A Little Love by Virginia Hamilton

First published: 1984

Subjects: Coming-of-age, emotions, family, race and ethnicity, and sexual issues

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Domestic realism

Time of work: 1982

Recommended Ages: 15-18

Locale: Suburban Ohio and Dalton, Georgia

Principal Characters:

• Sheema Hadley, a sensitive but troubled teenager, who struggles to overcome the pain and shame of parental abandonment to find her identity as she moves from adolescence to adulthood
• Granmom, and
• Granpop Jackson, who have reared their granddaughter from birth and continue to provide her with wisdom, support, and caring
• Forrest Jones, Sheema’s faithful boyfriend, whose love and belief in her assists Sheema in overcoming her paralyzing depression
• Cruezy Hadley, Sheema’s natural father, whom his abandoned daughter seeks to find for security, identity, and “a little love”

Form and Content

A Little Love is the story of an adolescent girl who hides from the demons of shame and anger that have robbed her of her childhood, of a teenager’s painful search for “a little love” to help her make the transition to adulthood. The book depicts a rite of passage, a journey in search of self, roots, personal voice, identity, and genuine love.

Virginia Hamilton begins her chronicle of a troubled teenager in a setting likely to cause distress to any self-conscious, overweight, depressed girl of seventeen tender years: a crowded school bus. School is over, and Sheema Hadley tries to hide from the insensitive taunts of fellow students who call her “She-mama” and make fun of the “lumps and rolls” that she cannot hide with her baggy clothing. The author uses a third-person narrator to tell Sheema’s story, but she balances the voice of the omniscient narrator with frequent use of dialogue that makes her characters come alive in a most extraordinary way.

The novel’s structure contains two main parts. The initial chapters that make up the first part of the book introduce readers to the main characters and to the conflicts in young Sheema Hadley’s troubled childhood and adolescence. The locales of these initial chapters alternate between Sheema’s school and her home, the world of the adolescent. It is a world of incomplete definitions of self, definitions attached to such labels as “student,” “child,” and “teenager.” It is a world in which simple solutions, such as the search for “a little love,” frequently plague young people, especially those who have known pain like Sheema’s.

Sheema’s pain comes from her acute sense of abandonment. Her mother died giving birth to her, and her father abandoned her to her grandparents and has never even called her on the telephone. The emotional turmoil that has plagued Sheema throughout her childhood and adolescence has resulted alternately in anger, shame, and guilt. To escape these demons and a plethora of other fears and anxieties, she has sought to medicate her pain with food that layers her body with lumps and rolls, trapping her “real, cute, little self on the inside.” She has also sought to assuage her pain by seeking “a little love” in casual sexual encounters.

Three significant figures in her life offer Sheema more than a little love. Although she does not yet have the maturity to appreciate the genuine love provided to her by Granmom and Granpop Jackson and her faithful boyfriend, Forrest Jones, they do not abandon her. They encourage her to break away and make the journey in search of her identity. “Move on out and let in whatever,” Granmom wisely encourages her. “Movin is livin. Changin is life.” The first section ends with Sheema beginning to take control of her own life, beginning to make those painful preparations for her rite of passage into adulthood.

The second section of the book details Sheema’s quest in search of herself. It is a frightening journey that takes her away from the comforts of the one home in which she has lived all her young life. It is a journey that deprives her of the security of her familiar suburban neighborhood in Ohio, takes her across Kentucky and Tennessee, and thrusts her into the Deep South in search of the father who abandoned her at birth. It is a fearful journey into the historic land of slavery that requires courage, determination, and more than a little love from the people in her life. Nevertheless, it is a journey that brings Sheema a surprise that will change her life. She thinks that she will find her father; she is surprised when she finds herself.

Critical Context

Virginia Hamilton has written a number of acclaimed works—novels, short stories, and biographies—that enjoy places of eminence in the canon of juvenile and young adult literature. In 1974, she became the first author to win both the Newbery Medal and the National Book Award for the same book, M. C. Higgins, the Great. It is unfortunate that A Little Love has not been as well received as Hamilton’s other works. It contains not only a model of survival from which young female readers will benefit but also a powerful example of an intergenerational relationship in Sheema and her supportive grandparents. For this reason alone, it deserves to be on supplemental reading lists for juvenile and young adult readers.

This book may also prove interesting to young adult and adolescent readers because of the dynamic dialogue of the book’s diverse characters. There is no single black dialect, as some people mistakenly believe; there are many. Hamilton has deftly preserved a record of the dialect of African American youths living in the Midwest. In the authentic voices of Sheema’s grandparents, the richness of the dialect of a previous generation is preserved. Finally, the vibrant differences between these two dialectical versions of black speech are further defined when contrasted to the language of African Americans in the Deep South.