Producer: Debra Aurora Baum

Screenwriter:  Stacy Dean Campbell

Genre:  Feature

 

In West Texas in the summer of 1937, COTTONWOOD tells the story of two families thrown together by tragedy and the bounds of racial injustice. 

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Rube Whitlock is faced with raising his two young sons after the death of his infant daughter leaves his wife mentally incapacitated with grief and unable to care for them. Overwhelmed with the responsibility, Rube hires Esther, a local black woman whose husband- in an attempt to establish himself and his farm as competitive cotton producers- has just purchased his second mule and ignited a stirring of dissonance and contempt within the usually quiet community. As Esther's natural maternal presence begins to fill voids in the Whitlock house and racially charged animosity percolates in the dim-lit bars and shacks just beneath the community's surface, Rube is forced to choose between the boundaries set by the laws he has sworn to uphold and the boundaries set by the moral convictions of the human heart. 

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Amidst painful pasts beginning to resurface and new secrets freshly buried, it would take a "knobby-kneed buckskin" mule, a cheap pocket knife and a lifeless COTTONWOOD tree to form a lasting friendship that would gray the stark lines between black and white and begin the delicate mending of family ties in the tender heart of a young boy.