Picking Cotton: Our Memoir Of Injustice And Redemption

It is September of 2006. A man named Ronald Cotton meets with Jennifer Thompson-Cannino at a soccer field in Gibsonville, North Carolina. Ronald is 6’4” tall and African American. He wears a medallion with an eagle in flight around his neck. He is there with his daughter, Raven. Jennifer is a short, petite, blond white woman. Jennifer’s 16-year-old daughter, Brittany, is playing on one of the soccer teams.

After the game, someone tells Jennifer that Brittany played a great game, then asks where her husband is. She also asks how she and Ronald know each other, to which Ronald responds: “We go way back” (3). Twenty-two years prior, Jennifer had picked Ronald out of a lineup of seven Black men, naming him as “the man who had brutally raped her eleven days before” (3).

Twenty-two years ago, Jennifer was 22 and living in Burlington, North Carolina. Every day, she walked three miles to campus. She and her boyfriend, Paul, were talking about getting married. One night in July of 1984, she noticed the glow of someone smoking a cigarette near her apartment as she walked home in the dark. It was someone in a tree, and Jennifer notes, “I gave it no further thought” (10).