Don't Nobody Know: Lalee's Kin

By Donna Ladd Thursday, January 2, 2003 2:45 p.m. CST

Everyone who cares about human dignity and justice should see "Lalee's Kin: The Legacy of Cotton," which debuted on HBO Sept. 18. I first saw it during the Crossroads Film Festival in Jackson last spring in a mixed-race audience, most of whom stayed to hear a lengthy and emotional discussion about African-American poverty in the Delta.

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Undoubtedly, all of us fell in love with Lalee Wallace, a West Tallahatchie County grandmother raising three grandkids, sometimes more, on one of the country's poorest pieces of soil. Lalee and her kids live in a Delta county where many people are trapped in a vicious cycle that started with 19th-century slavery, continued through 20th-century Jim Crow and sharecropping, and now festers as politicians try to close "failing" schools without giving them enough tools to succeed. It's an economically depressed area that cannot afford to pay teachers decently and struggles to attract decent industry to improve the tax base because the schools are so bad. This is a place where illiterate parents and grandparents struggle to buy pencils and notebooks for their children.

"Don't nobody know," Lalee says in the film. "All of us slaved until a few years ago. When you lived on a white man's place you couldn't do what you wanted to do." She lives in a roach-infested trailer provided by the government and raises the children on a $494-a-month disability check. She gets clean water from a hose outside the county jailhouse, and the kids bathe in big paint buckets before going to school. She makes extra money two months a year cooking and delivering plate lunches to the cotton gin. "I always have wanted to be a chef cook, but didn't have nobody to teach me," Lalee says.

The film documents the efforts of West Tallahatchie School District Superintendent Reggie Barnes to raise test scores and get his district off academic probation. (He now heads the Cleveland School District.) Barnes — who attended the Crossroads screening with Lalee and her grandkids — is the type of man who should be governor one day but probably won't be because he's too plain-spoken. Barnes, who is black, blamed the state agencies and the Legislature for fighting "turf wars" and for spending too much money on prisons, instead of helping young people achieve something beyond what civil-rights hero Bob Moses calls a "sharecropper education." Barnes says too many Delta children simply are not getting an "equal and just education," as required by state law. The system, he says, seems "designed for us to fail." Consider that poor schools must either improve in order to get more resources under President Bush's new "Leave No Child Behind" education plan or be closed, and Barnes' argument becomes even more compelling.

The film elucidates the cycle of despair of kids who play in abandoned cars and pretend that they're calling their fathers in Parchman. "Give me Lalee's grandchild at age 3, and I can stop that vicious cycle," Barnes said at Crossroads. A white audience member asked Barnes what we can all do to help. "Hell, all you've got to do is cross the railroad tracks," Barnes said, adding that "people on both sides of the tracks must learn to communicate."

In the audience were a handful of African-American state legislators, there because Ward Emling of the Mississippi Film Office sent copies of the film to the Capitol, as well as to the governor's office. "I wish I could send a copy to everybody in Mississippi," Emling said.

Donna Ladd is editor-in-chief of the Jackson Free Press.

Free Press Fact:

Teach for America is a program designed for recent college graduates to give back to their communities by pledging to teach rural and urban children for two years after graduation. The program brings many teachers to the Mississippi Delta. For more info, see http://www.teachforamerica.org

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