Word: homely
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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France, her home from 1925 until her death in 1975 at age 69, may have been color-blind, but Baker never escaped the reality of race. Indeed, it was the exoticism of her black beauty and the apparent spontaneity of her jazz- inflected dancing that captivated French audiences. With negritude the cultural rage, Baker was nominated as queen of Paris' great Colonial Exposition of 1931 -- until critics pointed out the obvious, that she was neither French nor African. Baker was memorably reminded of that during a 1935 dinner party in New York City given by Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart...
Baker, sadly enough, never learned how or when to quit. She spent francs as fast as she earned them, and her last years were marked by humiliations: mortgage foreclosure on the rambling country home she built for the Tribe, increasingly inept and desperate "farewell" performances to pay overdue bills. But when the end came, Paris remembered what it, and the world, had lost. In 1940-42 Baker had been a spy of sorts for De Gaulle's Free French, and later in the war, she made endless appearances as a troop entertainer. At the historic Madeleine church, her flag-bedecked...
Last year, after fire destroyed their home outside Canton, Miss., Willie Anderson and seven of her children moved into a rented shack. The place was a horror, with no electricity or running water, rotting walls papered with newsprint, and gaping holes in the tin roof that allowed the rain to pour through. "Once a snake came up under the stove, and we got big rats in there all the time," recalled Anderson, 47, a big, strapping woman in a flowered blouse. "I couldn't wait to get away...
...family's ordeal finally ended in August, when a trailer truck carrying a hip-roofed house with yellow shingles pulled up on the site of Anderson's burned-out home. "This house," she boasts, "won't have no holes like the other...
Anderson's new home was donated by a church in nearby Pearl to a nonprofit organization called MadCAAP -- short for Madison Countians Allied Against Poverty -- which helps poor people in one of the poorest parts of the nation. Financed solely by donations and grants, MadCAAP takes old wood-frame buildings that local communities and private owners no longer need and hauls them to new sites. There volunteers from local churches and schools join with families that have been aided in the past to install wiring, put up paneling and dig septic tanks. Over the past six years MadCAAP has recycled...