Category Archives: identity

Mistaken identification – a memoir of injustice and redemption

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by Jerry Waxler

The memoir “Picking Cotton” begins with the home invasion and rape of Jennifer Thompson a college student in a small southern town. Society cried out for justice, and in response, Ronald Cotton was convicted to a life sentence. Eleven years later, he was fully exonerated, having been imprisoned for a crime he did not commit. This memoir tells the story of both victims, about their journey through that dark night, and the years that followed, explaining what went wrong, and how they picked up the pieces.

When the search began for the monster who had assaulted Jennifer Thompson, Ronald Cotton seemed to fit the part. This young black man had already been in trouble with the law and he had been dating a white girl, two facts that attracted police. He told them there had been a mistake, because he was out with friends that night. Unfortunately, he realized too late that the outing had been on a different night. At the time of the rape, he was actually home asleep on the sofa, a fact sworn to by members of his family. The all-white jury weighed their testimony against Jennifer Thompson’s positive identification. “That’s him,” she said under oath, and so Cotton went to jail.

After the trial, no longer worried about her attacker being on the loose, Jennifer had to face the disruption of her safety and normalcy. Eventually she reclaimed her life, married and started a family. Cotton meanwhile was trying to avoid despair. Early in his incarceration, he learned that another black man had privately bragged about committing the rape. Yet, a botched appeal dismissed this jailhouse confession.

Finally, a sympathetic defense team took up the case. Despite disturbing discrepancies in his trial, the new lawyers could not make a dent in Cotton’s life sentence. It was only after DNA testing that police interrogated the real rapist who officially confessed, including details he could only have known if he had been present at the crime. After 11 years in prison, Cotton was released.

In typical stories of crime and punishment, a diligent detective gradually pries the mask off the villain, and exposes hidden evil. In “Picking Cotton” investigators pried off the demon’s mask to reveal an innocent man.

Memoir as a tool for Redemption

Having been certain that Ronald Cotton was her attacker, it was difficult for Jennifer Thompson-Cannino to revise her mental image of him. And yet, she needed to do something. Haunted by the awful fact that her identification had ruined years of his life, she finally reached out to apologize. When she discovered he had forgiven her, she wanted to do more. Jennifer became actively involved in trying to raise awareness that a victim’s identification should not be considered infallible.

Out of the rubble of that destructive night, a friendship developed that could hopefully save lives. The two appear together on talk shows, trying to put a human face on the tragedy of wrongful imprisonment, especially when based solely on a single person’s memory. Their advocacy aided by the publicity generated by the memoir has contributed to revising guidelines for witness identification, hopefully reducing the psychological influence that can be exerted by police to steer the victim towards their preferred perpetrator.

Stylistic and Emotional Strengths of Picking Cotton

The book alternates between two points of view. For example, in one section we watch the police lineup from Jennifer’s eyes, and later we see that lineup through Ronald’s eyes. Their journey starts out in this treacherous, bleak territory – the rape, the trial, life inside a prison. Then, as they try to make the most of their situations, their paths lead them back towards a lighter place. Their first encounter was based on fear, terror, and error, while their second was based on love and forgiveness, and the effort to transform a wrong into a right. The memoir takes us along on this emotional and moral journey, moving from the external activity of criminal investigation, to the higher moral justice of actual truth.

Thinking at the moral edges

The story of “Picking Cotton” raises many issues. It engages the reader in race relations, justice, and injustice. It involves gender politics, violence, and the power of men over women. It reveals problems with identification, one of the foundations of our legal system. And it digs deep into the challenge of “redemption,” that effort to turn back the clock and make up for what happened in the past.

When I was younger I hoped I could discover the underlying truth that governs the world. I wanted this Truth to exist in science, or in philosophy, or spirituality. But I kept finding that facts and theories could not contain the entire human condition. Rather, through my study of memoirs, I find that within each lifetime or situation, there is a system of right and wrong that is every bit as cosmic as the absolute truth I had always looked for.

In every memoir, I find an author’s perspective that extends my understanding farther and farther. From their point of view, my own logic does not necessarily apply. Instead of my search for one absolute truth I have shifted my focus. In the world of real people, I no longer look for the one right answer. Instead, I seek to understand their stories.

Writing Prompt: Thinking and Writing About Your own Redemption

After a wrong has been committed, how much time and energy do we put into trying to make amends? While we can’t turn the clock back, can we restore some of the decency and dignity of our lives? The Twelve Step Programs suggest that it is worthwhile in many cases to not only face mistakes but try to learn their story, so we can do everything within our power to make them right. The Ninth Step says, “We made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.” If there are areas in your memoir that you feel might have caused pain to others, consider the Twelve Step suggestions. Are there ways you could help? Have you used the situation to grow? What have you learned? Could your story help someone else avoid a similar situation?

While most of us don’t have the near-miraculous opportunity Jennifer Thompson-Cannino and Ronald Cotton had to set the record straight, we can pay it forward, to help others who are in a similar situation, or to spread the word and share the story by writing a memoir.

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Amazon page: “Picking Cotton Our Memoir of Injustice and Redemption,” by Jennifer Thompson-Cannino, Ronald Cotton, and Erin Torneo”

For the Picking Cotton’s home page, including appearances by the authors click here.

For the site that campaigns against wrongful imprisonment, see the Innocence Project.

Identity moves too in Doreen Orion’s travel memoir

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By Jerry Waxler

Doreen Orion and her husband are psychiatrists, which means they had to complete medical school before they could start studying mental illness. This intense education elevates physicians to the stratosphere, provoking enough curiosity in the rest of us to inspire television shows like ER, Scrubs, Marcus Welby, MASH, and Gray’s Anatomy. Now you can add one more resource to learn who doctors “really are” by reading Doreen Orion’s memoir, “Queen of the Road.”

You will learn a couple of things about doctors. But like everyone else her identity is a moving target. Whether you are a psychiatrist, a CEO, beauty queen, sales person, or factory worker, your title changes depending on whether you’re home, at your parents’ house, or at work. It changes from decade to decade, and it changes when you retire.

I know a couple who moved to a retirement community in Florida where former factory workers and college professors set aside their old titles and in this egalitarian environment they all become good friends. (Some are better at dropping their former role than others.) Doreen and her husband are not yet fully retired, but their year off provides a glimpse of what happens when they shuck the outer skin of their identity.

When sketching your life story, take advantage of Orion’s example. Pay attention to what your various roles feel like. With your kids you were mom or dad, in your parents’ house you were the kid, and at work the boss or worker. Look across decades, and see how your roles evolved. By staying open to the various ways people see you and you see yourself, you will portray your identity not as a static thing, but a thing in motion.

Writing Prompt
Who are you in your main role? What other roles do you have? Write a few anecdotes, calling attention to your roles.

Character Arc – What you have learned, keeps readers interested
It turns out that one of the fundamental principles of story telling is that during the course of the story, the protagonist is supposed to learn something and change in some way. This story element is called Character Arc, and if done well continues to resonate in the reader’s mind after they close the book. If you want people to remember your memoir long enough to recommend it to friends, I recommend you carefully consider the Character Arc.

“Queen of the Road” starts with concern about midlife crisis, and so, once this dramatic tension has been planted in the reader’s mind, it needs to be resolved by the end. That’s a problem because it’s impossible to “solve” midlife. In fact, by the end of the book, the couple was a year older. The resolution of this dramatic tension comes from Character Arc. If she learns and grows, the reader feels satisfied. So what did Orion learn?

Travel and “Stuff”
One of the haunting images of the pioneers of the old west is the sad scene when the wagon train reaches the mountains. With winter approaching and the horses straining to carry their load, the pioneers make a terrible decision. They push the most valuable thing they own, their piano, off the back of the wagon. Freed of this burden they cross the mountain before winter and save their lives.

Unlike the settlers of the American West, Orion stored her stuff during her pilgrimage, but she was inconvenienced in other ways. For example, after purchasing a pair of shoes she came back to the RV and realized there was no where to put them. So she had to drive all the way back to the store and return them.

Religions have been proposing for millennia that since you can’t take it with you, don’t get too attached to your stuff. It doesn’t seem probable that a bus equipped with dishwasher and satellite television will teach Orion a profound lesson about detachment. But it does.

Orion realized her stuff was not as important as she thought. This inner development might seem small. But despite its modest size, she leaves me feeling rewarded. She was wiser at the end of the book than she was at the beginning – Not a bad pay off for a trip, and not a bad payoff for reading a book. It stayed with me long enough to recommend it to you.

The movement of Doreen’s Character Arc is a journey in its own right, showing her character move through the course of a memoir. We thought we knew her, and now we see we were wrong. This is the kind of simple message that builds hope in readers, as well as memoir writers. At the start of our own journey, we thought we knew who we were, and over time we evolve to become wiser about ourselves and the world.

To visit the Amazon Page, click here.
To visit Doreen Orion’s Home Page, click here.
To see the other two articles I wrote about this book, click here and here.

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Writing Prompt
List the times “stuff” has been important to you. Each time you moved? What about divorce? Splitting up stuff is a huge part of that sad time. Did you have to deal with your parents’ stuff when they died or had to go into assisted living? Did you lose or break something that was important to you?

Writing Prompt
How will your character evolve from the beginning of the book to the end?

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Iranian in America makes love and laughter

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by Jerry Waxler

Read Memoir Revolution to learn why now is the perfect time to write your memoir.

When two countries go to war, their “us” versus “them” mentality make their differences seem irreconcilable. So when I saw Firoozeh Dumas’ memoir, “Funny in Farsi, Growing up Iranian in America” it appealed to me instantly. I wanted to laugh at the differences instead of fight over them. But how can you laugh about something so serious as the differences between Americans and Iranians?

At a meeting of the National Speakers Association in Philadelphia, after an introduction that repeatedly cracked up the audience, Ron Culberson explained that humor happens when your mind sets you up to expect one thing, and then the punch line suddenly shifts the ground you thought you were standing on. That’s what creates the laughter in “Funny in Farsi.” One culture sets up an expectation, and the other culture spins that expectation in a surprising direction.

Firoozeh came to the United States from Iran when she was seven, with a father who believed America was the promised land, a land of infinite wisdom, compassion, and possibilities. That’s a familiar theme for me. Three of my four grandparents moved across the globe from Russia to the melting pot of America. In the early days of their immigration, there was enormous suspicion against them. Their Jewish names and manner and their foreign accents isolated them. But the melting pot blurred the differences especially among the children, and by the second or third generation, the accents were gone, the suspicion eased, and people started to relate to each other as people. The self-effacing humor of Jewish immigrants was an important tool as they struggled to become part of their new home, and helped create a sense of bonding and strength.

So I was prepared to appreciate Firoozeh’s humor. For example, when Firoozeh was a little girl, visiting Disneyland with her family, she became preoccupied by a bright red telephone and when she looked up, her family had moved on. At the lost-and-found for children there was another child who didn’t speak English. The caretaker begged Firoozeh to speak to the little boy. When Firoozeh spoke to him in Farsi, which the boy didn’t understand, he cried even harder. It was comical to think that the American woman assumed that any two foreign children would understand each other’s language.

On Firoozeh’s first day in second grade, her mother went along. The teacher invited them both to the front of the class and then gestured for Firoozeh’s mother to point out their country of origin on the world map. Firoozeh’s mom stood there smiling politely but not moving. The teacher assumed any woman would naturally know where her own country was on the map. She was wrong. What she expected did not match reality.

When I watch a movie or read a book, situations of identity confusion embarrass me so badly, I want to jump up and pace. I was feeling this jumpiness when I read Firoozeh’s memoir, and I wanted to understand how this dramatic tension works. So I pondered other dramatic situations in which identity confusion makes me crazy, and I realized that identity confusion plays a central role throughout Shakespeare’s plays. So I took a closer look at Shakespeare’s comedy “As you like it,” in which Rosalind, was forced into exile, and dressed up as a boy. In this disguise she meets Orlando who was madly in love with her. Taken in by her disguise, he enters into a second relationship with her, now as a friend and confidante. The resulting confusion has been driving audiences crazy for centuries.

Confusion about identity is especially relevant in the great melting pot of modernity, when people cross boundaries, exiled from their own culture and try to enter another. We wonder about each other, “How am I supposed to speak or act towards this person? What parts are the same? What parts are different?” The concern about a person’s identity creates tension, and then when the identity is exposed, we breathe a sigh of relief. “Ah, now I understand.”

While Firoozeh’s neighbors in the United States weren’t sure how to relate to her, I had no such confusion. She took me into her confidence and I saw for myself who she was, thanks to her superb command of the English language, and her clever, ironic insights. “She’s one of us.” I thought. And even better, as a recent entrant into the melting pot, she could share her observations about contrasts between two cultures more clearly than someone limited to seeing things only from within one.

At the end of the play “As You Like It,” just as at the end of all of his comedies, Shakespeare resolves the confusion by marrying the characters. I suppose he figured once they were living and sleeping together, all the masks would be removed. Firoozeh married too, but in her case, the wedding was yet another opportunity for misunderstanding. Her parents wanted the celebration to be the same as in Iran, where animal sacrifice is considered essential. The caterers, who were not experts in the nuances of this ritual, decided to carve the animal first. The carcass they wheeled out, stripped of its meat, was appropriate neither for an Iranian or an American celebration. It switched from being a symbol of joy, to a symbol of foreigners trying to hang on to their old identity in a new land.

The ending of Firoozeh’s memoir differs from a Shakespearean comedy in another way. Her husband is French, so even after they married they can never return together to a single homeland. Instead, they must continue to seek the universal qualities of love and laughter in each other, and in their adopted neighbors or else forever remain foreigners. And that is precisely what provides the lift at the end of Firoozeh’s drama of confusion and mixing. Amidst the differences of people, she offers us this opportunity too, to understand the things we share.

Writing Prompt: List the decades of your life. For each period, list examples of cultural mixing. For example, what neighbor, lover, teacher, or co-worker entered your life from another culture? How did you behave towards that person? Curious? Suspicious? Confused?

Writing Prompt: List vacations or journeys to other countries, regions or neighborhoods where others might have looked at you as a foreigner. What is it about you that people might have thought was different from them? (Color, features, accent, religion.) How did you reach out? What were some of the confusions? What humor or love relieved the tension? What did you learn? What surprised you? What still makes you wonder?

Visit Firoozeh Dumas’ home page.

Funny in Farsi, Growing up Iranian in America

Note: For more information about Ron Culberson, the speaker who got me thinking about humor, see his website. www.funsulting.com

Note: I listened to the audio version of the book, read by Firoozeh herself, so I was treated by her lovely voice and slight accent, along with the authentic pronunciation of the few names and words she mentions in Farsi. This book is available from www.audible.com.

Note:
Here are a few other memoirs in which the mixing of cultures plays a central role. Click the links to read my essay.

The Invisible Wall by Harry Bernstein
Pursuit of Happyness (the movie) by Chris Gardner
Dreams of my father by Barack Obama

More memoir writing resources

Memoir-lovers in my experience intuitively recognize the potential that this genre has for healing us individually and collectively. My book, Memoir Revolution, backs up these intuitive views with research and examples about how the cultural passion for life stories serves us all.

For brief descriptions and links to all the posts on Memory Writers Network, click here.

To order Memoir Revolution about the powerful trend to create, connect, and learn, see the Amazon page for eBook or Paperback.