Summer Reading Picks

The miracle of grace and friendship. By: Keith T. Barber

Picking Cotton documents survivors’ stories, flawed justice system; by Jennifer Thompson-Cannino and Ronald Cotton; St Martin’s Press; 2009

There is a school of thought that believes great beauty comes only at the cost of great pain and suffering. The lives of Jennifer Thompson-Cannino and Ronald Cotton are a testament to that axiom. In the summer of 1984, an unknown intruder broke into Thompson-Cannino’s Burlington apartment and raped her at knifepoint. She managed to escape and run to a neighbor’s for help. Several weeks later, she identified Ronald Cotton as her assailant. As a result of her positive identification, Cotton spent the next 11 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. Picking Cotton, a New York Times bestseller, is their dual memoir.

The miracle of Thompson-Cannino and Cotton’s story took place 13 years later, on April 4, 1997. Jennifer had arranged to meet with Ron two years after he was released from prison when DNA evidence proved his innocence and Bobby Leon Poole confessed to her assault. She wanted to apologize.

Picking Cotton tells the story of their meeting from both their perspectives, which gives it added emotional punch. “Can you ever forgive me?” Jennifer asked Ron during the encounter at the First Baptist Church of Elon College.

“I forgive you,” Ron responded. “I’m not angry at you…. All I want is for all of us to go on and have a happy life.” Jennifer writes that the first meeting ended with a hug. “He seemed to be holding us all up,” writes Jennifer.

That group hug proved to be the moment Thompson- Cannino began to feel the grace of forgiveness. After their first meeting, Jennifer and Ron made a number of public appearances together, and soon became best friends.

In the past 12 years, Cotton and Thompson-Cannino have traveled the country together talking about their experiences and campaigning for criminal justice reform. They have worked diligently to raise awareness about the inherent flaws of eyewitness identification, which contribute to more than 75percent of wrongful convictions.

Cotton has the distinction of being the first post-conviction DNA exoneree in state history. Ron’s case led to North Carolina becoming only the second state in the nation to adopt the best practices standards for law enforcement training.

Ron’s former attorney, Rich Rosen, formed the NC Actual Innocence Commission as a result of his case. Based on the Innocence Commission’s recommendations, the NC General Assembly established the Innocence Inquiry Commission — the nation’s first forum for justice in innocence cases — in 2006. The work of Cotton and Thompson-Cannino has been instrumental in the state increasing compensation for exonerees. When Ron gained his freedom in 1995, the state only offered $500 a year for those wrongfully imprisoned.

Now, the state offers $50,000 a year retroactive to 2003. Ron received a little over $109,000 from the state for the 11 years he spent behind bars. Thompson-Cannino said her deeply painful experiences have given her a personal mission — to instruct the public on how memory fails in eyewitness identification.

“How does memory really, really work?” she asked. “Some of the things we think to be true are not true. We think the more certain we are about something, the more correct we are, and it’s really the opposite.”

Thompson-Cannino has learned that “unconscious transference” led to her positive identification of Ron. The Burlington Police Department showed Jennifer a lineup of mug shots before the physical lineup. Ronald Cotton was the only suspect in both the photos and the physical lineup, which led to her identification. Mary Reynolds, who was victimized by Poole the same night as Jennifer, failed to identify Cotton as her assailant in the days following her assault. Three years later, however, Reynolds changed her mind and Cotton was convicted of her rape as well. Jennifer often speaks of how memory fails in the eyewitness identification process during prosecutorial symposiums. Each time she relates the story of her sexual assault, Bobby Poole has less and less of a hold on her, she said. However, she had never gone into the details of her rape outside a courtroom until she sat down to write Picking Cotton two years ago. “I did [relive it], and it was really difficult,” she said. “I had to thoughtfully consider how honest and raw I wanted to be about it because my children are 19. I knew they would read the book, and I knew their friends would read the book. My parents would read the book. Although people knew the story, it’s different when you actually read the details of that night, which I had actually never told outside of court.”

Thompson-Cannino said she vividly remembers handing a copy of the memoir to her son, Blake, before he boarded a plane for Vietnam earlier this year. “I said, ‘Please don’t judge me,’” she recalled.

Blake, who traveled to the Southeast Asian country to embark on a semester abroad, was the first of Jennifer’s triplets to read the book. Several days after his arrival in Vietnam, Blake sent his mother a message on the social networking site Facebook.

“He said, ‘Just finished reading the book. I knew the story but I had no idea how brave my mother really was. I’m so proud to be your son,’” Jennifer recounted.

She said there is an upside to Blake and his triplet sisters, Morgan and Brittany, knowing every detail of the night she was victimized by Bobby Poole.

“I made mistakes,” she said. “It’s given my children permission to not have to be perfect and to know they can come to me and tell me things maybe the average parent won’t be told and we can work through it before a disaster happens.”

The writing process proved excruciatingly painful for Thompson-Cannino. As easy as it would have been to withhold certain details, her honesty and willingness to bare her soul gives the book its emotional weight.

Thompson-Cannino said she anticipated how hard it would be for her family to read the details of that horrific night and the perceived lack of support she felt from her parents, siblings and ex-boyfriend in the aftermath. So before the book’s release earlier this year she did her best to prepare them. “I talked to them very honestly one at a time and said, ‘The truth of the matter is, I never felt supported,’” she said. “‘The truth of the matter is, you never came to trial; you never did call me or write me a note of support.’ I can’t make it any different than what it was, but I’m not angry about it any longer. It’s just the way it happened.”

Cotton spent the next 11 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit.

In the years since, Thompson-Cannino has gained insight into the way most families deal with sexual assault. “I don’t think [my family] didn’t support me because they didn’t love me. I felt like they didn’t support me because they didn’t know how, and because a lot of times when people deal with a sexual assault, as a family member or friend, it’s almost like visiting someone with cancer,” Thompson-Cannino said. “They just don’t know what the heck to say.” Thompson-Cannino’s hope is that Picking

Cotton will encourage sexual assault victims “to give themselves permission to visit their experience and then work through it.” Jennifer and Ron often speak of the miraculous nature of their case, but they wonder how many people in Ron’s situation never have a miracle.

So they continue their fight to give a voice to the wrongfully imprisoned, to reform police investigation procedures and the criminal justice system, and to give hope to victims of crime and their families that someday, justice will prevail.

Ron and Jennifer’s friendship, born of pain and suffering, has helped raise public awareness regarding the flaws of the criminal justice system and the 235 post-conviction exonorees, like Ron, who campaign for justice for all who have been wrongfully convicted.

“For some reason I will never be able to explain, Ron and I were supposed to bring some message to the system to make it better,” Jennifer said. That is the beauty of their story, and the reason Picking Cotton is a must-read this summer.

After mistakenly accusing Ronald Cotton of rape, Jennifer Thompson-Cannino sought his forgiveness, which he graciously extended.

Growing up too fast. By: Lindsay Craven

The Last Child; by John Hart; Minotaur Books; 2009

For most people, childhood means carefree days, a feeling of security and hours of play. That’s not what childhood is like for Johnny Merrimon.

Johnny lives in a world of deceit and abuse, which set him on an arduous quest. His face is framed with black strands, his eyes dark and pained.

His classmates call him a freak, the community thinks he’s troubled. And after his sister disappeared one year ago, his family fell apart.

Definitely not the setup for a happy go-lucky summer read, John Hart’s The Last Child takes readers on a journey into the dark world of a very tortured 13-year-old boy living on the North Carolina coast.

“Having a thriller based around a 13-year-old kid, I had to ask myself some pretty tough questions,” John Hart said. “What would take away the perfect life this boy had? How would he react to the brutality of his changed circumstances? Where would he find the strength to deal with that change and what dangerous path would that strength take him down?” Hart answers these proposed questions with painful honesty. He examines the difficult reality of losing a piece of yourself and what that loss does to the way you view the world.

Johnny Merrimon must adapt to a world without parents and without love. Things get out of control as he discovers the presence of sexual predators in his neighborhood who may be responsible for his sister’s disappearance.

He scopes out the homes of these dangerous men, waiting for the clue that can crack open this mystery. Also on the case is Detective Clyde Hunt, whose failure to return the girl to her parents or even give them the closure of her death leaves him with an intense feeling of guilt. His obsession with the open case drives his wife to divorce and his son to hatred.

Hunt shows true compassion for Johnny, something few other characters do throughout the book, but when another young girl goes missing Hunt begins to see a darker, meaner side to Johnny; one that will stop at nothing to find answers to his questions.

As Hunt desperately scrambles to solve the latest missing child case he struggles with his own feelings for Johnny’s mother, Katherine, feelings that are putting his career in jeopardy and prompting some undesirable rumors about town. Katherine lives a nightmare: Her only daughter is missing and presumed dead; she is a junkie, and a very unattractive and abusive man takes advantage of her weaknesses and her son. A year after her daughter’s disappearance, she is a pale, sunken, apathetic version of her former self. Johnny hates her for this but cannot leave her side. And he still needs to know what happened to his sister.

John Hart achieves brilliance with his latest novel. Few authors collect the pain and thoughts of their characters so brilliantly and poignantly.

“Dangerous fiction makes for interesting fiction,” Hart said. “For fiction to be dangerous that means the writer has to take a lot of chances. What makes me most proud of this book is that I took loads of chances knowing full well that I could be shooting myself in the foot and the fact that all those chances have paid off have made the book the strongest thing that I’ve ever done.”

John Hart achieves brilliance with his latest novel.

Wicked Kernersville or lame K-Vegas? By: Jordan Green

Wicked Kernersville: Rogues, Robbers, Ruffians & Rumrunners; by Michael L. Marshall and Jerry L. Taylor; the History Press; 2009

Michael L. Marshall will be the first to acknowledge that the Harvest Ridge subdivision where he lives with his wife near the Forsyth-Guilford county line bears little resemblance to the village of Kernersville of the 19th and early 20th century that is chronicled in the slim volume he coauthored with Jerry L. Taylor called Wicked Kernersville.

To get to Marshall’s house, you take North Main Street, which becomes NC Highway 150, from the center of Kernersville towards Oak Ridge. The sprawling Bible Revival Ministries Center mega-church materializes on the right, and soon the entrance to Marshall’s subdivision appears. New houses with fieldstone finish and saplings not more than six feet in height sprout from the ground, while about half of the lots remain empty and carpeted in weeds — testimony to the cratered real estate market. It looks like a typical Triad exurb — and it is. The 64-year-old Marshall and Taylor, who is seven years his senior, grew up in this town, and their dads worked together at the Adam-Millis Plant No. 4 in Kernersville. They went to college, pursued careers out of state, and each returned to their hometown, reconnecting appropriately enough through the Kernersville Historic Preservation Society.

At 124 pages, Wicked Kernersville is a brisk and mostly entertaining read that is episodic rather than comprehensive.

The stories are not quite as salacious as the title would suggest, and Taylor discloses that the term “wicked” was imposed by the publisher, a Charleston, SC imprint called the History Press that has produced a small series based on the theme: Wicked Washington, Wicked Charlotte, two volumes of Wicked Charleston and accounts of cities called Newport in both Kentucky and Rhode Island.

“Rogues, Robbers, Ruffians & Rumrunners is our subtitle,” Taylor says. “We wanted to soften it.”

There’s not much here about activities that would be considered morally corrupt, unless you count acts of violence prompted by over-consumption of (mostly illicit) liquor; these characters are mostly ordinary, if headline-grabbing criminals.

With an estimated population of 22,407 today, Kernersville has grown by a factor of 37 over the past 130 years. President Bush chose the town’s Deere Hitachi plant as a setting for a stagemanaged appearance in 2005. When hipsters call the town “K- Vegas,” the nickname is entirely ironic.

As the blurb notes, despite its contemporary reputation for “quiet neighborhoods and lovely historic district homes,” early Kernersville “had its fair share of unsavory characters.”

So was Kernersville especially rough back in the day, or just typical in its danger quotient? George P. Winfree, who was interviewed in 1958 for an article in a local newspaper called the People’s News, seems to have believed so. Winfree told Editor Pete Nash Jr., as Marshall and Taylor write, that Kernersville “was a rough town and the talk of the entire state” — so rough, in fact, “that when the train passed through, the conductor advised passengers to keep a low profile.”

Marshall is inclined to think the claim is somewhat exaggerated. With the book’s thematic inconsistencies out of the way, it’s no exaggeration to say Wicked Kernersville is full of fascinating tales literally ripped from the headlines (and bodies) of contemporaneous newspaper stories. There’s the farmer named Biggs whose corpse was exhumed based on the overactive imaginations of townspeople who thought they saw perspiration on his forehead before he was interred; the black man who was busted out of the Greensboro jail by a Kernersville mob, then hung and shot on Spring Garden Road based upon an unsubstantiated transgression against a white woman; the father-and-son blockading team shot to death by a pair of revenue agents; the estranged husband who hacked his wife to death and then inflicted the same punishment on himself; the mail-order dog purveyor who was convicted of fraud for advertising pedigreed hunting dogs to the gentry and instead sending them common mongrels; and the cross-dressing female bootlegger.

(I’m excited to report that at least three of the malefactors in this book are Jordans, although there’s no evidence that they’re from the same line as my forebears, who settled down east in Northampton County.) Marshall and Taylor’s account of the 1887 lynching of Eugene Hairston, said to be the only one in Guilford County, is especially horrific, although its circumstances and methods were most likely unremarkable for its time. Considering that the authors are completely dependent on contemporaneous newspaper articles for their research, the account will remind readers of just how racist the North Carolina press was in the late 19th century. Based on the allegation of 18-year-old Mahala Cordelia Sapp that the man threw her on the ground and choked her, the Greensboro Morning News screamed: “RAPE! A Negro Fiend Commits an Outrage Upon a Young Lady in Kernersville!” As Marshall and Taylor report, another Greensboro newspaper, the North State, decried the lawlessness of Hairston’s mob, but concluded that the legal problems with lynching would be best overcoming by preempting the law. “Our women must be protected above all things,” the paper editorialized. “They are our most precious jewels, and earthly happiness is dependent on their purity and inviolability. When their virtue is assailed let the actual or would-be ravisher, when he is caught and identified, be killed on the spot like a wild beast if it can be done before the law lays its hands on him.” We can give thanks that our history gives us not only racist and sanctimonious mobs, but also cross-dressing female bootleggers.

Michael L. Marshall and Jerry L. Taylor will sign copies of Wicked Kernersville at Borders in Winston-Salem from 1 to 3 p.m. on June 14. Borders is located at 252 Stratford Road. Call 336.727.8834 for more information.

A valley of malcontented humility. By: Brian Clarey

A Very Mutinous People: The Struggle for North Carolina, 1660-1713; by Noeleen McIlvenna; UNC Press, 2009

North Carolina comes by its contrarian streak honestly, according to the pages of A Very Mutinous People, a meticulously footnoted and indexed micro history by Noeleen McIlvenna of the region known back then as Albemarle.

The 50-year span she deconstructs, which occurred well after the colony at Roanoke vanished into the saltwater mists, saw the emergence of North Carolina as a colonial entity and the underpinnings of an American thirst for democracy that, 100 years later, would lead to the American Revolution.

The author begins the story in 1660, the year the monarchy was restored after the English Revolution, and her historical narrative has all the stuff of great fiction.

In 1660, the area known as Albemarle occupied the northeast corner of what is now North Carolina, roughly from the Chowan River to the Outer Banks and from the Virginia border across the Albemarle Sound.

Between the water and the tobacco plantations simmered the Great Dismal Swamp, 2,200 square miles of impenetrable pocosin, thick mire, dangerous flora and fauna.

By 1660, the author describes American colonists who had seen their English King tried by the people and beheaded, seen a gentleman farmer, Oliver Cromwell, build a republic advocating religious freedom and meritocracy. They had powerful new ideas about authority, liberty, tradition and reason. They were angry enough to leave England as Charles II took the throne during Reconstruction; disdainful of Virginia’s landed gentry who had already carved that colony up into tobacco plantations, or the affected finery and slave-owning ways of South Carolina aristocracy.

And they were brave enough — or desperate enough —to ford the Great Dismal Swamp. They were veterans of Cromwell’s army, Roundheads, sailors who could navigate the barrier islands and inner waterways. They were escaped slaves, indentured servants and debtors looking for open space and peace of mind. They were trappers and traders and fishermen, outcasts and hustlers and prisoners. Many of them sought religious freedom, like that most radical of dissident groups, the Quakers.

The first European settler on record is Nathaniel Batts, a fur trader who fled Virginia in disgrace, leaving behind a wife. He traded with the Yeopim Indians, eventually taking a native bride and buying land from the elders of the tribe. McIlvenna calls him the “unofficial governor” of the state in the 1660s, after boatloads of disillusioned Virginians settled there too. By the 1670s, the colony was home to an elaborate smuggling operation that flourished in the shadows of British tariffs and presaged an armed rebellion against the governor of Virginia.

The man who laid claim to the position of governor of the colony in the 1680s was Seth Sothell. He came on the scene in 1681 after being ransomed by Turkish Pirates and quickly grabbed power and land. Over the course of the decade he would build a corrupt and terrible regime while pirates cruised the waters outside the barrier islands.

Sothell was overthrown by a scorned ally as the century came to a close. The period in the state’s history is riddled with scoundrels, malcontents, revolutionaries and idealists.

The man who gave his name to the Containment Area for Relocated Yankees, for example, Thomas Cary, led the colony after a soft coup that counted just one casualty. He was eventually deposed by a cabal with ties to Virginia and the Crown.

Naturally, he then enlisted the aid of the Tuscarora Indians and led an armed rebellion, which was not quelled until the Virginia Militia, and Royal Marines drew close.

McIlvenna, an assistant professor of history at Ohio’s Wright State University, uses primary source documents to make her case: letters, personal papers, journals, narratives

McIlvenna calls him the “unofficial governor” of the state in the 1660s, after boatloads of disillusioned Virginians settled there too.