Clearly Virginia Hamilton is concerned as a writer with the black, or non-white, experience. To the best of my recollection, no fictional character in any of her work up to the time of writing is white. But there is no taint of racism in her books; as she said herself in [her article "High John is Risen Again"] 'the experience of a people must come to mean the experience of humankind.' All through her work runs an awareness of black history, and particularly of black history in America. And there is a difference in the furniture of her writing mind from that of most of her white contemporaries: dream, myth, legend and ancient story can be sensed again and again in the background of naturalistically-described present-day events.

Her first book, Zeely …, exemplifies this and other Hamilton qualities. Elizabeth, who is calling herself Geeder by way of make-believe while on holiday in the country, sees the beautiful, regal, immensely-tall Zeely first as a night-traveller (a phrase which of course connotes escape from slavery) and then, obsessively, as a Watutsi queen. At the end of the story, when for the first and only time she actually talks to Zeely, she faces the truth that Zeely is a very tall girl who looks after hogs. Zeely has accepted herself as what she is, and with the aid of a parable of seeking and finding she helps Geeder to do the same. She is not a queen; and perhaps there is an implication that for black Americans to look back towards supposed long-lost glories in Africa is unfruitful. Yet the story manages at the same time to hold within itself a different truth, almost a contradiction. There is a sense in which Geeder's illusions have not been illusions at all; in which the figure of Zeely does embody that of the night-traveller, who, according to Geeder's Uncle Ross, 'must be somebody who wants to walk tall … it is the free spirit in any of us breaking loose'; in which, as Geeder says at the end, Zeely truly is a queen as well as a hog-keeper. If there is a simple message here for younger children (and I do not think Virginia Hamilton would scorn to offer a simple message to young children) it can be summed up in those two words 'walk tall'; but it is a simplicity that has profound resonances.

The House of Dies Drear …, with its crowded action and melodramatic trappings, is in many ways at the opposite fictional pole from Zeely. Thomas is the eldest child of a black historian's family which moves into a great rambling old house, once a station on the Underground Railroad, supposedly-haunted home of a murdered abolitionist, and now guarded by 'that massive, black and bearded man some souls called Pluto'. Thomas and his father penetrate the labyrinthine complexities of the house, discovering at last the extraordinary treasure which is its ultimate secret; and they drive off those who have threatened it. Here is a tale of mystery and excitement; of all Miss Hamilton's novels it is the one with the most obvious attractions to the child reading for the story. Indeed, an adult reader may feel she has been rather too free with the Gothic embellishments…. The hidden buttons, sliding panels and secret passages can too easily suggest a commercially-inspired Haunted House from a superior fairground: at the same time gruesome and giggly. And the play-acting with which 'our' side frightens off superstitious intruders at the end is not really worthy of this author. One has initial doubts, too, about the marvellously-preserved treasure cave of Dies Drear, with its magnificent tapestries, carpets, glassware, Indian craft work and so on. Is it appropriate to the story that there should be a tangible, financially-valuable treasure, and anyway is it the right kind of thing for a dedicated abolitionist to have and to hide?

Here however one must recall Virginia Hamilton's comment on the tendency of the people and properties in her books to turn into emblems. It is a reasonable supposition that the treasure represents a cultural inheritance, of which Mr Pluto is the guardian or some kind of guardian spirit. The whole book has a strong, almost tangible sense of the presence of the past. It is a dramatic and at the same time a rather rambling piece of work, with something in it of the character of the house itself: much of it is below the surface, passages open out of the story in all directions, some are explored and some are only glanced into. It is highly interesting, highly readable, but it does not quite succeed in being both an exciting adventure story and a satisfying work of art.

The mysteries of The Planet of Junior Brown … are of a different order from those of Dies Drear: more akin to those of Zeely and of the later novels. Junior Brown is not fantasy, as the word is commonly understood: the laws of nature are never broken, and occasionally, as in the description of Junior's mother's asthmatic attack, there is an insistent, almost cruel realism. Yet there is much in the book that requires a different kind of assent from that which we give to an account of everyday events. The ex-teacher janitor who has a large rotating model of the solar system erected in the hidden basement room to which his truant friends come; the 'planets' of homeless boys dotted around the big city, each with its 'Tomorrow Billy' as leader; the lowering of 262-pound Junior Brown into the basement of a deserted building by means of a specially-rigged hoist: these carry a conviction which has more to do with the character and atmosphere of the story, the hypnotic power of the author to compel belief, than with literal probability. (pp. 100-03)

A planet in this story is a person's refuge, and perhaps also his sphere of action. There is an analogy between the huge uncaring city and the vast indifference of space by which planets are surrounded. The school from which Junior Brown and Buddy are alienated, but in which they find a temporary home in the janitor's room, expresses the same analogy on a smaller scale. Buddy, coping and compassionate, instinctual and imaginative, 'swinging wild and cool through city streets', is a forerunner, a leader into the future, a kind of saint of the streets. Too good to be true? Too good to be literally true, I think; it is hard to suppose that a homeless street lad could be so noble, so uncorrupted by hardship and by the company of those already corrupted. But when Buddy affirms on the last page that 'the highest law is for us to live for one another', he surely speaks not as Buddy Clark but as Tomorrow Billy, a mythological figure, conceivably related to the High John de Conquer who was the hero and inspiration of slaves in the last century. (pp. 103-04)

M. C. [of M. C. Higgins the Great] is the early-teenage black boy who sits on [a] pole, which was his reward from his father for swimming the Ohio River, and which he has equipped with a bicycle saddle, pedals and a pair of wheels that enable him to move the pole in a slow, sweeping arc. The title 'the Great' is self-awarded, a joke, but by the time the book is read the reader is likely to feel it justified; for M. C. is great, he does ride high; though he is poor and presumably uneducated he has wisdom, competence, determination. At the end he is building a wall which he hopes will hold back the spoilheap that threatens his home; he will inherit and defend the family territory. Unlike Buddy Clark, though, he is not a saint or an inspirational figure; he is human, makes mistakes, has his inadequacies. (p. 104)

Events in M. C. Higgins the Great either define the people and their situation or else, by apparently small redirections (like points on a rail track) change the courses of people's lives. The most important event happens inside M. C.: his acceptance of his own rootedness in Sarah's Mountain and his determination to stop that spoilheap.

Roots, more than anything else, are what this novel is about: roots in place and also the roots of ancestry. After telling M. C. how Great-grandmother Sarah came to the mountain, his father, Jones Higgins, sings some words from a song she used to sing. The words have been passed down through succeeding generations, but Jones doesn't know what they mean: 'I guess even Great-grandmother Sarah never knew. Just a piece of her language she remembered.' Both Jones and M. C. occasionally have a sense of the presence of Sarah on the mountain. (pp. 104-05)

It may be noted that M. C.'s wisdom is itself rooted in the earth and does not move away from it; he is hopelessly naïve about the visiting dude and about Mama's prospects of stardom. Two more small but significant events may be noted at the very end of the story: Jones accepts, albeit reluctantly, the presence of Ben Killburn on his property, helping M. C. to build the wall, and he gives the boys a gravestone to build into it…. It is the reinforcement, once more, of the present by the past.

The Adams family in Arilla Sun Down are interracial. Arilla's mother is a light-skinned black woman, beautiful, and a teacher of dancing. Her father is part-black, part American Indian; and her older brother Jack Sun Run, though neither more nor less Indian than Arilla, asserts himself to be 'a blood'. Arilla feels overshadowed; doesn't know who or what she is.

Jack Sun Run—handsome, flamboyant, a brilliant horseman—is the dominant figure in this novel; but he is a more subtly ambiguous creation than any in Virginia Hamilton's earlier books. There's a sense in which he is a phoney: 'playing the brave warrior', as his mother unkindly says, and, for instance, showing off shamelessly at Arilla's birthday party…. Yet the phoney and the genuine are not entirely incompatible. There is something in Jack Sun Run's blood and background, and in his father's, that will come out and that will always be strange to Mother, who doesn't share it. And it is there in Arilla, too. In flashbacks to her earlier childhood, Arilla recalls half-forgotten experiences and encounters with the People: especially her friend, mentor, storyteller and source of wisdom, an old man called James False Face. Arilla receives—reluctantly, as a birthday present—a horse; she learns to ride well, and saves Jack Sun Run's life after an accident while out riding in fearful conditions. That is how she earns the name of Arilla Sun Down, becomes able to see Jack as human rather than as a being of sunlike power and brilliance, and also puts herself level with him, since he saved her life as a small child.

But in the end it is through her father that Arilla comes into a share of the Indian inheritance. Every year Dad, who is a supervisor in a college dining hall, disappears for a while, and Jack has to go and bring him back. Now, with Jack in hospital, the duty falls on Arilla. She finds Dad where he is known to be, up in the country of his people; and he has gone sledding—flying wild and free over the snow. Arilla sleds with him, as she did when a small child. Sledding, riding, even roller-skating: these are important, she needs the movement for the nomad that is in her. There is something of the experience, the transmitted wisdom of the People in her, too. All this is more real than the earlier posturings of Jack Sun Run.

Lastly there is the thing that is Arilla's own, the gift that is individually hers, that comes out in her urge to write. It goes with the name that old James has given her, along with his stories: her secret name. It is there in the book, at a key moment, a moment remembered by Arilla from years before. In this memory James has just died; Arilla is feverish and she seems to hear him speaking to her of life and death, and concluding:

                 'Wordkeeper?'
                 'I hear you.'
                 'Remember who you are.'

In its movement back and forth in time, and its shifts of style, Arilla Sun Down may make one think occasionally of the [William] Faulkner of The Sound and the Fury. But it is an original work, and a poetic one. Among many memorable lyric passages are Arilla's childhood recollection of sledding with Father, and, in her 'present-day' narrative, a parallel pages-long account of roller-skating, both capturing to an astonishing degree the poetry of motion. (pp. 105-07)

[Arilla Sun Down] is a book that takes risks. It is not for casual, easy reading, and among young people (or adults) it is likely to be appreciated only by a minority, and perhaps fully understood by none. The read book is always a collaboration between writer and reader, and this one requires that the reader should willingly contribute his or her own imaginative effort. It offers in return the high delight of sharing in an achieved work of art. (p. 108)