“When I was a little girl,
we walked out to the cotton field
early in the morning
with the sun shining pretty on the land.”
 From “Oh Lord, I Wish I Was a Buzzard” by Polly Greenberg

 My grandmother grew up sharecropping just south of Tupelo, Miss., picking cotton with her siblings and parents.

 Her older sister married and moved to Porterdale for the promise of work at a cotton mill, and one-by-one the family moved to Georgia, settling in Porterdale and Columbus to work at the mills.

 So many families from the South have histories intertwined with this crop, yet so few children today could even identify a cotton plant.

 Nanny made sure each of her grandchildren saw and touched cotton plants. She even found the brown cotton she had grown in Mississippi; something I’ve never seen along the roadside in south Georgia.
 Several years ago I read “Oh Lord, I Wish I Was a Buzzard” to a friend’s children whose grandparents also grew up picking cotton.

 In the story of sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta, the little girl says “we picked and we picked and we picked and we picked,” to earn the coveted sucker at the end of a long week.

 The repetition caught on quickly with both girls, and I was thrilled that they were connecting with their family’s history—until, that is, I overheard the 3-year-old “reading” the book to her dolls.

 In her version, the workers were picking cotton candy.

 Even after much explanation and photos, she persisted in her belief that cotton candy grew on stalks.
 On a visit to the 1850s town of Westville, she finally saw the remnants of a cotton field.

 “Can I taste it?” she asked as she looked up at me with a piece of the fluffy fiber held between her fingers.

 I agreed, but not before grabbing my camera to snap a photo.

 You may laugh at her innocence, but I’ve seen this reaction again with other children as they view the cotton patch at the Inman Tractor Show.

 Cotton is still an important part of our lives in Georgia, with lint and seed valued at almost a half billion dollars in 2007 according to the Georgia Agricultural Statistics Service, and cotton serving as an ingredient in everything from our jeans to our toothpaste.

 Last week, four Newton County 4-H’ers showed off their knowledge of cotton and practiced their consumer skills at Cotton Bowl and Consumer Jamboree.

 Each fifth through eighth grade team member researched and presented a creative 30-second commercial for cotton at the area competition in Perry.

 They also learned about the features of MP3 players, prepackaged deli lunches, hoodies and cell phone plans to hone their consumer skills.

 Each 4-H’er read a situation for each class about a consumer, then placed four items by ranking them from the best to the worst purchase.

 After one class, each 4-H’er had five minutes to prepare oral reasons to defend their decisions to two judges.

 Hundreds of 9-to-19-year-old 4-H’ers competed last week for prizes and bragging rights, including more than 190 youths at the competition in Perry.

 Mary Lathem, eighth grader at Cousins Middle, earned fourth place for her commercial to “Vote for King Cotton.”

 Fifth grader Kate Tuck of East Newton Elementary took the county’s top honors for score on the team, which also included fifth grader Dominique Gooden of West Newton Elementary and sixth grader Lydia Irving of Veteran’s Memorial Middle.

 On the bus ride home, as the team sang 4-H songs and told silly jokes, I interrupted to ask what they had learned from Cotton Bowl and Consumer Jamboree.

 Fully expecting jokes, I was pleasantly surprised to hear each girl pipe up with solid facts about cotton production, cotton uses, nutrition facts and comparison shopping tips.

 No one mentioned public speaking, but I saw that for myself.

 The first few weeks, only a returning team member was willing to practice giving reasons in front of the group.

 The final few weeks, each of the others timidly practiced reasons.

 Each week I saw the words and phrases come more easily and confidence begin to creep into their speech as they explained their decisions.

 Judging by the scores, each girl represented Newton County admirably, and there are at least four local youth who know the difference between cotton and cotton candy.