Eliza jumped from one ice floe to another to get to the other side. Sometimes she had to toss her baby on to the next floating ice chunk and then jump into the freezing cold waters and pull herself up onto the ice with her child. Eliza escaped the slave hunters and eventually made her way through the Underground Railroad to freedom in Canada.27
MAP OF THE OHIO UNDERGROUND RAILROAD
Courtesy of the Ohio History Connection, SA 1039AV_B1502_044
. . .
Virginia set aside her sadness over the loss of her journal and turned to writing her first novel. She stretched out on the slanted, hot tin roof of the hog barn and wrote. She filled page after page with passionate prose under the scorching summer sun.23
As she grew older, Virginia was determined to write for a living. “I never thought seriously of any other career.”24
That same little girl from Yellow Springs, the one who sat at her grandfather’s knee and heard the story of his escape, who listened to her mother’s tales and learned about her father’s heroes, did become a writer. Just like the firefly that shares its light with the world, Virginia released her stories.
Boy, did she ever.
Virginia became the most honored author of children’s literature.
Her forty-one award-winning books drew upon her family’s accounts of events, both true, and some not so true.
She graced us with stories of characters who lived in her native Ohio, and those who lived in her ancestors’ land of Africa. Virginia wrote of the horrors of slavery and the joys of family. She created worlds of fantasy and reflected both urban and rural landscapes in her books. Her stories were as diverse and as special as she was.
“I write books because I love chasing after a good story and seeing fantastic characters rising out of the mist of my imaginings. I can’t explain how it is I keep having new ideas. But one book inevitably follows another. It is my way of exploring the known, the remembered, and the imagined, the literary triad of which all stories are made.”25
But it wasn’t easy becoming the award-winning author so many have come to love. How did she go from the carefree little girl listening to her family’s stories to the amazing writer she was? What obstacles did she face along the way?
As grandfather Levi Perry would say, just sit down and let me tell you a story.
Virginia’s story.
SLAVE PEN IN THE NATIONAL UNDERGROUND RAILROAD FREEDOM CENTER
From the Collection of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center
DID YOU KNOW?
The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center opened in Cincinnati in 2004. Visitors can learn the stories about freedom’s heroes, from the time of the Underground Railroad to the modern day. A “slave pen,” a 21-foot by 30-foot, two-story building that had originally served as a holding pen for slaves until they were sold at auction, is found on the second floor of the museum.
CHAPTER TWO
SETTING
My subject matter is derived from the intimate and shared place of the hometown and the hometown’s people.*
IF VIRGINIA’S family provided the foundation for storytelling she became known for, Yellow Springs provided the backdrop for her tales.
Yellow Springs was the place where little Virginia ran home on the last day of the school year, very excited. In her small hands was a prized possession, a book. It was bright and shiny, with three cute yellow ducks on the cover. She’d won it as a result of having read the most books in her class.
It was Virginia’s first award, and treasured. New books were hard to come by in her family.1
Virginia loved to read.
Yellow Springs was the place with the quaint library that nurtured Virginia’s passion. “It was a lovely little cottage,” Virginia recalled, “shaped like a gingerbread house and made of gray fieldstone, with a red tile roof.”2
YELLOW SPRINGS LIBRARY DURING VIRGINIA’S CHILDHOOD
Photo courtesy of Antiochiana, Antioch College
Her love for the Yellow Springs Library began with a quest to find out more about an exotic breed of chicken her mother had sent away for.
Virginia’s mother encouraged her to “look at the rainbow layers” of the eggs from their Araucanas chickens. While the chickens roamed about in the yard, Virginia explored the henhouse.
She discovered the nests held eggs of a variety of colors. Her mother’s exotic chickens laid eggs that were turquoise, pink, olive green, and various shades of brown.
“When I told my class at school about my job as colored-egg gatherer, some of the town kids snickered, ‘Both you and the eggs are colored!’”
“I told Mama and she said, ‘Go take a look in the library.’”
“‘For what?’” I wanted to know,” Virginia said.
“‘For the rainbow layers,’ Mama said. ‘There’s more than one kind of chick with color. More than Araucanas.’ And then she gave me what I thought of as a secret smile.”3
And so it was that Virginia became a regular visitor to the local library.
She even thought the “spritely, bright-eyed” Story Lady lived at the library. Once a week the Story Lady visited Virginia and her classmates in elementary school. She walked them across the street and introduced the children to her world of books.
“I’d get side-swiped every time by all those straight-back sentinels in long still rows,” said Virginia. “Short books and tall books, blue books and green books. What’s in them? I would wonder. They had more colors than the rainbow-egg layers ever thought of. And a greater supply of subjects. Today I realize that was my mother’s point. Get Virginia to the library and she will find out many things.”4
Yellow Springs was the place where Virginia roamed freely and played in the surrounding fields and farms owned by her family. She ventured beyond her family’s lands and on to the other side of town and the glen, now known as Glen Helen, a thousand-acre preserve.
“In the glen I discovered deer, the sweet and yellow freshwater springs, an immense, condemned pavilion once a grand hotel and marvelous old vines strong enough to swing on.”5
The images stuck in Virginia’s mind and came out in two of her works. The House of Dies Drear features an old, spooky house, and the swinging vines appear in M. C. Higgins, the Great.
Through
