Picking Cotton: Our Memoir Of Injustice And Redemption

On August 1, 1984, 22 year old Ronald Cotton comes home—where he lives with his mother and her boyfriend—to find that the police had already been there. He borrows a neighbor’s car and asks his sister Tudy to go with him to the police station so that he can clear his name. On the way, they pick up Teresa, a woman he had been dating: “We were too afraid to talk, too afraid to make promises about its all being a big mistake and everything working out. That’s not the way it is in some Southern towns. At least, not for everybody” (76). When he arrives, the first cop he sees looks familiar to him. Ronald realizes that “this officer had trailed [him] before” (77), when Ronald was out riding his bike.

He tells a detective named Lowe that he doesn’t need an attorney because he didn’t do anything. He says on the night in question, he was with his brother Calvin at a boardinghouse on Ireland Street. Then they went to the Candlelight Club at 10:20. At 2:30 in the morning, in the club, he met a friend named Janice and asked her for a ride home.