Ending

The ending of the novel, Picking Cotton, was very satisfying. After Jennifer realized she had made a mistake, the only way she could help herself was to talk to Ronald. Once they sat down and talked to each other, they became the best of friends.

Ronald Cotton and Jennifer Thompson are now friends after the entire fiasco is over.

At one point in the book, Jennifer's son, Blake, asked if he could ride with Ron, and Jennifer said that he could. I thought it was very interesting that the person she had wrongfully put into jail for 11 years was being trusted with her son's life. I think a theme in this book is definitely Faith. Ronald kept on believing throughout prison that he would one day be free, and his sister even told him to keep on believing. His bond with God grew as he awaited his freedom in prison, and when he was wrongfully convicted for two rapes, he sang a song about the presence of God in his life. I enjoyed this book a lot. I liked particularly how Ronald tells of his hardships in prison. The one problem I didn't like is that the Prologue gave the ending away. I would have liked to be in suspense, not knowing if Ronald was going to be set free.

Part 2

Part two of the novel, Picking Cotton, was just as exciting as the first one. This part, however, was written through the eyes of Ronald Cotton, the man wrongly convicted of raping Jennifer Thompson and Mary Reynolds. When Ronald first learned the police were looking for him, he went to the headquarters and was arrested. He had to go through very harsh interrogation and he was only allowed a short break after three long hours of being questioned. After a few days Ronald was picked out of a lineup and had to go to court. He kept insisting on not pleading guilty and I felt a mix of anger and sadness as I read Ronald going through the trial and being judged as guilty. Ron got taken to Central Prison, a huge jail right near Raleigh, North Carolina, and he begin to work out a lot more at the gym. But then he met Bobby Leon Poole, the man who actually committed the rapes of Jennifer and Mary. He was suspicious of Bobby, but he wasn't really sure.

As Ronald was working in the kitchen he met a person named Kenny, who had already been in the prison for 5 years already. Kenny always taunted Ron and even confronted him in the shower. Ronald ended up getting in a fight with Kenny, but Kenny told Ron that he thinks that Bobby really did commit the crimes that he was in for. That was when Ron started writing to his lawyers. He sent them things that confirmed Poole had done it and even included a picture of him. As life went on in prison, he realized he was turning into a madman and was only 15 feet away from killing Poole. Not only was he starting to decompose, but so was his family.

His mother had a stroke and his sister's boyfriend had committed suicide right in front of her, so she was going through some very intense trauma. The only thing that he thought would save him was to continue believing in God. He was allowed another trial, and this time Kenny would speak and Bobby would also be tried. It might've looked like Bobby had done it, but the judge did not use the evidence in the ruling of the court, and Ronald was again convicted. At the end of the trial, he sang a song about how God came into his life. After one of his prison mates committed suicide, he felt much closer to god.

After 8 or so years, they discovered DNA testing and that the blood on Mary Reynolds' door matched Poole's blood type, and not Ronald's. This sparked new hope in Ronald and he said that he definitely wanted to do DNA testing to finally prove that he was innocent. The DNA order was approved and I felt happy for Ronald because he finally had a chance to get out of prison. The DNA wasn't his, but it didn't necessarily clear him. Throughout this part of the novel, I was very moved by his letters to his lawyers and his faith in God as he went through 11 years in prison as an innocent man.

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.