Word: vanessa
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...slave quarters vanished long ago. The blackened chimney of the plantation house still stands in the wooded farm country of Prince Edward County, 60 miles southwest of Richmond. Vanessa Venable's ancestors, who were slaves there, dug the clay that made the bricks...
...Vanessa Venable owns the plantation, or 600 acres of it. The chimney is her haunting and triumphant little ruin. Mrs. Venable, a schoolteacher for 42 years and past president of the Prince Edward County N.A.A.C.P., lives with her husband, the Rev. H.R. Venable, in a brick bungalow on the site of the slave owners' house...
...Vanessa Venable was teaching ninth grade in the black school system in 1959 when the county shut down the public schools. The blacks knew nothing in advance. "I went to school one morning," Mrs. Venable remembers, "and the superintendent told us that Prince Edward County had gone out of the education business. I was shocked. It was like you had been living with vipers all around you and didn't know...
...public schools reopened, 1,600 black children came to class . . . and four whites. The private white schools flourished, eventually moving into handsome quarters upon 53 acres in Farmville, the county's commercial center. The public schools struggled along in a state of mediocrity, trying to repair the damage. Vanessa Venable remembers a 13-year-old girl standing at a blackboard. She was asked to add 34 and 26. She began to weep uncontrollably. She did not even know how to write a number. So she and Mrs. Venable stood at the blackboard for long minutes, crying hopelessly together...
ORPHEUS DESCENDING. In this gothic erstwhile flop by Tennessee Williams, brilliantly reconsidered by director Peter Hall, Vanessa Redgrave returns to Broadway for the first time in twelve years and proves herself to be the greatest actress in the English-speaking world...