Picking Cotton: Our Memoir Of Injustice And Redemption

In March of 1995, Gauldin calls Jennifer. She is in her children’s playroom, in the house where she lives with her husband and family. Gauldin asks if they can meet together the next day to discuss something. Jennifer is immediately worried.

She says that, instead of moving on after the trial, she “fell apart” (183). She and Paul had mutually ended their relationship a month after Cotton’s sentencing. She began partying and doing cocaine. One evening a tennis instructor of hers showed up at her house drunk and tried to get in bed with her. She screamed and fought him off. Weeks later, a girlfriend convinces her to go to Fort Lauderdale with her for Spring Break. She goes to dinner there with a man named Vinny who is from New York. After she gets home, he calls her every day for a week, then flies up to see her a month later. By June, they are in love and she has decided to move to Long Island to be with him.

She hates Long Island, and Vinny agrees to move back to Winston-Salem with her. When he proposes, she agrees to marry him. In 1989 she gives birth to triplets, Morgan, Brittany, and a boy they name Blake.