"I Double Never Ever Never Lie to My Chil'Ren": Inside People in Virginia Hamilton's Narratives

Abstract

V irginia Hamilton is the most important author currently writing for children in the United States.1 The point is perhaps an arguable one, but I think few critics of children's literature would deny Hamilton's significance as an international author of children's books. Winner of the prestigious Hans Christian Andersen Medal, presented by the International Board on Books for Young People based in Switzerland that is the field's equivalent of the Nobel, Hamilton has written more than twenty books for children since her first novel, Zeely, was published in 1967. She has a distinct style, one that is poetic, intricate, and political; indeed, all of her books are informed by her commitment to racial issues. She acknowledges that she began writing at the time of 'Black is Beautiful' on through black power and throughout the Malcolm X time and all the disasters that befell this country (Mikkelsen, Conversation 396), so her books resonate with her awareness of the centrality of African American culture to American history. One of the most powerful recurring issues in the Hamilton canon that demonstrates this awareness is her emphasis on the social effects of inclusion and exclusion on people. For example, in Plain City, an African American girl who lives in her family's commune on the edge of town refers to herself as being to designate her otherness (15). Once the girl accepts what Mae Henderson would call the plural aspects of self that constitute the matrix of her subjectivity (18), she comes to take pride in her family's uniqueness. She then proudly proclaims herself an child, enjoying the double entendre of being someone who loves to be outdoors and one who also celebrates the difference of her otherness (169). When Hamilton depicts marginalized people transforming their otherness or outsideness into insideness, she demonstrates their power to define their own position in life, and in the process she destabilizes the very concepts of inclusion and exclusion. Hamilton's focus on the social effects of inclusions and exclusions also operates on a narrative level. Her interest in who is inside and who is outside of any given narrative leads her to develop a richly structured system of narrators, narratives, and narratees that asks us to question boundaries that have traditionally been used to demarcate otherness: boundaries between races, between genders, and between children and adults.2 The result is a series of texts whose narrative structures paradigmatically interrogate racial identity, feminism, and the very definition of children's literature. Two novels about girls who are storytellers most poignantly demonstrate Hamilton's ongoing concern with narrative stance