Part 1 Summary

Part one of the novel, Picking Cotton, is written through the eyes of Jennifer, a college student with a 4.0 grade point average and knew exactly what she was going to do with her life and when she was going to do it. However, when Jennifer was raped at knifepoint by a black man, her whole world turned upside down. It was as if her life was decomposing and no one felt sympathy for her. She had to drop out of school, she lost he boyfriend, her family didn't want to talk about it, and she couldn't express her feelings. She felt like a baby as her younger sister had to care for her. She felt as if someone was watching her constantly and started to go crazy. I began to feel very bad for Jennifer as she struggled to continue living her life as if nothing had happened. Everyone expected her to get over it, but she couldn't do it. She couldn't feel at ease until the person who had attacked her was behind bars. When she finally had the chance to pick the attacker out of a line-up of seven black men, she chose Ronald Cotton.

 I knew she had chosen wrong, though, because of the Prologue. In the prologue, Ronald and Jennifer were at Jennifer's daughter's soccer game and when one of the soccer moms asked how they knew each other, the text stated, "What they don't say is that about twenty-two years ago, Jennifer sat in a jailhouse just five miles down the interstate, ... and picked Ronald Cotton as the man who had brutally raped her eleven days before." This gave me a clue about the fact the Ronald was actually innocent. Also, the book is dedicated to all the wrongful convictions made, so in the story as she was choosing Ronald, I wanted to yell at her not to pick him. With this knowledge in the back of my mind, Ronald was ruled guilty at the trial. Reading Ronald getting charged and knowing he was innocent was like watching a horror movie and the main character going into the basement. You know there is nothing you can do, and all you can do is watch in horror. Part one ends in Jennifer and her family celebrating, but I think that Ronald's family was doing quite the opposite.