Picking Cotton Book Analysis

Picking Cotton

I read the book Picking Cotton over the summer and I thought that this book was interesting. I thought it was interesting because of how everything played out in the in because in the situation that Ronald Cotton was in I would have not been as forgiven as he was. I learned a lot from this book. One of the first thing I learned from this book is how once people this they have found the answer, even if it’s wrong, they choose it because the jump to conclusions. Like in the beginning of the book when they brought Jennifer Thompson in to see if she could identify the person that raped her she pick all of the clues that lead to Ronald Cotton and once she was dead set on him being the person that raped her, she did everything in her power to make sure that he was put in jail. Because in the book she said “Put a man in a cage with beasts and throw away the key, its usually not very long before the man is a beast himself”. Even when Ronald Cotton was in court and brought that guy that looked just like the picture that Jennifer Thompson drew, but had similar characteristics to Cotton. But since she was dead set on Ronald Cotton being the guy that raped her, she was oblivious to the fact that the other guy was the one who raped her

Because at the end of the book Ronald Cotton and Jennifer Thompson finally met and she thought that since she had him locked away for about half his life, in the end he said that he didn’t want to hurt her and that he forgave her for all that she has done. At the end he said that “I forgive you”. For me in the beginning I could not understand why he forgave her for locking him up for all those years for a crime that he did not even commit. I was thinking in my mind that I would have lost it when I got out because I tried to convince the court many times that I was not the rapist and I was in jail for over 10 years. I don’t know what I would have