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Miss
Ella
Synopsis:
On
a hot summer Selma, Alabama afternoon in the early 20th
century, a one-armed Black man, OWENS, storms a cotton field on
an crazy rampage, murdering three sharecroppers.
In the midst of the madness, he pauses to tell one of the
field workers, ELLA, to go raise her children.
Ella wonders why her life was spared.
We flash back to--
Years
earlier, a six-year-old Ella is left orphaned after her
mother’s death. The
quiet, shy girl is adopted into a sharecropper’s family where
she grows up side-by-side with her light-skinned “sister”
Rose.
Though
they would be forever entwined in each other’s lives, there
could be no more opposite sisters than Ella and Rose.
As they get older, the beautiful Rose desires an escape
to an easy life of luxury, pleasure and riches.
Rose seeks fame as a singer and searches for a man who
can offer her the ‘glamorous life’.
The less elegant Ella values more simple ideals--she
dreams of nothing more than buying a home where she can raise
her family safely and together with all the love she has to
offer.
Eventually,
Ella marries HAMP, a solid, straightforward man who shares her
dream of home and family. Rose
marries the one-armed Owens whom, despite his handicap, she
believes is the man of her dreams when he promises her a life
full of “pretty things.”
We
flash forward. Hamp
and Ella are slowly making their dream come true - they may not
own a house yet, but they’ve certainly been working on the
family part of Ella’s dream.
She now has seven children.
But Ella’s life is thrown into chaos when Hamp
unexpectedly dies of a heart attack while still a relatively
young man. Ella’s
relatives offer to adopt some of her six children, but Ella
flatly refuses, determined to fulfill her and Hamp’s dream.
The obstacles of raising a family alone are many, but
Ella’s strong faith in God gives her the strength and hope she
needs. Somehow the
family maintains an environment of fun, love and happiness.
And despite her impoverished condition, Ella opens her
doors to others in need.
On
the surface, Rose seems closer to living her dreams - at least
she receives a steady stream of trinkets from Owens.
But Rose is still not happy.
In order to provide Rose with the lifestyle he promised,
Owens hoboes and is away from home for days on end.
After years of this, the gifts don’t make up for his
lack of physical presence. Yearning for love, Rose finds an outlet for what she’s
feeling singing at Lola Mae’s, the local blues joint.
And Rose frequently fills the void caused by Owens’
absence in the arms of other men.
Meanwhile,
Ella’s faith is tested when her teenage son JAMES is accused
of raping and murdering a white woman with whom he had been seen
hanging out. Ella
gives James all the money she’s saved so that he can escape a
mob of angry white men. James
does escape, but tragedy still strikes when the mob, mistaking
Ella’s oldest son HAMP JR. for James, beats him mercilessly
and leaves him for dead. When
Hamp Jr. dies, something in Ella dies too; she feels guilty for
not protecting her family well enough.
She’s even too sick to attend his funeral.
It
takes Rose to bring a despondent Ella back to life.
Acknowledging the shallowness of her own life, Rose
praises Ella and the atmosphere of love and honor in Ella’s
household. Only through Rose’s eyes can Ella finally mourn, release
her guilt and move on. Through
this healing experience, Rose owns up to her own mistakes and
decides to leave Owens to pursue a more emotionally satisfying
life.
Unfortunately
for Rose, she learns this lesson too late.
After she ends her relationship with her husband, an
increasingly desperate Owens tries to lure her back with gifts,
but fails. When he
later learns that she has been with other men, enraged and
insane, he finds her in the cotton field and the beginning of
the movie replays. Rose
is one of the three victims of the violent rampage, which
ultimately concluded when Owens turned his gun on himself as
well.
In
the aftermath, still dazed that her life was spared, Ella learns
that Owens left her a gift of money so that she can finally
accomplish her dream. The
gift remains untouched until a vision of Rose tells her to use
it. With this final
blessing, Ella finally buys a home for her family – a home
that is still in Ella’s family today.
And one evening while she’s sweeping her new porch,
James returns home. |
