“What makes you think they have?” she parried.

“Oh, come on, Minnie. Why else are Doris and Robert here? And there’s Jess, your own daughter. And Zach’s Emma.”

“Now, don’t worry about it, honey. There’s no names on anything. You just judge it like you would if you didn’t know they were in it.”

It was a good thing that I had two colleagues to help with the judging or rumors might have started that the fix was in.

“Yoo-hoo, Deborah!” my sister-in-law Doris called. When she caught my eye, she shifted her own eyes significantly from her grandson Bert to the table that held entries for the under-sixes.

“I saw that,” said Luther Parker. Luther is tall and gangly and looks sort of like a black Abe Lincoln without the beard. He’s Colleton County’s first African American district court judge and has a dry sense of humor. “No playing favorites, now.”

I looked around the hall and saw his wife Louise. We exchanged waves as a bright-eyed little girl ran up to her and tugged at her hand.

Luther and Louise’s first grandchild.

“May we assume Sarah’s entered in the first category?” I asked sweetly.

He gave a sheepish shrug.

“And what about you?” I asked our third judge, Ellis Glover, who’s Clerk of Court.

“I don’t have a dog in the first fight,” he laughed, “but my sister’s son’s in the six-to-sixteen bunch.”

“I probably have some nieces there, too,” I told them. “Shall we all recuse ourselves and go home?”

“Not unless you know which entries are which,” said Luther.

I admitted I didn’t and the same held true for Ellis and him, so we got down to it.

The object, of course, is to give out as many rosettes as possible to the younger children. Neither Bert nor Sarah won first, second, or third, but they each carried off one of the ten green ribbons for honorable mention and were too young not to be pleased with their success.

In the second group, I was pretty sure that the wagonload of yam children pulled by a remarkably horse-shaped yam was Jess’s entry. She’s crazy about horses and it would have taken something serendipitous like this for her to enter when I’d asked the family to skip the contest this year. Ellis and Luther had marked it as a possible winner on their first ballots, so I didn’t feel bad keeping it in the first round, too. The yam baby had a natural indentation that made it look as if it was bawling its head off.

It was cute enough to win a unanimous second place, but the blue ribbon went to a Hispanic boy’s tableau that featured space yams walking on the moon along with some yam aliens. When Jess bounced up to accept her award, we both pretended we didn’t know each other. Wouldn’t have looked good for a judge to hug one of the winners.

That didn’t stop Minnie and Seth, though, and while they were distracted, I slipped back to the pig cookers. The Ladies Auxiliary of Colleton Memorial Hospital had brought coleslaw, spiced apples, hushpuppies, and various desserts to augment the meat and were now selling plates of the donated barbecue to benefit the children’s wing. I asked Isabel and Nadine if I could have a foam take-out box of barbecue and another of slaw and apples.