If the Cotton Ball were a person, she would be well into retirement. She might be a grandmother.
Maybe she would call up her children with gossip about people they no longer cared about or scarcely remembered. Maybe she would bore her grandkids with stories of her girlhood, show anyone who'd listen the faded photos of a younger version of herself. If they were well mannered, they wouldn't possibly interrupt her.
They wouldn't tell her she had told that story a hundred times. It would be a matter of respect.
One of the oldest debutante balls in the South, the Cotton Ball will celebrate its 80th birthday this year. On a weekend in early August, just before Labor Day, a group of young women will wait in a line that will rustle with white taffeta. Long, slick white gloves will climb up to their elbows and, two by two, paired with a date, they will glide into the center of a ballroom as their families watch.
To music they will march into a formation learned just the afternoon before. And when each has walked across the stage, they will move from their dates to their daddies for a waltz.
On the stage will be the Cotton Ball King and Queen sitting in oversized chairs-thrones. The Queen will wear a heavy embroidered train, and carry a scepter. The King will wear a sash and medal. Their identities will have been kept secret until the moment the curtain parts and their names are announced.
For 80 years the formalities of the Cotton Ball have been a part of the social coming of age for the daughters of the well to do and up and coming in the Scenic City. The belles will have just completed a year of college. The Queen will have been presented in years before, her selection a mystery. Organizers say she isn't the most beautiful or the most popular or the most well bred, just a woman with a legacy in the ball. The King-middle aged-is an established man in the community. He may be on the board of the hospital or president of the Rotary club, his name known about town.
Historically an invitation to the Cotton Ball cemented a place in society. It was a statement by the family that their girls were ready for marriage. But these days, the spectacle escapes many. The announcements in the newspaper are almost cryptic, like obituaries-little more than a list of names.
Today, the notion of a debutante is all but dead.
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When she was presented in 2012, Hannah Jackson got a shock at the afternoon rehearsal the day before the ball.
"They told us we had to waltz," she explains. She rushed home in a panic. "I grabbed my date, Googled 'how to waltz,' and we watched videos on YouTube to learn," says Jackson, a Corporate Communications major at Baylor University.
The Cotton Ball has had to adjust itself to a changing society. Rumor has it that there is a person appointed to slathering foundation on top of the belles' tattoos before they go onstage. A quick search for #cottonball on social media brings up Tweets about the ball captioned with hashtags like #diva and #turnup. Instagram photos with gauzy filters show girls in gowns tipping Bud Lights to their lips, and posing in monogrammed button-downs (stitched with a blue 'C.C.B') in hotel rooms, prepping for the night.
"Haven't been in town 24 hours and I'm already going to a debutante ball," reads one Tweet from last year's ball.
"Embracing my inner Yankee by choosing to be in Chicago instead of coming out into society as a southern belle tonight #cottonball #lulz," posted another.
The meaning behind the ball, the concept of "coming out," mostly escaped Jackson. She can't recall the order of the ball, or her place in the cotillion. She doesn't remember much sentiment or ceremony in the days leading up to the ball. She remembers the theme of the party thrown for the belles-cotton candy-and the necklaces, imprinted with the Cotton Ball crest, that organizers placed around each of the belle's necks at the mother-daughter luncheon the day of the ball. Mostly, she says, it was just a nice party.
Jenny Smith Wright works as a police lieutenant with the Chattanooga Housing Authority. She wears a bullet-proof vest to work and gets ribbed by some of her coworkers, who started calling her the Magnolia Queen once they found out she was named Cotton Ball queen in 2000. She recycled the dress she wore as Queen as her wedding dress.
"My dad joked that I should carry a sawed-off shotgun instead of a scepter," she says. "I didn't think that would go over very well."
As for the meaning behind her coming out as a belle?
"In terms of leaving with a guy on my arm, no way. Could have cared less," she says. "It was more for my family. It's a nice tradition, and it's fun."
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That tradition began in 1933 as a fundraiser for the Crippled Children's ward in Dr. T.C. Thompson's children's hospital. The belles, their escorts and the royal court-upwards of one hundred-enjoyed a summer of parties and dances leading up to the big night. Guests were invited from out of town. Until the '90s, local media showed great interest in the season, profiling the belles, covering the gatherings, often running a two-page spread of photographs the day after the ball.
Thousands packed Memorial Auditorium each year for the presentations. Some families bought the same seats every year.
In 1938 the Queen was presented to a crowd of 7,000 at Warner Park- around 5,000 couldn't get seats-as part of the Drums of Dixie, a circus-scale pageant with a cast of 2,000 people and 300 animals. That year the Cotton Ball queen, Elise Hayes, the great-granddaughter of president of the Confederacy Jefferson Davis, was named "Daughter of the South."
In those days, a young woman would have known she would be presented at the ball for months, if not years, beforehand. No doubt she would already know how to waltz.
This year, around 45 belles will be presented. That number is cut in half from the ball's prime. "These days I think it's almost difficult to even find girls to come in for the weekend and do the ball," says
Karin Glendenning, a former chairwoman of the ball who has been attending balls since she was a little girl.
"These are busy women. And they're definitely not going to parties in the middle of the afternoon-they all have jobs."
Mark Ramsey, who serves as the Cotton Ball's Public Relations chair, recalls corresponding with 2011 Queen Caroline Decosimo the summer she was crowned; she had been studying in Italy and flew back to her hometown for the weekend. Ramsey loves the traditions of the Cotton Ball-the marches, the pomp and the costumes. But he admits that the original intent of the ball is a little archaic.
"The modern debutante is way different than the original concept of a debutante," Ramsey describes. "The girls are doing internships and going on to do better and greater things. The days of presentation are long gone."
Crowned Cotton Ball King in 2010, Ramsey laughs remembering a wardrobe malfunction his Queen had while they performed their royal waltz. Mid-dance, the heavy bustle that attached her train at her hips came loose. "She just kind of kicked it aside and moved around with her feet so it looked like a dance move," he said. "No one takes it very seriously. It's very light-hearted."
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In its heyday, the ball followed themes-Fashion, Roses, Indians twice-but the prevailing trope was the rose colored view of the Old South before the ravages of the Civil War. Grand plantations. Gentile, graceful, soft women who had no work to do. Big cotton money. Sprawling land.
Each year a performer sang a rendition of "Old Black Joe." A tableau with costumed performers recreated a plantation scene. The Ball's founder, Zella Armstrong, "shaped the dreams of perpetuating the vanishing glories of the Old South by requiring the debutantes ... be descended from Confederate ancestry," reads a program from 1959.
Armstrong herself was the daughter of a Confederate artillery major "who helped return the first shots against the Yankees."
Today, the Cotton Ball is smaller, quieter. Condensed to a single weekend, the belles and their escorts have one rehearsal before the ball, now held at the Convention Center. The ball moved from Memorial in 1985, the year after alcohol brown-bagging laws tripped up booze-toting guests.
The event is invite-only, a measure intended to keep it family-friendly and relatively tame. Organizers of the ball say they've worked hard over the years to make the ball more inclusive, too. No one is turned away who wants to participate, provided they can pay the hefty fees. When the invitation to be presented at the Cotton Ball came in the mail last summer, Tayana Fernandez wasn't so sure about it, but her mother was. "She said, 'This is an honor and a privilege, and a great opportunity. You should really do this,'" Fernandez recalls.
Fernandez, a junior Biomedical Science and Spanish double major at Auburn University with her eye on dental school, isn't the first biracial belle to be presented at the Cotton Ball, but for her family, the occasion was momentous. Her family is native to Chattanooga. Her mother is African American and her father is Hispanic.
Her mother, a surgical technician, works with lots of doctors who presented their daughters in the ball. Two generations before that, Fernandez's great-grandmother worked as a housekeeper and nanny for many doctors in the area. "I did it more for my parents and my grandparents," she explains. "They grew up when things were really different. They wouldn't have been able to be involved in something like this, and me being the only African American in the Ball, that was really a great thing for them to see."
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A few of the rituals of the original Cotton Ball remain. The belles still wear white and march in a cotillion. The King and Queen sit in the oversized chairs that are unearthed from storage just once a year. The belles and the court still waltz. Their names and their legacies are still announced.
The Cotton Ball board starts meeting a couple weeks after the event each year. They tally up the money they have raised through advertising in the programs, decide which charities will benefit. They might start skimming local high school class lists for next year's prospective belles.
Greyson Brown is in her second year as chairwoman. She's never participated in a deb ball, but she's been involved with the Cotton Ball for years. Brown moved to Chattanooga 20 years ago from New Orleans. "I like tradition," she says. "When I moved here what I missed most was that in New Orleans there was always a reason to celebrate. When I was growing up we always knew a lot of people's parents and grandparents, not just our own. I think the ball brings an intergenerational aspect that I think is really important."
Julia Dooley, a board member who oversees the belles, has a long legacy in the ball. She was presented in '84, and her daughter was a belle last year. Generations of Dooleys have waltzed at the ball. "It's a very old tradition that focuses on a wonderful evening with family," Dooley says. "Next to a daughter's wedding, this is most likely the second in line in importance to the people who participate."
The Cotton Ball also raises thousands of dollars in charity for local nonprofit organizations, usually those with a focus on women and children.
"We've been giving to the Northside Neighborhood House for so long, they write us into their budget," says Brown. "We've probably given them half a million dollars over the years."
Today, Brown says, the Cotton Ball can stand as a testament to how society has evolved.
"I think it celebrates young women and how far they've come even since the Cotton Ball started," she explains. "We're not parading them out there so everyone can look at them.
We're celebrating their accomplishments and their education, and letting them feel surrounded by their family and friends. It has to have evolved. Women have evolved. No doubt about it."