Virginia Hamilton was born in 1936 in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where years earlier a fugitive slave on her mother's side of the family had settled. The family grew, working at farming and indulging in storytelling, a skill shared by both of Hamilton's parents. Hamilton moved to New York after college, where she wrote and began a family of her own before moving back to Ohio some fifteen years later. Meanwhile, in her fiction, family became an important element. Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush, one of over a dozen books Hamilton wrote for young people, features the family of an adolescent named Tree. Forced to raise her children alone, Tree's mother struggles to earn a living at a job that keeps her away from home too often. The novel exposes the desperation and isolation that poverty often brings but also offers hope that through struggle, hardships can be overcome.
Single parents and the crisis of the black family. In the early 1980s two-thirds of adult African American women were single or living away from their husbands. In addition, the majority of African American children did not live with their fathers (Anderson, p.
