Prince Edward and the Past

By LANCE MORROW

The 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.

Now 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.

The order of things, the feudal inevitabilities, can be changed, with endurance. The Old South was always saying No! in thunder, and Virginia had a gift of eloquent defiance. In 1959, rather than submit to federal court orders to merge their two public school systems (black and white), the supervisors of Prince Edward County closed them down, and then kept them closed for five years. It was an extension of "massive resistance," the last stand of states' rights. The position was argued in high legalisms. But in deeper truth, Senator Harry F. Byrd Sr. and other leaders of white Virginia were constructing a cathedral of rhetoric ("interposition . . . sacred duty . . . priceless natural right . . .") to enshrine the remnants of the nation's original sin, slavery.

Prince Edward County's whites established a private school system for their own children, and offered to help blacks do the same. The blacks insisted on integrated public schools. Black families that were lucky sent their children to relatives in other counties or states where the public schools were open. But many of the children went five years without entering a classroom. At last, the Supreme Court ordered the public schools reopened, and racially integrated. By that time, a generation of Prince Edward's black children had been profoundly wounded. Many have never recovered. The drama blew a hole in their lives. A documentary film about those years called them "the lost generation." Many have transmitted the traumas -- illiteracy, for example, indifference to learning, a sense of defeat -- to their own children.

Prince Edward has a sort of archaic rural beauty, with sleek Black Angus cattle grazing, hay baled in cylinders in the fields and an enveloping sweetness of landscape and seasons. It is -- or was -- a peculiar charm of the county that virtually everyone knew everyone else, and spoke with outward courtesy. Most of the families, black and white, have roots that go back 200 years, their lives, for good and ill, entwined. The blacks lived in intricate dependency upon the whites, who owned the land and held the power. But the foundation of white paternalism was segregation: when segregation was endangered, the relationship dissolved.

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 it."

When the 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.

In 1972 Prince Edward County's public schools had the lowest test scores in Virginia. But in the years since then, the public schools have made a gradual and remarkable recovery. Now Prince Edward County High School's student body is 62% black, 38% white. The tuition to attend the white private school (some 630 white students and six black) is now $2,495, and many white families have decided they can find a superior education (free) at the public schools. Even white families from surrounding counties are applying. Test scores for students in the public schools now approach the national average. The range of achievement remains stunningly wide: the high school has gifted students and functional illiterates. Prince Edward High's debating and forensics teams are state champions. The yearbook, slick, lively and professional, wins awards. Some students go to nearby Hampden-Sydney College and Longwood College for advanced courses. School Superintendent James M. Anderson Jr. and his teachers have accomplished an academic resurrection.

Prince Edward County never had racial violence, or the lynching meanness that seeped up in those years in Alabama and Mississippi. But the bruise of the past is deep. The students segregate themselves, black clusters and white clusters, in the school cafeteria. They struggle to describe the abiding significance of race in Prince Edward County. They cannot quite find the word for what they suspect in the hearts of the other race. Not "prejudice." Not "hatred," not "intolerance," exactly. It is, they say, something hidden, and always there.

In the county, whose population is roughly half white, half black, the vote last week was 2,821 for Douglas Wilder and 2,732 for Marshall Coleman. The mood after election day was strangely subdued. The election was too close. Blacks declined to celebrate. They seemed to fear that a recount might take the victory away.