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. Ron is 6’4” tall and African American. He wears a medallion with an eagle in flight around his neck. Jennifer is a short, petite, blond Caucasian woman. He is there with his daughter, Raven. 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 as she looks at Ronald. She asks how they know each other, to which Ron 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). 

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: “I gave it no further thought” (10).