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.
