: Everything of Value: Moral Realism in the Literature for Children, May Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecture, ALA, April 4, 1993, published in Virginia Hamilton: Speeches, Essays, and Conversations, edited by Arnold Adoff and Kacy Cook, Blue Sky Press, 2010
“My mother Etta Belle Perry Hamilton, named me Virginia so that I could always remember my origins.”
From: A Storyteller’s Story, keynote speech Fourth Pacific Rim Conference on Children’s Literature, Kyoto Japan, August 24-28, 1993, published in Virginia Hamilton: Speeches, Essays, and Conversations, edited by Arnold Adoff and Kacy Cook, Blue Sky Press, 2010
Fly
“… my own grandfather, Levi Perry, who made his escape as a child with his mother on the secret Underground Railroad.”
From: A Storyteller’s Story
“She [Levi Perry’s mother] delivered Levi to friends in a town nearby to my hometown, revealing to any historical sleuth that she knew well where she was going, after which she promptly disappeared.”
In some mentions of this story, Hamilton stated that her great grandmother’s name is unknown. In later writing she states that her name was Mary Cloud.
From: Everything of Value: Moral Realism in the Literature for Children, May Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecture
Mother
This story is told in the afterword to Her Stories, Hamilton’s collection of folktales and fairytales centered around African American women.
From: “More About Her Stories,” Her Stories, Scholastic, Inc, NY 1995
time
“I grew up on the outer edge of the Great Depression.” Hamilton goes on to talk a bit about the family farm and the additional work her parents did to make ends meet.
From: Everything of Value: Moral Realism in the Literature for Children
“My father, Kenneth James Hamilton, had the Knowledge in our household, and on still summer evenings in the country, he endeavored to pass it on to his children.” Hamilton talks about her father in this introduction to her biography of Paul Robeson, crediting him with teaching her about important Black Americans while playing his mandolin.
From: The Knowledge, foreword to: Paul Robeson: The Life and Times of a Free Black Man, Harper and Row, 1974
“He [her father, Kenneth Hamilton] was a mandolinist and an extraordinary one, who played in mandolin clubs and performed on radio.”
From: CSK Acceptance Speech for Sweet Brother Rush, ALA 1983, published in Virginia Hamilton: Speeches, Essays, and Conversations, edited by Arnold Adoff and Kacy Cook, Blue Sky Press, 2010
Free
“What I remember about the growing up years in Yellow Springs, Ohio is that I was free.” Hamilton underscores this further stating that she was free from work, pain, hunger, and sadness. That she was free to think and play.
From: The Spirit Spins: A Writers Revolution, 1985 First lecture in the Virginia Hamilton Lecture Series, published in Virginia Hamilton: Speeches, Essays, and Conversations, edited by Arnold Adoff and Kacy Cook, Blue Sky Press, 2010
Lies
“But it was just my good luck to have descended from a slew of talkers and storytellers – plain out-and-out liars at times – who did not merely tell stories, but created them when they forgot parts of real stories or family history, who in effect, created who they were and were they came from and what they would become through acts of imagination.” In this speech Hamilton calls her family liars, but not as a scold or to insult, for she affirms that there is a deeper truth, not necessarily dependent on facts.
From: CSK Acceptance Speech for Sweet Brother Rush
“An aunt whispered in perfect rememory the incident of Blind Martha and how she found her way down the dusty road to the spot where the log cabin had stood in which she had been born.”
From: Ah, Sweet Rememory, Horn Book Magazine December 1981, published in Virginia Hamilton: Speeches, Essays, and Conversations, edited by Arnold Adoff and Kacy Cook, Blue Sky Press, 2010
Star
Throughout her speeches, Virginia speaks admiringly of her siblings and parents.
“…I would have given anything to have been a basketball player like my oldest brother [Buster], who was a high school basketball star…”
From: Regina Medal Acceptance Speech, 1990, published in Speeches, Essays, and Conversations, edited by Arnold Adoff and Kacy Cook, Blue Sky Press, 2010
“She [Nina] certainly was smarter… she was and is the brightest in the family.”
From: Reflections, The Marygrove College Contemporary American Authors Lecture, April 1997, published in Virginia Hamilton: Speeches, Essays, and Conversations, edited by Arnold Adoff and Kacy Cook, Blue Sky Press, 2010
She was very close to her brother, Bill, who was nearest to her age. In several speeches, she recollects the time spent playing with him and his inventive nature. “…he was the one who taught me how to imagine and to dream.”
From: Untitled speech from Children’s Book Festival at Southern Mississippi University March 22, 2001, published in Virginia Hamilton: Speeches, Essays, and Conversations, edited by Arnold Adoff and Kacy Cook, Blue Sky Press, 2010
dreams
“When the Faceless One appeared out of nowhere, I flapped my arms and miraculously, floated over its head.” Hamilton describes her dream and feelings of creative empowerment detail in this speech.
From: Changing Woman, Working in Celebrating Children’s Books: Essays on Children’s Literature in Honor of Zena Sutherland, edited by Betsy Hearne and Marilyn Kaye, Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Books 1981, published in Virginia Hamilton: Speeches, Essays, and Conversations, edited by Arnold Adoff and Kacy Cook, Blue Sky Press, 2010
Writer
“I was a child of the sun and I became a writer, I suspect, at the moment my imagination saw to rise above the pursuer.”
From: Changing Woman, Working
“At age nine, I started “The Notebook,” which was an accumulation of mysteries my parents and other adults talked about – whispered gossip couched in symbolic language so that my young ears would not comprehend.”
From: Literature, Creativity and Imagination, George Peabody College for Teachers, sponsored by Association for Childhood Education International and Children’s Book Council, November 11, 1972, published in Virginia Hamilton: Speeches, Essays, and Conversations, edited by Arnold Adoff and Kacy Cook, Blue Sky Press, 2010
“…The day Uncle Saunders was killed, all of the ivy fell from the Pasony house.”
From: Ah, Sweet Rememory
Cousins
Hamilton talked about her cousin Marlene, who was a grade above her in school, a few times in her speeches. The two of them had regular adventures together. Here, Hamilton described the summer when she sold wild greens and berries to earn money. “I took on a business rival as a partner: my cousin Marlene, who barefoot the same as me, would accompany me down the hot highways as we made our daily business rounds.”
From: The Knowledge
Parallel
Hamilton spoke of parallel cultures in several speeches.
"Parallel culture describes better, I think, the multicultural communities of America."
From: Regina Medal Acceptance Speech
“I became a student of black history at the age of thirteen after I read Shirley Graham’s There Was Once a Slave, a biography of the life of Frederick Douglas, a book that literally changed my life and thought.”
From: CSK Acceptance Speech for Sweet Brother Rush
“In the public schools in the 1940’s, we black children were taught little that might suggest that our people had contributed any lasting virtue to the American experience.”
From: The Knowledge
Hogs
Hamilton recollects her first attempt at writing a novel at about eleven years old. “Nevertheless, I filled page after page with vehement prose under the hot summer sun while lying on a slant atop the burning tin roof of the hog barn.”
From: Literature, Creativity and Imagination
Memory
This poem was inspired by an essay Hamilton wrote for Horn Book. In it she coined her own word, “rememory.” I decided to speak of memory here. It is a simpler concept, to be sure, but still reflects the themes of time and place.
“Time and place are bound together, a solid sensation in the present and past of that which has been accomplished.”
From: Ah, Sweet Rememory
“The time would be that period of my early life transformed and heightened to uniqueness through the creative process; or is it the memory of my life, or my mother’s memory of her life as told to me, revised by me; or that of her mother’s and her grandmother’s and her old friends’.’
From: Changing Woman, Working
Virginia talks about being active in athletics in high school and captain of the girls’ basketball team.
From: Undated promotional piece by Virginia Hamilton from Blue Sky Press
When visiting Yellow Springs, I took a walk in Glen Helen Gorge and saw many runners. I took a creative leap here in showing Virginia and her teammates running in the gorge.
Hamilton talks specifically exploring Glen Helen gorge as a child in this essay.
“Eventually, I ranged some distance from home to the other side of town and the glen (Glen Helen, a thousand-acre wildlife preserve of forest, hill and dale and old Indian trails now owned by Antioch College).”
From: The Knowledge
Away
In her Regina Medal acceptance speech, Hamilton talks about her years just after college. She was already familiar with New York City. She’d lived there for a while when she was a student. Antioch College had, and still has, a coop program, where students work or study off campus as part of their degree. Hamilton spent her coop semesters working in New York and Pittsburgh. She briefly aspired to be a singer and sang in nightclubs, but ultimately felt that she was a bit too shy for that career. However, she always considered herself a writer and during her first years living in New York, was looking to find her place in the publishing world.
From: Regina Medal Acceptance Speech
Doors
I had the great pleasure of interviewing Virginia’s husband, Arnold Adoff, for this book. He told me of their first meeting at a Charles Mingus show in the Village.
From: Nina Crews interview with Arnold Adoff, May 5, 2020
Breaking into publishing was not easy and Hamilton received numerous rejections. But she continued to write and to study writing. When her college friend, Janet Shulman, found work in Macmillan’s Children’s Book division, she encouraged Hamilton to develop a short story into a children’s book. Eventually, Hamilton reworked the story and submitted it. Her book Zeely was edited by Richard Jackson and published by Macmillan.
From: Regina Medal Acceptance Speech
Home
For Hamilton, home was Yellow Springs, OH and after around ten years in New York City, she moved back to the family land her husband and children. Home was central to her creative process and inspired her writing in many ways. It is a central theme in M.C. Higgins, the Great, as M.C. believes the best way to protect his family by having them leave their ancestral home. In The House of Dies Drear, the Small family’s new home contains mysteries and knowledge. In Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush, the ghost brings Tree back to her mother’s childhood home.
“Having lived ten and more years in New York, I discovered that my mind had never left Ohio.”
From: Portrait of the Author as a Working Writer