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GU I D E to Y E L L OW S P R I NG S | 2O22 – 2O23 17 This story is about Virginia Hamilton and Yellow Springs, Black people, children and family, an artist’s growth, the past and the future. To begin it briefly in the present: Virginia Hamilton, Yellow Springs born and bred, is among the most widely read and highly honored chil- dren’s writers in America. And then go back to the beginning, well over a century ago, when an enslaved man named Perry rode the Under - ground Railroad out of the South, north to freedom. He settled in Yellow Springs. As the village grew and changed, a few generations later, so did Perry’s granddaughter, Virginia Hamilton. The Yellow Springs heritage of “the Perry Clan,” as Hamil - ton fondly called it in a 1978 interview with the News, is full and rich. It is rooted in the soil, for the Perrys once farmed much of the land within the village. The Perry who escaped enslave - ment and founded the clan lived where his descendant, Kingsley Perry, would one day live, on Limestone Street near Dayton Street. Omar Circle was all Perry farmland. The Union Street house built by Hamilton and her husband, Arnold Adoff, stands on what once was a Perry Clan cornfield. “You could say,” Hamilton told the News, with a smile and a wide sweep of her arm, “that at one time this whole end of town was owned by the Perrys.” The presence of the Perrys, Hamilton said, remained in her memories of childhood. “My mother’s ‘people’ were warm-hearted, tight with money, generous to the sick and the landless, close- mouthed and fond of telling tales and gossip about one another and even their ances- tors,” she recalled. “They were a part of me from the time I understood that I belonged to all of them. My Uncle King told the best tall tales; my Aunt Leanna sang the finest sorrowful songs.” Virginia was the youngest of five children born to Etta Perry and Kenneth Hamilton. “My brothers and sisters were already intelligent, competitive and given to the family habit of staring off into space. Being the ‘baby’ and being bright, mind you, and odd and sensitive, I was left alone to discover whatever there was to find.” There was an abundance to find. “My mother could take a slice of fiction floating around the family and polish it into a saga. So could my father. He came from a Creole family that wandered the face of this country. He was an outlander who once ran gambling halls in mining towns. He was charming, talented, moody and forbidding. He was a superb mandolinist. There was never any part of the world or any incident in the Black man’s history that he didn’t expound upon. He was bitter toward all unions because, in his youth, the musician’s union would not give mem- bership to Blacks like him.” The Hamiltons were “dollar poor in the ’30s when I was born,” Hamilton remembered, but working in the field of what is now mid-Yellow Springs, they “turned acres of rich soil into a working farm with enough extra produce to sell by the bushel to the local grocer. By the time I was 7, I knew that life must be free - dom — there was no better life than those acres and the surrounding farmlands.” Like those of many other people who grew up in Yellow Springs, Hamilton said her childhood memories had a vivid basis in Glen Helen. “I lived in the Glen as a kid,” she said. “The Glen was my home.” And she absorbed the his- tory handed down through the local families of for- merly enslaved people who, like her grandfather Perry, ▲ Author Virginia Hamilton in 1993. Author Virginia Hamilton— WRITINGBLACK HERITAGE From pieces by DON WALLIS in 1978 and 2002 with additional material by LAUREN ‘CHUCK’ SHOWS Offering: Traditional, as well as cremation services Pre-arrangement counseling Educational/support materials handicapped accessible JACKSON LYTLE & LEWIS LIFE CELEBRATION CENTER 937-767-7310 • Fax: 937-399-2501 • 322 Xenia Ave., Yellow Springs I I