Times of the Islands Fall 2022

talking taíno
Opposite page: Cotton plants continue to grow wild throughout the Caicos Islands. The flowering shrub produces leathery fruits (called bolls)
encasing fibrous lint and sticky black seeds.
Above: These cotton plants are growing at the Wade’s Green Plantation near Kew, North Caicos. It is the best-preserved historical agricultural
site in the Turks & Caicos Islands.
BILL KEEGAN
King Cotton
The fabric of our lives.
By Bill Keegan and Betsy Carlson
Competition had grown fierce. A burgeoning fitness industry in the 1980s had embraced man-made
fabrics to the point where DuPont Corporation could not meet demand for its trademarked product
— Spandex. In response, Cotton Incorporated recognized the need to remind consumers that cotton
products are soft, durable, and perhaps most important, natural. On Thanksgiving Day 1989, they introduced
a new advertising campaign touting cotton as “the fabric of our lives.” So what do we know about
this plant that that has played such a central role in human life for 6,000 years?
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