Plot

In the 1950s, a poor Georgia cotton farmer and his sons search for the gold presumably buried on the farm by their great-grandfather, but problems related to poverty, infidelity, unemployment, and booze threaten to destroy their family.

A poor farmer is obsessed with finding gold on his land supposedly buried by his grandfather. To find it, he conveniently moves a marker out of his way that designates the land on which it rests as God's Little Acre, where anything that comes from the ground will go to God's work. Eventually he abducts an albino to help him find the gold. Meanwhile, his daughter-in-law is suspected of fooling around with a labor activist out of work since the mill closed, and a local political hopeful actively seeks his daughter's hand in marriage.—Ed Sutton <esutton@mindspring.com>

Cotton farmer Ty Ty Walden is convinced that his grandfather buried a cache of gold on the family farm. As such, ever since grandpa died 15 years earlier, Ty Ty, now with two of his grown sons Buck and Shaw, has been manually digging holes on the farm looking for the gold. Ty Ty is doing this all in the name of God, to whom he looks and in turn provides. His friend, aspiring sheriff Pluto Swint, convinces him that the local albino, Dave Dawson, has magical powers that can divine exactly where the gold is located. Because of this information, Ty Ty believes that wealth and prosperity are imminent. But life within the Walden family is not happy. They have no money and because of Ty Ty's singular focus, the farm is not producing. A jealous Buck believes that his wife Griselda would rather be with her ex-beau, Will Thompson, who happens to be married to Ty Ty's daughter Rosamund, who is scared of her husband, who has been floundering in life ever he lost his job when the local textile mill closed. Ty Ty's youngest daughter "Darlin'" Jill is just coming of age and is a flirt. The entire family is estranged from Jim Leslie, another of Ty Ty's sons, who married into money and feels he's better than the rest of his family. Ty Ty believes that the gold will solve all of the family's problems.—Huggo