LALEE’S KIN: THE LEGACY OF COTTON

Sixty-two-year-old LaLee Wallace is the mother of a family of eight children in Tallahatchie County, in the Mississippi Delta. “Could have been worse,” she says quietly, surveying the rat- and roach-infested trailer she has been granted through a government program after her own house was condemned. The electricity in this new trailer doesn’t work and there is no running water. She receives a monthly disability check and earns a negligible seasonal income cooking meals for workers at nearby cotton gins. Still, she is glad to be out of the fields. Wallace grew up in a family of sharecroppers; she began picking cotton at the age of six, stopped attending school a few years later, and still cannot read. Without education or skills, Wallace and other residents of Tallahatchie County had few options, and the poverty and hopelessness they felt was passed down to the generations that followed. The film also profiles educator Reggie Barnes, who is determined to stop this vicious cycle. “It’s a different world,” he says. “We get kids in kindergarten who don’t know their names, who don’t know colors, who’ve never been read to.” In the tradition of direct cinema, there is no narration and no academic analysis: just real life, marked by joy, frustration and, above all, effort.