LITMIR.BIZ

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teaching her about others who came before her and accomplished great things.

      Kenneth would take off his white work jacket from his job at the Tearoom, loosen up his tie, and share his wisdom. Virginia sat on her father’s lap and listened to his soft, modest voice teach her about baseball player Jack Johnson, who played for and managed the Kansas City Giants in 1910 and 1911. And, as Virginia liked to sing, he’d thrill her with stories about Florence Mills, a cabaret singer, dancer, and comedienne, and Blind Lemon Jefferson, a blues and gospel singer.¹⁷

      Kenneth told her stories about Paul Robeson and William Edward Burkhardt Du Bois, otherwise known as W. E. B. Du Bois, two men she would write biographies about later in her life.¹⁸ Paul Robeson was a handsome and talented athlete, actor, and lawyer who was an international activist against racism. W. E. B. Du Bois was the first African American to earn a PhD from Harvard in 1895. He wrote about racism and became one of the cofounders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

      Kenneth was well read and subscribed to the New Yorker and The Crisis, the NAACP magazine. Virginia’s father had many coverless, old, and musty periodicals stacked around the house. She discovered a picture of the Watusi people in one of the magazines. The Watusis are the tallest people in the world. The image stayed with her for many years, and ultimately served as the basis for her first novel for children, Zeely. Her father also read the Sherlock Holmes mysteries by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Virginia got caught up in the stories, and learned how mysteries were written and plotted as a result. These books were early inspiration for Virginia’s The House of Dies Drear, a mystery.¹⁹

      Of all her siblings, Virginia was closest to her older brother Bill, a dreamer. She stood by while he tried to dig a hole to China. He was certain to get to the other side of the world. She played up in the tree house he created, looking up into the Ohio sun-filled summer sky, taking in the scent of sweet, country air.

      Bill had a paper route in Yellow Springs. In the winter, he pulled Virginia around on a sled as she held his papers for him. He shared his dreams for the future.²⁰

      Virginia played with siblings and cousins so hard that some days she was plumb tuckered out. Her cousin Marlene was her best friend and the two of them ventured through all the neighboring family farms.

      “Memories of all those years, of summer days and winter nights, storms and sunshine, have given ample food to my imagination all my life,” she wrote.

      Words from her female relatives filled her world. “Whether while resting from the hot summer heat and enjoying sassafras tea, or warming up by the fire in the parlor on a cold winter’s evening, tales were told. Tales of nature’s power, about ourselves in the world, where we came from, and who we were.”²¹

      And, there were amusing stories told, too. There’s the one about an uncle who apprehended the bandits who robbed a nearby bank. To the culprits, her uncle looked like a madman, with wild hair, dressed in his pajamas and shooting two pocket pistols at them. To avoid him, they dove into an empty well, breaking their arms and legs. The uncle was beside himself and fell into the well after them.

      Then there was the one about how, back in 1938, Virginia’s Aunt Leah was listening to the radio on Sunday, October 30. Orson Welles was on the air. His broadcast of an adaptation of H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds was in progress. Wells’s story tells of an invasion of Earth by Martians. The radio play suggested that the invasion was actually taking place. The show created panic all over the country, including in many of the Hamilton and Perry households. Aunt Leah, being very superstitious, roused family members “in three counties.” She, along with many male relatives, policed the skies throughout the night, shooting at anything that moved. Virginia’s family was much more reserved in their approach. They sought shelter for hours in Grandpa Perry’s root cellar.²²

      There were stories, always stories, being told by and about the many characters in Virginia’s extended family.

      But, just as a firefly’s light dims, so too can stories that are passed on through word of mouth.

      Virginia didn’t remember telling stories as a child. She did not spin a yarn as her relatives did.

      Virginia’s gift was capturing the essence of her family’s storytelling magic in her writing. She began putting her stories down on paper from an early age.

      When she was nine she began “The Notebook.” This journal included secrets that her parents and other family members whispered about. Little Virginia was not expected to understand the gossip shared among the elders. She took notes, hoping to comprehend the mysteries when she grew older. Sadly, she lost her journal a year later. The family secrets remained as such in Virginia’s mind.

      . . .

      THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD AND ELIZA HARRIS

      THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD was a secret network of homes, churches, and farms throughout the North and South that provided safety and shelter to the thousands of runaway slaves seeking freedom. Slavery was legal in the United States from 1619 until 1865 when the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution abolished it. In the early 1800s abolitionists—people who wanted to eliminate slavery—began a network of “stations,” safe locations for runaway slaves. Ohio, Virginia’s home state, had more than two hundred safe houses.²⁶

      Just as Virginia’s great-grandmother escaped slavery with her young son, so too did a woman named Eliza Harris. Eliza lived in Kentucky, just south of the Ohio River. Eliza was left with just one child after her other two children died very young. When she learned that her slave owner was going to sell her and her baby to two different owners, Eliza decided to try to escape. Eliza took her baby in the middle of a winter’s night and walked to the Ohio River. Some winters the river froze solid. However, as Eliza discovered in the early morning hours, the Ohio was only partially frozen. Ice chunks floated by. With slave hunters hot on her trail, Eliza jumped from one ice floe to another to get to the other side. Sometimes she had to toss her baby on to the next floating ice chunk and then jump into the freezing cold waters and pull herself up onto the ice with her child. Eliza escaped the slave hunters and eventually made her way through the Underground Railroad to freedom in Canada.²⁷

      MAP OF THE OHIO UNDERGROUND RAILROAD

      Courtesy of the Ohio History Connection, SA 1039AV_B1502_044

      . . .

      Virginia set aside her sadness over the loss of her journal and turned to writing her first novel. She stretched out on the slanted, hot tin roof of the hog barn and wrote. She filled page after page with passionate prose under the scorching summer sun.²³

      As she grew older, Virginia was determined to write for a living. “I never thought seriously of any other career.”²⁴

      That same little girl from Yellow Springs, the one who sat at her grandfather’s knee and heard the story of his escape, who listened to her mother’s tales and learned about her father’s heroes, did become a writer. Just like the firefly that shares its light with the world, Virginia released her stories.

      Boy, did she ever.

      Virginia became the most honored author of children’s literature.

      Her forty-one award-winning books drew upon her family’s accounts of events, both true, and some not so true.

      She graced us with stories of characters who lived in her native Ohio, and those who lived in her ancestors’ land of Africa. Virginia wrote of the horrors of slavery and the joys of family. She created worlds of fantasy and reflected both urban and rural landscapes in her books. Her stories were as diverse and as special as she was.

      “I write books because I love chasing after a good story and seeing fantastic characters rising out of the mist of my imaginings. I can’t explain how it is I keep having new ideas. But one book inevitably follows another. It is my way of exploring the known, the remembered, and the imagined, the literary

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