It is the year 1935 and Waxahachie, Texas is a small, segregated town amid a depression. One evening the local sheriff, Royce Spalding, leaves the family dinner table to investigate trouble at the rail yards. He dies after being accidentally shot by a young black boy, Wylie. Local white vigilantes tie Wylie to a truck and drag his body through town, for all the community to see, before hanging him from a tree.
The sheriff’s widow, Edna Spalding, is left to raise her children alone and maintain the family farm. The bank has a note on the farm and money is scarce; the price for cotton is plummeting and many farms are going under. The local banker, Mr. Denby, pays her a visit. He begins to pressure her to sell the farm as he doesn’t see how she can afford to make the loan payments on her own let alone run the farm.
A drifter and handyman, a black man by the name of Moses, appears at her door one night, asking for work. He offers to plant cotton on all her acres and cites his experience. Edna declines to hire him but offers him a meal instead and sends him on his way. In desperation, Moses steals some of her silver spoons before he leaves. Similarly desperate, Edna finally resolves to keep her family together on the farm no matter what. When the police capture Moses with her stolen silver, and bring him back to confirm the theft, Edna seizes the opportunity. She lies to the police and says he is her hired man. She sees there is more to gain from the situation because of what he knows about growing and marketing cotton, so she chooses not to prosecute him but to hire him instead.
The next day, Edna visits the banker, Mr. Denby, to relay her decision not to sell the farm but to work the land and raise cotton. He is frustrated by Edna and her decision but ultimately manipulates the situation when he unloads his blind brother-in-law, Will, on Edna, compelling her to take him in as a lodger. Will lost his sight in the war but has remained fiercely independent and somewhat marginalized since. He begins to soften, however, as he and the others living at the farm become more and more like family while they weather life’s storms together.
Edna visits Mr. Denby once more to negotiate and save her farm from foreclosure. She realizes she cannot make the next payment in full even if she sells all her cotton. The bank declines Edna’s request for relief, but during her visit she learns of the Ellis County contest; a $100 cash prize is awarded to the farmer who produces the first bale of cotton for market each season. Edna realizes the prize money plus the proceeds from the sale of her cotton would be enough to allow her to pay the bank and keep the farm. Edna knows she will need more pickers though and despite his initial protests, Moses agrees to help her find the help so they can harvest the cotton on time. Soon the farm is teeming with people and everyone has an important job to do—even Will who prepares the meals and feeds all the workers. Everyone is busy with the business of survival.
Their efforts pay off as Edna and Moses eventually find themselves first in line at the wholesaler with the season’s very first bale of cotton. Moses carefully coaches Edna on how to negotiate with the buyer and as a result he is unable to cheat her on a price for her cotton. She lets the buyer know that if he does not pay her a fair price, she will go to another wholesaler who will. The buyer does not want to lose the distinction of purchasing the first crop of the season to a competitor, so he agrees to pay Edna’s asking price. It becomes clear to the buyer that Moses is Edna’s partner and has helped her throughout. That night Moses is accosted by Ku Klux Klan members and savagely beaten. Will, who recognizes all the assailant’s voices as local white men, confronts, and identifies them one by one; they all run off and Moses’ life is saved. Moses realizes he will have to leave the farm permanently, however, under threat of future attacks.
In “The Worshiping Body: The Art of Leading Worship,” Kimberly Bracken Long recalls the 1984 film “Places in the Heart,” set in Waxahachie, Texas, in 1935. Its last few minutes depict a communion service in a small country church. The few folks in the sanctuary do their best to sing “Blessed Assurance” as they prepare to commune. But then something remarkable happens. As the bread and wine are passed, we see that, somehow, there are now more people in the pews:
The bank president who tried to foreclose on a young widow; the white men who lynched a black boy after he mistakenly shot the town’s beloved sheriff; the players in the honky-tonk band and the floozies who followed them from dance to dance; Moses, the African American laborer who had helped the young widow bring in a prizewinning crop of cotton… and the Klansmen who drove him out of town; and, finally, the sheriff himself and the boy who had killed him. ‘The peace of Christ,’ the sheriff says to the boy as he shares the bread and wine. ‘The peace of Christ,’ the boy whispers in return.
“Here, at the Lord’s Table,” says Long, “life triumphs over death, love overcomes hatred, mercy overcomes guilt, and those who could not or would not live together in peace are reconciled in Christ’s name.” It is an eschatological vision of the communion of saints.
Sharing a sign of peace….there’s a lot going on.