Virginia Hamilton's ["Arilla Sun Down"] delicately explores one of the most ignored facts of American society: that a great many "vanishing Americans" did not really vanish, but were absorbed instead into the relatively friendly black community. The evidence is everywhere for those who are willing to see it: Plains and Cherokee features appear startlingly at the windows of many sharecroppers' shacks and ghetto tenements, as well as in newspaper and magazine pictures of black achievers. And there are less obvious traces of this oddly hidden heritage, habits of mind and deeply rooted beliefs neither Afro nor Anglo in origin.

Imparting these last, subtlest parts of the Native American heritage through the consciousness of a 12-year-old girl is the difficult task that Hamilton has set for herself. Mystical ideas and experiences are not supposed to be communicable in words. But Hamilton, a communicator of rare ability, succeeds. For this...