The Great American Field Trip: 100% Cotton

So we’re driving down the road in rural Mississippi and I am seeing this stuff looking like cotton balls littering the sides of the road.

Then I realized, “Oh my gosh! That is cotton!” I remembered the fields in South Carolina looking like expanses of snowy fields. We were told by locals cotton harvest would soon begin.

These cotton fields in Mississippi had just been harvested. The fields were nothing but small nubs and dirt now. I know that today harvest is done by machine, but I could vividly imagine the slaves bent over for hours in those same fields. Their ghosts seem to still hover in a landscape which has changed little in the last 150 years. I imagined the songs they sung as their calloused and cut hands moved with dexterity around the prickly plants, removing the cotton. Some of the farms houses may have been built pre Civil War, by the looks of how weathered and worn they were.

The cotton we saw were the little bits that did not make it into the huge freight car sized piles neatly stacked and waiting to be picked up and delivered to world markets any day. We pulled over and the kids picked up the cotton.

"Are these things inside the seeds, Mom?" Sally asked.

Although on some level I know cotton is a plant, I never give it much thought. Well over 90% of my wardrobe is cotton, but when was the last time I gave thought to the plant that gave birth to my favorite sweatshirt, t-shirt, or pajamas? We all know that removing nail polish with anything other than a cotton ball is a joke.

Before this trip, none of us had ever actually seen cotton growing.

In school I remember learning about Eli Whitney and his invention of the cotton gin. But until Sally asked me the question about the seeds and I looked back to see her futzing around with the cotton, I had never given Eli and his invention much thought. Seeing Sally struggle to get to the seeds and remove them from the cotton seemed a harder task than completing a Rubic's cube. When I was a kid and again in high school, I learned about this part of history the way I learned my spelling words. Just rattled them off, unmoved emotionally. It suddenly hit me, Eli Whitney's invention was world transforming! A machine could do the laborious task of removing the seeds at speeds that could only be imagined. I had to go online and google "Eli Whitney and the cotton gin."

The Chinese proverb "Tell me and I forget, show me and I may remember, involve me and I understand" was illuminated by our little encounter with cotton.

I wondered why not one teacher had ever passed around freshly harvested cotton to the class and timed us in our attempts to get the seeds out of cotton. This simple hands on activity would have really drove the point home. I am assuming it could not be that difficult to get a hold of some. Or, taken one step further, I began to woder how hard would it be to grow cotton with the kiddos when we got home.

I found some information on www.cottonspinning.com

From the website:

Would you like to see the progress of this amazing plant in your own home? Plant seeds indoors in 3" peat pots. Keep in a warm, sunny place, turning the pot a little each day. Best to start your plants indoors about 4 weeks prior to putting them outside. Transplant directly into the ground or a large outdoor pot when all danger of frost is over. To transplant, tear off the bottom of the peat pot. Water the plant well for the first few days. Keep in a sunny spot and away from a lot of wind. Make sure the ground is warmed above 60 degrees and put in well tilled loose sandy loamed soil. "
I like to plant cotton into a large pot so I can move it indoors during the winter and put the plant out again next spring. It will last several years if it does not get frost bitten.

Driving through the South, it was apparent just how much cotton is still such a vital part of the economy and culture of this "land of Dixie" My kids had no idea why I kept singing, "I wish I was in the land of cotton..." and I had to hum the rest because I never learned that song all the way.