Читать книгу What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About #MeToo - JoAnn Wypijewski - Страница 9
ОглавлениеThey say a stranger brought sex and danger to Jamestown, New York. Not just sex, and not just danger—though no one admits to much of that being here even now—but sexanddanger as an unhyphenated reality, a threat so great that government health officials flouted precedent and papered the county with posters of his face, red-bordered warnings, Most Wanted-style, that Nushawn Williams (aka Face Williams, “E,” Shyteek Johnson, Jo Jo Williams, Lashawn Fields, Headteck Williams, Shoe Williams, Face Johnson), the twenty-year-old with the dark skin and short braids and occasional display of a “pleasing personality,” was carrying the AIDS virus, and anyone who’d had sex with him, or with someone who’d had sex with him, ought to come down to a clinic for testing. His confidentiality might not have been honored, but yours surely would be.
This happened in the fall of 1997, before the subject of sex with multiple partners had made its swift transit from public menace to political crisis to national presidential joke. Williams was a small-time drug dealer who’d come to upstate Chautauqua County from Brooklyn in 1995. He was not a pioneer in any sense of the word. His occupation and migratory route were as commonplace as his discovery, in September of 1996, that he’d tested positive for HIV; as commonplace as the county jail cell he was in when he learned of that test result; as commonplace as denial.
He’d been intimate with a number of young women both in western New York and in New York City before and after being told he had HIV. He is not known to have used intravenous drugs or to have had sex with men, though Chautauqua County health officials are not interested in determining the source of his infection. He’s been X-ed out of all the usual categories of patient. Back before this was so—when Williams was like anyone else who’d tested positive and was first told the terrible news—he gave those officials the names of twenty-two area women for notification. Then, in January of 1997, he left town. Over the course of a year, four young women who were traced from the names Williams had provided tested positive; then one of their male partners did; then six more women whom Williams had never named but who had listed him among their partners. It was at that point—after the one person who tracks every HIV case in the county had sorted out Williams’ aliases—that health officials decided his private life was a public emergency.
In the close-elbow manner of small-county politics, the sheriff and his father, the judge who gave the legal go-ahead to breach Williams’ confidentiality, agreed. State authorities agreed as well. So the posters went up, and the press came flocking. Williams’ face and his HIV status were flashed on network television, on CNN and throughout the print press even as he was again confined to jail—this time at Rikers Island in New York City, for selling $20 worth of crack to an undercover agent in the Bronx. In Chautauqua County, some 1,400 people, most of them high school students, were tested for HIV in October and November. Parents who once lived next door to Williams brought their children, even infants, for tests. In the end, thirteen young women, aged thirteen to twenty-four, had tested positive and claimed Williams—more precisely, unprotected sex with Williams—as the source. Through them, one other (a baby, not Williams’ child) also tested positive. The press moved on to riper scandals, leaving Jamestown bleached and raw, its kids sullen from too many questions and too many answers half-heard. The posters, which Williams’ friends began to rip down almost as soon as they went up, disappeared. Williams was history and, for a while at least, someone else’s problem.
But suspicions of strangers die harder, especially in an area where some people, high-placed people, pride themselves on provincialism; where police are known to harass and judges known to issue one-way bus tickets to kids who come from out of town; where more adults than anyone cares to admit reckon uneasily that the presence of sharp young black men from Rochester and Buffalo and Brooklyn—mostly Brooklyn—is as alluring to some local girls as the sight of a deer to a hungry hunter, and for the same reason.
Jamestown’s cupboard is bare. Its children, the ones who’d been invisible until association with Williams gave a few of them a moment of dubious fame, are walking bored and lonely and desperate for something that reason tells them they’re never going to find here. It’s less Jamestown’s fault than its condition. And less its condition—less some malady that grew up in isolation in Chautauqua County, sixty miles from Buffalo, amid the dairy farms and fruit orchards, creeping suburbanization and crumbling urbanization—than it is America’s. Jamestown just called attention to it by putting Nushawn Williams’ face on a poster and telling itself, like a girl who believes with all her heart that she can’t be pregnant until the contractions have her crying for deliverance, that everything was okay until he came to town.
“I don’t understand it. Why would all these girls sleep with this guy without using a condom? What is it they figure—forty-eight girls he slept with? It’s not like they’d never heard of AIDS.” The UPS driver moonlighting as a bartender at The College Inn, a neighborhood bar near Jamestown Community College, took a quick drag from his cigarette and went about setting up the next round of drinks. “It’s stupidity, that’s all. Just plain stupidity. They know what can happen, and they do it anyway.”
“Do you always use a condom?”
“If I’m in a relationship, no. But if I’m just having fun, absolutely—every time. Sometimes two and three.”
Through puffs of smoke, everyone at the bar, working men from their late twenties on up, distracted temporarily from their betting games of dice and darts, agreed, and agreed too that only stupidity or youth’s faith in its own invincibility—“you know, It can’t happen to me”—could explain why the girls took such a risk.
It was a familiar rationale, though reason rarely played a part in it (as it doesn’t in the fiction that two condoms are safer than one). Kathleen Lombardo Whitmore, of AIDS Community Services in Jamestown, allowed that one day of AIDS education a year in the local public schools wasn’t enough, that free protection wasn’t readily enough available, that many of the girls seemed to have low self-esteem (a term that has become the catch-all explanation for any teenage sexual activity); but in the end even she declared in exasperation: “I don’t think they think! I don’t think a lot of them care.”
In the white heat of the crisis, Whitmore had appeared on The Montel Williams Show, where she said, with admirable self-reflection, “I’m wondering where my message is going. Our agency’s been there for five years—is anybody listening?” Indeed, none of the young women who are HIV positive and attribute their condition to Williams had ever been seen at AIDS Community Services, had ever dropped by to pick up free condoms or dental dams. It wasn’t the easiest place to find. Until HIV and AIDS asserted themselves as necessary, even acceptable, subjects of conversation here, the agency’s name was not listed along with Catholic Charities, United Way and other social service groups on the sign outside the old mansion on Fifth and Main whose basement it occupies. Even inside, one must ask a worker at another agency to point out the unmarked door that opens to the darkened stairway leading down to the offices. It barely advertised on radio, not at all on billboards, and Jamestown has no buses on which to place ads or even to transport people who don’t live within walking distance.
That said, the question about message veered toward the heart of the matter at a time when, after a decade of awareness, half of all new HIV cases involve people under twenty-five; when the number of women diagnosed with AIDS rose 63 percent between 1991 and 1995, faster than any group in the US; and when the single biggest group of women are infected through sex with men they love, or say they love, or ally with in pursuit of love. Whitmore did not speculate about love or need or the often impossible choices women face when making decisions about safety. Instead, she used her one shot at a national audience to ask the friends and former lovers of Nushawn Williams whether they had thought about abstinence.
Abstinence? I had come to Jamestown because although there had been some 300 media reports on the story, everything seemed too simple. It was the inverse of Monicagate, where everything’s gone rococo. In the Nushawn Williams scandal, the girls were presented as stupid or slutty or victims. The Geraldo show went live to film a young woman in New York as she got the results of an HIV test she had undergone after learning about the health alert upstate and realizing that she too had been with Williams. When she found out she was negative, she said, “It’s like I’m a virgin all over again,” a sentiment eagerly seconded by the unctuous Geraldo. By inference, it was also like a problem in logic: if negative equals virgin, then positive equals ____? Out of deference to the Jamestown girls’ age, or perhaps their color (almost all are white), the press mostly shunned the traditional iconic complement, whore, and called them victims instead—victims who were “looking for love,” a pursuit described as if it were a pathetic novelty rather than a hazardous preoccupation of humankind throughout history.
Jamestown was deemed “depressed” and “dreary” but also somehow “safe” and “mostly bucolic”—“Middle America” with “a solid, conservative social fabric,” the kind of place where, as Mayor Richard Kimball put it, “it [is] hard to believe that something like this could happen.” Mostly, though, whether in dreariness or small-town naiveté, it was exceptional—the setting for a local tragedy, not the emblem of a national truth.
Williams was the simplest of all, a “lethal lothario,” a “sexual predator,” a “one-man plague,” a “monster.” Dr. Robert Berke, the Chautauqua County health commissioner, said, “He’s not a monster. … We have the devil here,” and Montel Williams told millions of television viewers that the death penalty would be the right punishment for what Williams had done. What he’d done, according to health and law-enforcement officials, was intentionally infect or try to infect young women with the AIDS virus—intent here resting solely on the fact that he’d been told he was HIV positive and didn’t tell them. He’s been charged with statutory rape for having sex with the thirteen-year-old, and further charges have been bruited: first-degree assault for every woman he had sex with who is now HIV positive, and reckless endangerment for every woman he had sex with who is HIV negative. Each assault rap could get him up to twenty-five years in prison; each endangerment rap, seven.
Chautauqua County district attorney James Subjack and New York State attorney general Dennis Vacco initially outdid each other in telling the media of their desire to prosecute Williams on such charges. Six months later, with no formal action taken, the two were being evasive, low-key, as if the legal machinery they’d endorsed with such confidence was flawed and they weren’t at all sure they wanted to try it out, once again, with all eyes watching.
A preview of the kind of justice Williams might expect upstate has already been played out in New York City. Like legions of young black and latin men caught in the criminal justice system for petty drug sales, Williams had been awaiting formal sentencing on the crack charge in the Bronx when the posters proclaiming him a public sex enemy went up. He had already sealed a plea bargain with the DA to serve one year in jail. Normally, a judge just approves such deals, but on February 20, 1998, Judge John Byrne of the Bronx Supreme Court threw Williams’ deal out—largely on account of the potent mix of rumor and allegation in Chautauqua County. Due process? Presumption of innocence? Integrity of a solemn promise? The same questions can be brought to bear on the decision by upstate officials to breach Williams’ confidentiality and convict him as a “cold-blooded murderer” in the court of public opinion. On the straightforward matter of the drug charge, Williams was given a Hobson’s choice: more jail time because of unproven and unrelated claims in a different jurisdiction; or the risk of a trial on a charge to which he had already, famously, pled guilty once. On April 20, Williams decided to abandon his plea and take his chances at trial.
In the state capital, meanwhile, New York legislators used the crisis to plump for a range of legislation that even Dr. Berke acknowledges would have done nothing to prevent it:
§ laws making it a felony for anyone who is HIV positive to have sex without first telling a partner;
§ laws forcing doctors to report the names of all positive cases to the state;
§ laws requiring persons who test positive to reveal the names of all their partners or face criminal charges;
§ laws establishing a state registry of everyone who tests positive;
§ laws allowing the use of this registry to divulge the names of positive individuals while notifying anyone who has ever had sex with them;
§ laws compelling the testing of prisoners, criminal defendants and arrested persons under a variety of circumstances.
None of those laws would have made any difference in the case of Nushawn Williams, who had an HIV test while at a county clinic for treatment of another sexually transmitted disease; who identified almost two dozen sex partners and agreed to let health officials contact them under the current system, which Berke says “worked perfectly in this case”; who went by so many aliases as to make name reporting irrelevant, was identified publicly under the “clear and imminent danger” provision of existing law, and may well be prosecuted even without a special statute criminalizing HIV status.
More important, they would have made no difference in protecting him from the virus in the first place, and they will make no difference in the lives of the young women of Jamestown—or in the lives of their mothers or sisters or kids. They will not make HIV-positive individuals more responsible to tell, partners more responsible to ask, or any of us more responsible to hold out for our own safety in time before, as one Jamestown woman put it, “the question Why am I doing this? gracefully turns into Why did I do that?”1
“What makes you vulnerable is what’s complicated,” said Amber Hollibaugh, national field director of women’s education services at Gay Men’s Health Crisis in New York. “It’s the secrets that people can’t talk about that put them at risk—always, always. It’s not a question of whether people do ‘risky things’; that doesn’t deal with the real issues in the lives of real women and real men.”
No one knows what goes on behind the doors in any town, just as no one knows what goes on between two people. But from what’s in plain sight, it’s hard to understand how anyone could consider Jamestown safe in the fullest sense of the word.
Nothing here rivals the devastation of parts of Buffalo—the ruined avenues empty at night but for a single driver and a guy powering his wheelchair through the mist. But neither is there the energy that animates other parts, even poor parts, of that wounded city. Jamestown’s inner city, mostly white and black neighborhoods where Williams and many of the young women lived, consists of solid blocks of two-story frame or brick houses on hilly streets that rise up sharply from a stretch of factories on one side of the Chadakoin River—the old Swede Hill—and lead more gently out of downtown and into what’s called the Valley on the other side. Rounding out the inner city, away from the center along Second Street, is the latin section. Only rarely do you find a house boarded up, and there are fine, even beautiful, structures here. But most are worn rough, and too many have doors lost, steps broken, hallways naked to the street. People make an effort or they don’t, but the effort is often too small and probably too hard-won as well—a garden but not the steps, a gate but not the door, a curtain but not the window, some Christmas lights but not a coat of paint. On these streets, most likely they don’t own the place anyway.
A lawyer named John Goodell told me he and others were angry that some reporters had said Jamestown was depressed. Indeed, the Jamestown Post-Journal printed a front-page story on November 7, 1997, lashing out at the national media and reminding readers of the city’s virtues. Goodell took this a bit further. “Have you seen our ghetto?” he asked. “I bet you’d be happy to have our ghetto in New York.” It seemed a slim choice, trading one zone of poverty for another, and all I could think of was Billy Preston’s words: “Nothing from nothing leaves nothing …”
I found myself raiding the icebox of pop culture a lot while in Jamestown, and not only because so many white, black and brown teenagers here testify to the universality of hip-hop style. There are also the city’s own contributions to the culture: Lucille Ball and 10,000 Maniacs. Lucy grew up here. The Lucy–Desi Museum, around the corner from the high school, is a monument to mirth and marriage, though if you find the right button to press and wait long enough you can hear how, just before the divorce, Lucy clenched her teeth, dug her long red nails into Desi’s shoulders and growled, “I could kill you.” The Maniacs have far less claim on the local consciousness, except that they practiced in a warehouse that became the focus of a satanic-cult hysteria here in the late 1980s. Parents kept children home from school in record numbers one Friday the 13th when word spread that blue-eyed blonde virgins would be sacrificed. Countercultural kids were considered the dangerous element in that panic; one of them wore a jacket to school with the slogan FUCK AUTHORITY and eventually had to leave town because he was so beset with threats.
There was no blood sacrifice, nor any satanic cult (though one blue-eyed blonde who’d later be with Nushawn Williams did get a black rose from some kids making sport of the scare), just as there was no perfect happiness for the screwball comedienne whom some old-timers still denigrate as a teenage slut, running wild with a bootlegger’s son before leaving town. But the culture has a way of conjuring up a good fright when that’s what’s needed as distraction.
Jamestown had its start in 1811, when James Prendergast, a doctor from Tennessee, set up saw and grist mills by the Chadakoin rapids. From 1823 to 1873 it was the largest furniture-manufacturing city in the country, and up until the late 1920s was second only to Grand Rapids, Michigan. The lush forests that in 1800 blanketed the land, broken only by Indian footpaths, were gone a century later. The Indians were gone too. By then Jamestown was known as The Pearl City, owing to its production of pearl ash, used in making soap and glass. In the early days, while those with some capital set themselves to lumbering or artisanry—or, later, to establishing textile mills, small metalworks and photographic-paper businesses—the poorest settlers survived by hacking at the forests, burning the wood to ash and bartering this for staple goods from storekeepers, who sold it to asheries. As the forests passed from memory so did the asheries, along with the reason for the city’s moniker.
These days there are many “good parts” of Jamestown and, beyond the city limits, rambling houses and gracious country in the resort areas near Chautauqua Lake. (There are also year-round cottages off dirt roads hard by the water that recall places I’ve seen in Mississippi.) Jamestown High School’s Red Raiders play football on a million-dollar field covered with AstroTurf, and on special occasions they have been known to step out in identical gray slacks and blue blazers, courtesy of local donors. Some old fortunes remain here, concentrated in five foundations worth $160 million combined, and the entertainment pages note high-culture events befitting that part of the past memorialized in standard histories.
But downtown presents only mute mementos of the “air of constant activity and bustle” that guidebook writers of the New Deal found in 1940. The population, 45,500 then, is now 34,500 and falling. The rumble of public transport is gone, the Art Deco station for the Erie Railroad sooty and abandoned, its clock frozen like a prop out of Great Expectations at 9:25. The elegant Hotel Jamestown is an old folks’ home, as are several erstwhile commercial buildings, reflecting the only segment of the population that is growing. At the other end of Second Street from the high school, the cavernous Furniture Mart, to which buyers and dealers once flocked from all points, now houses Kelly Services, one of five temp agencies.
A slight, wise-eyed Puerto Rican girl named Tania, who left home at fifteen and later became a roommate of Nushawn Williams, went through one of those agencies for a job at Bush Industries, a furniture maker and the city’s biggest employer. She worked graveyard shift on the packing line when she was seventeen, along with nine other teenagers with whom she shared a two-bedroom flat. “They showed us a video when we first came in there saying how much better it is ’cause they have no union,” she said. “You know, ‘If you have a problem we can work it out.’ But if you complain, they fire you. They was paying us $5.15 an hour, and fifteen cents goes to the agency. I didn’t mind, ’cause when I got my check, you know, I was just glad to have the money. But then we all—all ten of us—got hurt at the same time: our backs. Not all the same minute, you know, but around the same time. They give you carfare to the hospital, but you got to pay your own way home. You got to pay for the hospital too. The doctor told me to stay home three days; I stayed four and they fired me. But it don’t matter, ’cause you can just go to the agency and they’ll hire you right back.”
Manufacturing started to bleed from Jamestown in the 1950s; from the 1960s to the early 1980s it was in full hemorrhage, and it’s still in slow decline. But unlike in Buffalo, where one shutdown at Bethlehem Steel alone cut loose 7,300 workers, here people left the plant gates quietly, a few hundred at a time, until 5,000 to 8,000 industrial jobs and perhaps the same number in support industries and services had disappeared. To consider the numbers now is staggering: job loss in the magnitude of anywhere from a tenth to a third of the population. Of course, it happened over time. There was other work—service work, part-time work, work out of town. Not all the manufacturers closed. And there were malls that went up in the suburbs, chain restaurants that moved in, a new civic arena downtown, the nursing homes, Walmart, Kmart and all the other marts that duplicate strip malls on the edge of every unlucky town in the country. People soldiered on, and, in the same way that a lifetime of days looking in a mirror makes aging tolerable, they barely noticed as the town fell apart around them. Perhaps for the same reason, they barely noticed the young subcontractors from Brooklyn who started coming to town in the early 1990s to work in the drug trade then expanding along Route 17 from New York to Jamestown and from there on to Buffalo and Canada. Their children took note, though, well before Williams came on the job.
Today in the legal economy, unemployment is 5.2 percent, but as Sam Teresi, who heads development at city hall, put it: “We’re following the national trend. While the figures are looking pretty good, it takes two and three members of the family now to equal the old wage of one. And every big company is using temp agencies. If that’s frustrating for a teenager, it’s also frustrating for a forty-year-old head of household who has no health insurance and a family to take care of. At this point we’ve weathered the storm—essentially we’ve bottomed out. Now we’re looking at how to sustain real, incremental growth. Manufacturing has to be a major leg in the economic stool, but we’re realistic. Jamestown is not going to become the oasis in the industrial desert that is America.”
Teresi conceptualizes the integrated pieces of a new economy as vividly as he juggles metaphors. But he also knows that if “good jobs at good wages” ever were enough to ensure the good life, they aren’t anymore. A generation of deindustrialization did more than remake the landscape and reduce the living standards of places like Jamestown, where the median family income is about $26,000 and almost a quarter of families with children under eighteen are poor. It made insecurity—always a feature of working-class life—the central experience. After twenty-six years of a citywide experiment in “labor–management cooperation,” there is no sign that the working class has any more power or any more pride. For too many of those without enough, there’s not enough of anything: not enough time, not enough confidence, not enough culture, not enough choices, not enough love.
On the last weekend before Christmas it seemed I had the downtown to myself. Two fine-jewelry stores, a camera shop, a florist doubling as a confectioner and one or two other merchants displayed holiday lights and brimming determination. But all the action was at the D&K Store, where people clothed in weariness waited to pick through bins—89¢, 99¢, $1.99, $14.99 tops—of sequins and wood blocks, pipe cleaners, tube socks, flannel shirts, pocket screwdriver sets, ceramic figurines: the flotsam and jetsam of the retail trade for the working poor. “We gotta get your daddy something now,” a wan young woman said, pulling along two pasty tykes and searching the aisles for anything that might say, I’m special.
Do you love me, baby?
Can you feel me, baby? I been away a long time.
Is it still me, baby—the one on your mind?
I drove away from downtown with Puff Daddy’s No Way Out playing in the car at full volume. On Tania’s suggestion, the album had become my soundtrack for seeing Jamestown.
Can I touch you, baby? Is that all right with you?
Can I love you, baby? What we’re about to do
could make the whole earth move, I’ll tell you my first move.
Climb up in it slow. I ain’t tryin’ to hurt you.
Can you feel me, baby? Should I keep it right there?
Is it still me, baby? Take off your nightwear …
At the health department they say nothing links the girls who tested positive besides Williams—no common social or medical profile. Dr. Neal Rzepkowski, a family physician who treats a lot of them, told me most of his patients had a prior history of sexually transmitted disease or had engaged in anal sex; otherwise, there is no “type.”
In the first flush of the crisis officials said there was a very definite type: girls who traded sex for drugs. This persisted in the public mind even after the sheriff asserted that “in no way” was that the case; too many girls had started turning up talking about love. I was meeting mostly girls who had moved in the same circles as Williams: some, like Tania, who’d never had sex with him but knew those who had; others who had; one who was positive. Although I’ve been told there were girls from “well-off, solid families” who’d had sex with Williams as a tryst with danger, the young women I was meeting were all working-class and precarious. I drove along imagining the rapper’s lyrics as a kind of baseline unifying the fragments of life history I’d heard:
You’re seventeen and you left home years ago. Your mother bugged you or was tougher than you thought your father would be, or she just threw you out. And you love her but she never had time—or maybe she had time but not as much as you wanted. You “wanted it all.” But she couldn’t help it really ’cause there were other kids and she had to work all the time; or she could help it, but she spent all her time with her boyfriend and then got on you about yours! Or she paid too much attention, or there was too much fighting, or she was always sick, or you got pregnant, or you couldn’t take another day of your father harping on everything you’d done wrong, or … or … too many reasons you’d rather not talk about. So, you’re living with relatives, friends’ families or kids alone and in the same boat as you. You’re working midnight to eight to pay the rent and utilities, to pay for food and clothes. You’re trying to go to school, but it’s hard to stay awake and it’s a drag to be hassled as if you’re a child. You’re sick and you need an excuse. The excuse is supposed to come from your mother, but you don’t live at home. The teacher says, “Well, get one from whoever you live with.” So you get it from your girlfriend; she’s who you live with! But the teacher thinks you’re being smart, so you get in-school suspension. You don’t mind that so much ’cause at least they leave you alone to do your work or think. And you’re with all the other kids who are always in detention, the “bad kids,” the ones “who are just looking for a place to fit in—they’ll accept anyone.” You actually tried to be a prep once, ’cause it’s not like you’re poor or nothing, but you had to dress a certain way, walk a certain way, talk a certain way—it was too much. And you dreamed of being a cheerleader but you were too fat, or you were a cheerleader but with everything else you were trying to keep together it was too much. And you have average grades or below-average grades, but it’s been clear for a while that no one expects much from you, and anyway school’s a bore so you drop out. You hear little kids counting the days till they can drop out too, asking, “Can I drop out as soon as I turn sixteen, or do I have to wait until the end of the year?” Anyway, you hang out with your friends. There’s not much to do unless you swim or play basketball, but you won’t go to the Boys and Girls Club ’cause “that’s for really grubby poor kids, these little kids who just piss in the pool and turn it yellow,” and you don’t like the Y ’cause that’s where the preps go and “they have this attitude they give to anyone who don’t have as much as they do.” Sometimes you go to JCC to play basketball and that’s fun, and there are girls who run track with this club Striders and they go off to meets out of town, which is okay if you like to run but if you don’t, well, you don’t. And there’s just nothing to do in this town but get high and fuck—well, and hang out and play cards and watch BET on cable, but really nothing else. There used to be a teen club and that was good ’cause you could go dance all night, but that closed up. You can’t get into the bars unless you’re twenty-one—well, you can sneak in—but the only really good DJ is at the Rusty Nail. They got a good one sometimes at Rascal’s. No?! Rascal’s is a gay bar?! Well, anyway, it’s not like you drink that much or get high that much—maybe a beer or some weed—though you know some kids who are in AA now because, you know, life is hard sometimes, and “in this town if you fall you don’t just miss a stair or two; you fall down the whole damn staircase.” And it’s not like you just sleep with anyone, either. You’re not like “those little girls who are just whores, you know, real pigs, who go with anyone.” Those little girls are disgusting, and some of them are real shystee bitches—“you know, not what you’d call real women”—the kind who talk behind your back and steal your man as soon as you go to jail. Oh, yeah, you can go to jail so easy in this town. Your boyfriend—he’s black and from Buffalo—he was in jail for a month and a half for throwing a stick at a car. He was mad—“he has problems with anger”—so he threw this stick and these white kids jumped out and started a fight, and one of them had an outstanding warrant but your boyfriend’s the only one got locked up. And you know this other boy—he’s black and from Brooklyn, he knew Face there—he went to jail for two months for driving without a license. Two months! You’ve been to jail a bunch of times, “always for the little things, never for the big things,” but those little things add up. Or maybe they’re not little things. You were at a boot camp once—eighteen months. And later you were in for four months—breaking probation—’cause you cursed out your landlord, said you’d blow up his house when he wouldn’t do what you needed. You have problems with anger too, but it’s not like you have a history with explosives. Now you’re through with “the business”—the pharmaceutical business, what do you think? selling drugs—’cause you just don’t want to be in jail again. You’re eighteen, nineteen, and you’re not talking about a little time now. But in the business, on a good night, you could make three, four thousand dollars in a few hours—“Jamestown is full of crackheads”—and that sure beat packing boards or sorting screws for five or six dollars. Yeah, you got to get out now. Maybe go to Atlanta, “where there’s some culture”; you and your boyfriend might have a chance in a black city. Nothing’s easy, though. Your little sisters think it’s glamorous ’cause you been out on your own since you were thirteen, fourteen. “But they don’t know how hard it is, how real hard.” It’s not so bad, though; it’s not like your friend in Rochester who has a three-year-old kid by her mother’s boyfriend who still lives in the house and visits her room every other night—and her room is right next to her mom’s! Or like your girl in Buffalo who had HIV—maybe from Face, nobody knows—and who was killed last year. It was an accident, a gun went off that wasn’t supposed to, but you never had a friend who died before. She was eighteen. That was in Buffalo, and Buffalo’s dangerous. “Jamestown isn’t dangerous, it’s just boring.”
I wish this pain would go awayI wish this pain would go away
Marx was wrong. Sex, not religion, is the heart in a heartless world. It may not turn out well; in fact, it almost certainly will not. Most every girl I met trailed a broken heart somewhere in her short past; if she didn’t, it was because she was still with her first boyfriend, or because she had never let anyone get too close, or because at eighteen, having determined that “we’re both clean,” she was planning for her wedding right after graduation and heartbreak would catch up with her soon enough. Whatever the case, sex brought the promise of something good, something intimate, something sweet and fleshy and maybe pleasurable; it brought that promise as surely as it carried the darker risk of pain and sorrow. But everything carried that—and more than the risk, the plain, lonesome reality. To be held in someone’s arms, to be kissed, to be entered and, in the act, forgiven for not being the most beautiful or the most responsible or the most stable; to be forgiven for the reckless dream of wanting, a baby, a partner, a life; to exert that power of forgiveness over someone else: only sex carried the slim hope of something better.
It is difficult now, when his mugshot has appeared across the country and young women have appeared on television weeping over their predicament and his betrayal, speaking of his violence and irascibility, to imagine that there was also a time when Williams delighted them and they delighted him. It is as if these young women, cast as victims of sex, must be denied every pleasure of their past and every power of decision—good and bad—so as to prepare for some future prosecution in which it can be shown that he was just a criminal and not a man, a young man, negotiating his fears and needs through sex as surely as they were.
Andrea is nineteen, white and HIV positive. She told me she was with Williams for a month or so at the end of 1996 and that she always “despised” him.
“Always?”
“The whole time.”
“But you say you were with him for a month, so there must have been an upside. Was it really just that he bought you presents and took you to restaurants?”
“He made me feel like I was somebody, like I was special. He was always there, and my other boyfriends were never there.”
“Anything else?”
“Well, the sex was great. And he held me in his arms when we slept, and that was important to me. And he kissed me real softly … I thought I loved him, but it was only infatuation. I wanted him because he was something I was told I couldn’t have.”
Andrea claims she used a condom with every man she was with until Williams. She claims he wouldn’t hear of using one, though she also insists, “He told me when we first had sex that he put on a condom.” To accept that requires believing that she never touched him, never paid attention, that she simply lay back, closed her eyes and took it.
“Oh, I never touched men. I never played with them or nothing; I think that’s disgusting. I never did oral sex either. I try not to look at them too often—their penis, I mean, it’s ugly.”
Great sex? “They can go down on me. And I make sure I always get mine.”
Andrea has been in and out of psych wards, group homes and jails since childhood. When she was four her mother’s fiancé took her to a park and abused her in some way involving oral sex. Her mother, Wendy, traces Andrea’s problems to that event. “At that age,” she says, “there’s part of them that understands it’s violating and part of them that enjoys it.” She says Andrea became obsessed with sex from that moment. At six she was on Ritalin. At twelve she ran away from a group home in Florida and met up with a man who was twenty. She told him she was seventeen, though seven years later, without makeup, she still has a baby-doll face. She remembers sitting on the edge of the bed in a motel, her knees shaking, before he took her virginity. “I thought I was going to be with him for a while,” she said. “A week later he was charged with armed robbery, and I felt like such an idiot.” In the years that followed she’d come home to her mother’s comfortable house, stay awhile, wind up in another institution, run away again and again—selling drugs, being pimped on the street, taking up with men for a ride or a place to stay. “I thought the end point would come when I got caught or when I was dead,” she said. “On the street you always have to watch your back. HIV was the least of it.”
It still is, in a way. Maybe not for Andrea—who dyed her blond hair black to avoid being recognized, lives at home again and strives to maintain the disciplines of safe sex and a medication schedule—but for many young women in America. “It’s the life that is lethal,” Amber Hollibaugh had said. But the life can’t be prosecuted; Nushawn Williams will have to do. He can stand in for every man who ever violated Andrea and every man who violated the others—and there are probably more fathers and brothers and boyfriends in that company than anyone wants or dares to take account of. He can pay for every rotten thing that ever happened to them that nobody knows how to deal with. If in the end he is convicted, none of the Andreas or Andreas-to-be will be stronger or safer, but somebody will call it justice.
Andrea said, “He was the only man who ever scared me.” And although that is hard to believe set beside the frightful details of her life (just as it is hard to believe that she didn’t know he sold drugs, that she always used condoms until she met him, that she had intercourse with only nine or ten men in her life, that she never before had a sexually transmitted disease and therefore knows her infection traces back to him), by all reports their time together was brutal. Yet the knives are drawn for him not for beating her but for holding her in his arms, kissing her softly, fucking her often and well—for the only things in a world of pain and binds from which she exacted a little pleasure and commanded a little power.
The frenzy over just how many teenagers are having sex in Chautauqua County, protected or unprotected, obscured a series of more unpleasant truths about the county’s families. “It’s still a great place to raise a family” was not only on the lips of politicians and the head of the PTA; even Andrea’s mother had said it, allowing that things had gone awry in her own case. In their descent upon Jamestown, journalists had sought out various family folk who had lived upstairs, next door or otherwise in proximity to Nushawn Williams. These people were offered in stable counterpoint to his volatile world—much as the Post-Journal runs engagement notices of recent high school graduates on one day and mugshots of area men for whom there are outstanding warrants on the next.
Right before Christmas, I was at the Chautauqua County Jail visiting a former girlfriend of Williams named Amber when I learned that a woman who had appeared in the media as the mother-next-door was also being held there. It seems the woman had written a bunch of bad checks—possibly in hopes of accomplishing something before the holidays that would calm her husband’s temper—but the details are sketchy, and her arrest was never reported. Amber, on the other hand, was a minor celebrity. She had spent considerable time with Williams and, in a manner that revealed as much bravery as vulnerability, had shaken up Jamestown by telling reporters that although she was angry at Face, her eighteen-year-old heart wouldn’t let her join in reflexive condemnation. “He’s not a monster,” she’d simply said. “I did once love him.” Afterward, she says, some plainclothes cops pulled up alongside where she was walking and promised to laugh at her funeral. Her father said, “I hope she dies.” Amber was arrested outside a county clinic after receiving her HIV test results (negative, which she says she reveals only because a rumor mill insists she’s positive). She was sentenced to serve a year for running up $600 on a stolen Sears credit card and for a drug sale she got busted on because a cousin agreed to wear a wire and set her up. Shortly after the press bus left in November, Amber said, the father-next-door was also in jail.
“He’s what I call a good friend but a bad man,” she said. It was a distinction she’d made before about men who love their neighbors and hurt their lovers. This man is in his twenties, with many children. But he did it right. He’s married, he doesn’t cheat, doesn’t sell drugs, and although the family doesn’t have much—he doesn’t work often—on the outside it puts up a fair face. On the inside it’s hell. In the days of high panic, his wife told the media that she’d counseled Williams to get away from his girlfriends if he couldn’t restrain his anger. Now people tell me they wonder if she’ll live to see her own children grown.
The Division of Criminal Justice Services states that domestic violence in Chautauqua County is increasing, from 232 reported cases in 1993 to 566 in 1996. The suicide rate is not comforting either. On the Tuesday before New Year’s, a twenty-nine-year-old woman had been dead on the couch for twelve hours when she was found by a caseworker. Her children, three and four years old, circled in confusion close by. Crime is low by state standards, but it’s the tenuousness of things more than the upward curve of any statistic that unsettles: the notices around town about a young woman who vanished, the drinkers at the precipice of rage, the unprompted warnings from people on the streets that perhaps you should be frightened when nothing seems frightening. On the social charts, teen pregnancy and car accidents involving twenty-five-to thirty-nine-year-olds under the influence are also up, after having dropped a few years back. The rate of child abuse more than doubled, from twenty per 1,000 to fifty-one per 1,000, between 1991 and 1993. This rate is about twice as high as in the rest of the state outside of New York City, and it represents only reported cases. Around the corner from one of the houses where Williams lived bumper stickers announce, WHAT THIS COUNTRY NEEDS IS A BREATH OF FRESH PRAYER, and after posters of his face went up, Lucy Zulick of Good Shepherd Mission Outreach, an evangelical church in the nearby village of Clymer, declared: “This problem began when we took God out of the schools and put condoms in. When they took heaven out, hell came in, and one word can sum it up: Sin with a capital S.” Chautauqua County schools aren’t required to talk about condoms, much less give them out, but on Super Bowl Sunday five children from a family of religious zealots were in a county emergency room with bruises and both old and new fractures. The five-year-old with the broken nose said she got hit for not sweeping the floor right.
“The family? I think it’s like a balloon that you keep blowing air into, and it’s holding more and more, but at a certain point it can’t hold any more and it just explodes.” Nancy Glatz, a practical nurse and a caseworker for Early Head Start in Jamestown, was talking about how everything has changed—the role of the city, the economic base, expectations of work and generational progress, the responsibilities of government. And everyone acknowledges there’s no going back. When it comes to the family, though, there’s only going back—to a Lucy–Desi ideal that was never true in the first place.
It’s common these days to hear talk of the Golden Age of the working class, when the household was strong, the factory secure and upward mobility seemed certain. This is the happy-family working class I came up in back in the 1960s and 1970s in Buffalo. I was hardly alone. But beside all of our happy families there were always unhappy ones, in which work was unsteady, violence came easily, and mothers and daughters and their daughters too lost their youth in vows of love that never turned out as they’d hoped. No one likes to remember those families, not even the children who come from them. They are the people who lost at a time when the country’s story admits only of winners. But someone always did the low-wage jobs, always got on the slow track in school. “I never wanted to be like my mother,” a young Jamestown woman told me, speaking of one of my contemporaries. “She had me when she was fifteen. I got pregnant at sixteen and ended up doing exactly what I never wanted to do.”
About seventy-five families—most with two adults—participate in Nancy Glatz’s Head Start program. She describes the general scheme of their lives as chaotic, constantly on the edge of want, dangerous in so many ways beyond the physical. Often there is no phone; there is no car, or one car and it’s the man’s car. Having control of so little else in life, he carries the Medicaid cards and every other family document, and he decides who is welcome in the house. Sometimes when he goes out, he takes the rest of the family’s boots and coats with him. But every time the caseworkers first visited these families, the women said that except for a few small problems everything was fine. It was only later—sometimes years later, when they began to trust that any revelation would not automatically call down Child Protective Services to haul away their kids—that they opened up. Still, there’s the shame, the fear that in a small town to say you need help because of alcohol or violence or mental illness or just the awful narrow limits of your life is to risk being branded sick or something worse.
When Wendy went on national television and stated that Andrea had been abused, all kinds of people in Jamestown responded bitterly, And where were you? No one seemed to know or care what this crime must have cost her, a woman who’d left her good-for-nothing husband, who’d hoped she could “save” the man who hurt Andrea and broke with him right after it happened, who says she was molested herself as a child, whose hit-and-miss strategy for dealing with this multiple horror was to shut away her own past, cart her daughter to a series of (as it turns out, dubious) therapists, throw herself into such Good Mother roles as scout leader, and never, ever allow herself to be touched by a man again. Nothing she did saved Andrea from HIV, and the nasty truth is that there are harder cases than Andrea’s. They’re the married women with HIV, the women in committed relationships, the ones who wouldn’t have dreamed of asking their men to use a condom, and whose very existence upsets all standard notions about HIV.
“I see people come in here, and it kills me,” Rose Torres said one afternoon in her office at AIDS Community Services. “I’m twenty-five, and I think, ‘Okay, it can happen to me, but not to my mother,’ and then these ladies my mother’s age walk in. People don’t want to talk about that.” Indeed, Rose’s colleague, Kathleen Whitmore, didn’t.
“What about women in relationships?” I asked Whitmore. “If you’re a ‘bad girl’ maybe people think you have no right to safety, but if you’re a ‘good girl’ you have no need for safety. How do you deal with that, since statistically the majority of women with HIV got it from a partner, not from a one-night stand?”
“What do you mean when you use the word relationship?”
“Married women, people who live together—a month, a year, twelve years. How do you ask a guy to use a condom when asking suggests he’s cheating, and cheating suggests you’re failing?”
“Well, I kind of think you can tell when someone’s cheating, don’t you?”
“Do you ever use a condom?”
“I’m married.”
There have been fifty-two cases of full-blown AIDS in Chautauqua County since the epidemic began being tracked in the US in the 1980s, but most of those, Dr. Berke said, “have been secret.” The county women with HIV whom nurse Margaret Geer has been visiting to help with insurance claims, social services and the like all thought marriage or commitment was a prophylactic until someone in the family got sick. Only one of their men was an IV drug user, and only one had clandestine homosexual encounters from what Geer has been able to determine, though the men might not tell everything. (Did they ever share a needle? Did they ever have sex in prison?) What they do admit to is sex with other women. One called it “my sport.” And what strikes Geer about the women she visits, all working-class, is their isolation, their lack of confidence, the huge degree of control they ceded to their men, and the silence that, until HIV was added to the mix, covered it all. Lately she’s begun visiting one of Williams’ partners.
Nationally, two of the top known concentrations of women with HIV are in Newark, New Jersey, and Macon, Georgia. In Newark the profile of “women at risk” fits those most at risk of any torment of poverty in a hard city. In Macon it’s different. Women there learned they were HIV positive when they went to give blood for Desert Storm at Robins Air Force Base. Many of their husbands are vets who years earlier had had trouble with drugs, cleaned up and came home to set their lives right. They didn’t talk much about the past, not at all about HIV. The CDC estimates that anywhere from 200,000 to 300,000 people don’t know they’re positive, and the majority of the public that thinks HIV is someone else’s problem grows bigger with every poll. Almost every straight person I talked to before leaving for Jamestown, most of them well-educated grown-ups in New York, said there must be some secret I’d have to unearth about these girls. “It’s almost impossible to get it just from sex between men and women,” they said, even though sex between men and women is the fastest-growing mode of HIV transmission.2 Amber Hollibaugh says that when she started the Lesbian AIDS Project some gay women said she’d never find more than a dozen cases—Everyone knows we don’t get it!—but now the project involves 400 women in New York City alone. In Jamestown some of Williams’ friends said they believe him when he says he thought the authorities who told him he was positive while in jail were just trying to scare him into leaving town. But his friend Amber, who was with him on and off for nine months, now thinks that he was mostly in denial: “When I went to visit him, he said, ‘Do I look sick? I don’t feel sick.’ I think he convinced himself that it wasn’t true—and, you know, you can convince yourself of anything.”
Watching Williams escorted out of a Bronx courtroom, giving a half-smile and two-fingered salute to someone in the gallery, I thought of Ohio. “That was his big dream,” Amber said, “to move to Ohio and make a life. He went there when he was younger; his dad used to live there—now, I don’t know if that’s true but it’s what he said—and he loved it.” By now the rough sketch of Williams’ biography has been drawn often enough, and it contains precious little of the stuff of dreams: born in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, his mother addicted to crack, his father jailed when he was four; a sweet kid attractive to females from an early age, an angry teenager who was in special ed for reasons unclear and who robbed one of the few people who tried to help him; a Blood, a dealer, a “wild cat” who survived a shooting in a housing project and a string of charges, including one for murder (he was acquitted); a guy with more sexual partners than Bill Clinton and, yes, a “pleasing personality.”
But what did they see in him? The question, overt or indirect, has riveted reporters and TV presenters. It’s funny how the opposite question—what did he see in them?—is never asked, only implicitly answered in the assumption that he was “looking for victims” and they were easy “prey.” There’s more than a touch of racism behind the media prurience, since, except that so many of them are white, the young women in this case mostly swam in the same stream of trouble as Williams. It would have been stranger if they hadn’t found each other. But America could have a lifetime of “conversations on race” and the white press would still twitch at the idea of a black man in bed with white women. This time the history of white perceptions of savage blackness was compressed in an economy of symbols—the reproduced poster, the headline language of beastliness, a young woman’s photograph, all of which worked together like a logo. The symbols made it unnecessary for most reporters even to remark on the interracial nature of the liaisons; allowed them, actually, to write or speak as if such pair-ups among young people in Jamestown were as common as they are, in upstate New York or anywhere, judging from the 57 percent of US teenagers who pollsters say have been in interracial relationships. Common, though, is not part of the vocabulary of the media in scandal mode. The scandal, the news, was therefore best conveyed by images, which effectively told the story, superseding all other language. In the story of Williams, pop culture’s trinity of sex, race and danger was perfectly realized.
Still, it’s too neat, and too disregarding of the women who are HIV positive, to say, as some have, that the panic is reducible to white, straight male America’s historic fear of black male sexuality. Racism poisons the brew in Chautauqua County as it does everywhere, but the fact is it wouldn’t have much mattered if Williams had infected one white girl (unless she was the mayor’s daughter), just as it wouldn’t have much mattered if the only person traced to him was the black thirteen-year-old, who I was told could pass for the seventeen years she claimed to be when everyone was partying.
In the catalogue of victimology, working-class women count only in bulk. Before Williams became an issue, no one with power got excited that Ernest Lockett, another black man in the county, had infected his white partner, Nan Nowak, and through her their daughter, Nadia. They were just another throwaway family. Nor is the state any more concerned with the health of such families now. Legal action has gained currency as a reasonable response to infectious disease, so Lockett is being prosecuted for assault, an action that Nowak had advocated but the state had resisted for years. If convicted, he will be one more black prisoner. Ernest, Nan, little Nadia: nobody knows their names. In the Williams case, numbers assumed such fetishistic value that Dr. Berke declared Williams had “damaged hundreds and hundreds of lives,” even when at the time the positive individuals associated with him numbered nine, and perhaps half of those had the virus before he was told he was positive. The state announced he’d named fifty to seventy-five partners in New York City, who in turn were placing untold others at risk. Those numbers were totally manufactured. According to sources at the New York City Health Department, Williams named about fifteen city women, of whom fewer than half have been found and none have been linked to him by HIV with any confidence. But the larger number was excitedly reported, implying an ugly chain of equivalence: one mayor’s daughter is worth twenty small-town “risk takers” is worth seventy-five big-city sluts is worth …
When numbers are so thrown about, the individual recedes, which is exactly the purpose of such panics. In propagating the extraordinary, they distract from the crushing ordinariness of life and death in the age of AIDS: from the 380,000 deaths and the 900,000 HIV-altered lives; from the man or woman infected every hour without notice or care; from the catastrophic failure of public health and the common, terrible but no less human realities of one man—one youth, really, for Williams was not more than eighteen when he came to Jamestown—for whom the best of all possible futures, a regular life in Ohio, might as well have been the biggest, most impossible fantasy anyone had ever had.
What did they see in each other? Maybe a hope of family. And if they only replicated its distortions, who deserves the blame? At a kitchen table one night in Jamestown, a fellow who calls himself Killer explained that the crew he leads, a gang that seems a long way from the Crips of his dreams, is “like family and religion rolled into one.” Listening to him describe his responsibility to instruct and discipline his “children,” to dominate his “Queen”—and hearing his acolytes vow obedience—was like an hour spent captive with Christian radio. Yet what is spoken and what is true may differ. Earlier, when I talked with Killer’s girlfriend alone, she had characterized their relationship as one of tender honesty, in which they faced their weaknesses and pooled their strengths, in which they had decided to abandon the underground as too risky but were still trying to find a way out of their low-end factory jobs. Equality was assumed. She said that with every man she insisted on using a condom, that she insisted with this one until they’d committed to each other and both had been tested. Surrounded by his friends and subordinates, Killer put aside his jokey charm and imagined firearms and “fucking with the police” and “big-time fraud.” He said he had never used a condom; he never would, not even now, not even to protect his Queen. He’d rather die.
So who is right? Probably both and neither. People burdened by fears have always sought to make something of a romance or swagger-dance of their life, and others have sought to deny them their contradictions and protective deceptions. I met Killer and Queen in a flat occupied by a group of teenagers and young-twenties, a driftway of bare rooms with almost bare mattresses on the floor for which they paid rent in cash or product or IOUs (this was kept vague) to an older woman with whom they sometimes sat around watching TV in the afternoon. They were poor and young and groping for home.
I have not spoken with Nushawn Williams. His court-appointed lawyer in New York, William Cember, turns away journalists’ requests for interviews and has warned Williams that anything he says will be used against him, by somebody. Cember is not wrong, but the protective effort is another form of capture, leaving Williams visibly invisible. There’s no reason to suppose, though, that Williams alone among men must be one-dimensional. It’s regularly assumed, for instance, that every present he gave, every gentle thing he did, was a ploy to exploit a young woman. Now, he might not be a “good man”; he might be a little crazy (psychiatrists report he is competent to stand trial, but that doesn’t mean he has no problems); and he certainly was wrong not to tell his partners about HIV. But at least sometimes might not a gift have been just a gift, a gesture of feeling and a bid for notice? How many ways are there for a street dealer with scars all over his body and a heavy rap sheet to express eligibility, even if some girls say they “go for thugs”? Isn’t it possible that he too might have been “looking for love,” that in the exchange of tokens and physical desire the trade in “self-esteem” might have gone both ways?3
It was the way he “carried himself,” Amber said, that first attracted her to Williams. “Like a millionaire.” I grasped something of that allure one Saturday after 2 a.m. at an all-night downtown diner called Mattia’s. Jamestown’s fifty-odd bars had just closed, and the restaurant welcomed the broken figures of what’s left of white working-class culture. I’d seen such faces earlier at the Ranch and the Bull Frog, faces joyless and worn and just a little menacing, just enough to shame you for the freedom of your life and the outsider’s curiosity that made you assume the right to impose on their dignity. At Mattia’s they were joined by a few soft drunks, a few frisky matrons, a few creamy prep-types and the drug dealers or drug-dealer hangers-on, who alone laughed and walked proud and with every flirtation or quick remark to a table of young women proclaimed, Life!
Girls who spent time with Williams say he was funny. He improvised songs and told silly jokes and put on accents. He could also be cruel and demand that they take off their clothes and get fucked when that’s not exactly what they had in mind. Amber describes a life of alternating sweetness and brutality, in which she would hit him and let him cry in her lap for his childhood; in which he would choke her and put his arm around her in the dark and let her cry for hers—for her girl-hood rape and all the pain behind her toughness. He cooked her spaghetti dinners, putting “his own spices” in sauce from a jar and lighting candles on the table, and in the afternoon he had quick sex with others whom she tried not to think about or not to believe. About the violence, which she remembered casually, almost as one would the events of a summer vacation, she said, “Obviously I believe in second chances … I guess the reason I didn’t leave is that I’m a violent person too. He just had to say something smart and I’d hit him. I don’t know, my dad used to hit me, my mom used to hit me, I fought with my brothers. I thought it was normal.” She bargained for what safety she could—denying him sex, leaving town for a while, taking a blow, giving one back, demanding respect, not getting it, then getting it, provoking him, evading him, insisting on a condom, not insisting, not even wanting to insist, trusting, not trusting, and never once assuming that protection might rest with persons who were as much her oppressors as his. Finally she’d had enough.
When I first met Amber I asked her about danger, and she said that before all the posters and the panic, HIV wasn’t anywhere on a scale of one to ten for her. She hasn’t been sheltered from AIDS. A cousin and her boyfriend died of it; Amber’s stepsister’s uncle died of it; his boyfriend was either positive or had AIDS when he moved away after the uncle died. She just didn’t worry about it for herself, not in Jamestown. Her biggest fears, she said, were being in jail and being alone. Now she was both, not having heard from her latest man, the one whose name is tattooed on her stomach, the one to whom she could tell anything, the one who would not hit her. They had a fight, he doesn’t write easily, has no phone—couldn’t afford to accept the charges, wildly inflated, if he did—and no ID. No one visits at the jail without ID. Somehow it seemed too small to be talking about risk, but we talked about it anyway.
“What would life be without putting yourself out there sometimes?” she said. “I tell this to my mother. My mother’s life is this: she goes to work, goes to the bar—she’s not a drinker or anything, she just goes there—goes home. Every day: go to work, go to the bar, go home. I asked her, ‘What’s the point, Mom? What is the point of your life?’ What could she say? There’s nothing she could say. That’s why I have to get out of Jamestown. It’s not anything about the town; it’s me. It makes me unhappy to be here. And I don’t want to be unhappy.”
“But do you think there are things you could do to protect yourself more from hurt?”
“There’s no way. No way. Because whatever you do, as long as you’re alive, there’s a scale of hurt. There’s the kind of hurt you get from loving someone, and the kind of hurt you get from keeping just to yourself and not letting yourself love nobody. So either you’re gonna get hurt because of someone you love, or you’re gonna be lonely. Either way, you’re hurting yourself. The point is, you’re doing it to yourself. You’re making the decision.”
In a time of epidemic, every woman has to decide for her own safety, and every man for his. Out of New England recently came a report that four out of ten persons who are HIV positive don’t tell their sex partner, and two-thirds of those don’t always use protection. Somebody didn’t tell Nushawn Williams—some woman, he says—and maybe somebody else didn’t tell her. The cascade of recrimination for all the anguish in Jamestown, as in America, is endless if you want to go that route; and many do. Almost thirty states have laws criminalizing the behavior of people who are HIV positive. Without disclosure, consent is no defense, and in most places neither is the use of a condom. More than 300 persons have been prosecuted for reckless endangerment, or assault with a deadly weapon, or attempted murder. Many of these are prisoners who spit at or bit corrections officers (often in the course of being beaten), even though there’s no known case of HIV transmission by those means. And many are people who didn’t tell the truth.4
The truth? Suppose Nushawn Williams is prosecuted for sex as proposed. Imagine two “victims.” Both of them consented, neither insisted on protection, both engaged in the same act of vaginal intercourse. Suppose, just to complicate matters, that they both enjoyed it. But one of them is positive and one is negative. The same “crime,” the same “weapon,” but one conviction could bring almost 250 percent more jail time. Proponents of this scenario say it’s no different from murder and attempted murder, except in this case the “bullet” hit in exactly the same spot and the victims were willing participants. Suppose further that the woman who is positive had another sexually transmitted disease—herpes, chlamydia, gonorrhea—that made her more vulnerable to contracting HIV. Suppose that the person who gave that to her, and thus compromised her health in a way that the negative woman’s health was not compromised, never told her he had it. Suppose, moreover, that she didn’t tell Williams, though exposure to something like herpes could be quite dangerous for someone with HIV. And suppose, beyond all those suppositions, that when it comes to sex people lie about a whole host of things, or they forget, or they have vendettas, or they need to protect someone, maybe themselves. How can it even be known, finally, whether the weapon is indeed Williams’ body and not someone else’s?
DNA! But DNA matching in HIV cases, according to Dr. Marcia Kalish at the CDC, “doesn’t prove anything. It simply supports the fact that there could have been recent transmission. It’s not like matching blood; you don’t have that definite answer. It’s just a very small piece of the puzzle.”5
The terrain gets slipperier when you think for a moment about the real way people have sex—the way risk arouses and arousal subordinates thoughts of risk, the way shame influences almost any discussion of desire, the way denial is always, always at work. If a woman begged for it up the ass because she wanted to avoid pregnancy or maybe because she actually likes it (yes, even nice girls do), would she admit it, or would she worry that such an admission would put her in a different category of victim, the one occupied by drug users and homosexuals? If a person was told he is HIV positive but also “knows,” the way so many straight Americans “know,” that “it’s almost impossible to get it just from sex between men and women,” might he have assumed—still in considerable disbelief about his condition—that the risk was rather low and he was just unlucky? And then how might this assumption—on which hangs the balance of guilt or innocence—have played out in the sex act? As the calm preface to judicious decision-making, or as one of a hundred flighty things in a highly fractured process of thought? So how does a court of law have the means or the right to decide any of this?
Intent is a necessary requirement for criminal prosecution. In California recently, an appellate court ruled that assault charges could not be brought against an HIV-positive straight man who failed to disclose his status, because some studies show that the annual rate of heterosexual transmission from man to woman is quite low—5.7 percent—and, applying the reasoning of the betting parlor, it could no more be said that he intended to cause harm than that somebody who put money on a horse favored seventeen-to-one intended to lose. It was a victory against criminalization, but by this logic it might be argued that groups whose odds of transmission are higher, or who, unlike the avowed heterosexual, have been branded with the scarlet A, ought to be criminalized. Criminal intent is extremely difficult to prove in consensual sex cases, gay or straight, which is why laws proscribing the behavior of HIV-positive individuals simply say that knowledge equals intent to harm.
Which brings us back to the fuzzy matter of truth. In the Bronx courtroom in late February, a defense attorney was telling a colleague that he would favor new criminal law to prosecute people like Nushawn Williams, “people who know and don’t tell.” People who don’t know—that’s another matter. So, suppose a man, maybe a man like this lawyer, has unprotected sex. And suppose he doesn’t think HIV can touch him, so it never occurs to him to be tested. Then suppose he doesn’t tell his wife he’s had sex with others, and one day she discovers she is HIV positive. With the same outcome, the lie of Nushawn Williams is a crime while the lie of the hypothetical lawyer is an unfortunate mistake. To be consistent, every lie would be a potential crime and every one of us a potential criminal.
In the sex panic around Nushawn Williams—as in the scandal around President Clinton, for different reasons—scarcely anyone pauses to consider the big lies that make the smaller ones inevitable. In Chautauqua County, Kathleen Whitmore travels to public schools for the allowed one day of AIDS education and is regularly told by administrators, to her frustration, just please say nothing about anal sex or oral sex or condoms (unless they ask), nothing about homosexuality (“there are no gay kids here,” one teenager told me); of course, nothing about pleasure. Dr. Rzepkowski, who is gay, out and HIV positive, has spoken at some schools about all those things and has never been asked back. After the news about Williams hit, a high school teacher in the county, Marcia Lindquist, was suspended after talking to her students about abstinence, because it was not appropriately abstracted from sex.
This is not provincial ignorance. In the entire history of the AIDS epidemic, the federal government has done exactly one national mailing on the health issues involved. There is no serious education on the relationship between other sexually transmitted diseases and HIV, and no effective prevention effort, even though people with one of those diseases are three to five times more likely to contract HIV, and people who are HIV positive and have another sexually transmitted disease are more likely to pass on the virus. These other diseases can, of course, be cured or suppressed, but it is as if public knowledge on the subject were frozen in 1981, and along with it the shame-brand that compels people to hold tight to their secrets and risk the very thing they hope to avoid: dying of embarrassment.
One in five Americans over the age of twelve has genital herpes, and up to eight in ten have oral herpes, which can also be transmitted to the genitals, but no one talks about that anymore. Over 50,000 Americans contract syphilis every year, but at current spending rates the disease will never be eliminated.6 There’s not a public school in the country that has a curriculum on human sexuality—its complications and wonders and varieties, “the emotional part,” as Tania put it, and the physical part without evasion or disdain. Too many young women I met still spoke of “feeling dirty” because they’d had sex, or were eager to label someone else dirty. Mainstream feminism is nowhere on this issue, and nowhere in the lives of these girls, who often don’t use birth control and don’t approve of abortion because, like sex, a baby is a little piece of goodness.
Now government officials grandstand on the need to “protect our kids,” but a comparison of rates of HIV infection for young people, particularly young women, at the beginning of the epidemic and today ought to nullify the state’s claims to legitimacy as an ally in safety. Former surgeon general Joycelyn Elders said, “I’d have a bag [of condoms] on every corner, so all you’d have to do is reach in and pick them up,” but we know where such ideas got her. A runaway shelter in Jamestown offers a refuge so that kids don’t have to choose between sleeping with their father, sleeping with another man or sleeping on the street, but it can’t keep them longer than thirty days, and funding for homeless assistance nationally is down 14 percent since 1996. The government conducts research on the spread of HIV among young people, and wants to keep statistics on everybody, but plans for universal surveillance are not being accompanied by plans for universal education or universal treatment, and there are no broad support networks for kids who learn they are positive and have no family, no insurance, no solid income and no emotional preparation for hearing that their life is in jeopardy. By providing the names of his partners for tracing, Nushawn Williams did exactly what public health officials advocate and was then vilified by those same officials as “some kind of scorekeeper.” It would have been better for him if he had lied. And with the specter of name reporting and national registries and more energetic prosecution, increasing numbers of people will decide that it is better for them never to get tested. But most grotesque in a rich field of hypocrisy is that anyone in authority should ask, Why didn’t he tell? when from its beginning HIV infection has been treated more as a social condition than a disease, when the files of the Lambda Legal Defense Fund bulge with cases of discrimination, and when you don’t have to know any of those details to know that being a carrier of the AIDS virus on top of being a black out-of-town drug-dealing ex-con is very bad news. Just how bad is symbolized by the spit mask Williams had to wear while being transported to courtrooms and even to meet visitors in New York—a gauzy bubble over his head with a black opaque strip over the area of his mouth, the whole contraption attached to a wooden collar with a stick jutting out, “like a dogcatcher uses to catch dogs,” Amber said.
The mask, the jail cell, they were just waiting for him—much as jail awaits the “bad kids” of Chautauqua County who are not already inside. Either that or marriage or death, and sometimes all three. Again and again in Jamestown I met well-meaning adults who said they only hoped girls in trouble would “meet a guy with a good head on his shoulders,” their one chance for safety. Classrooms at Jamestown High bear handmade signs urging students to JUST SAY NO to all the familiar vices, and the school system has a strategy group to keep kids on the straight and narrow that is affectionately called the Pizza and Flashlight Committee. The concept, according to assistant school superintendent James Coffman, is “if you attract them with pizza they will come, and if you shine a light on the cockroaches they will go away.” The cockroaches are the Nushawn Williamses of the world, “The Outsiders” depicted in a student’s drawing reprinted last fall in the Post-Journal—archetypal white toughs hanging out, drinking and smoking—and the girls who, by daring to go with such boys, deserve whatever they get and whatever name anyone chooses to call them.
For kids who are one step away from that category, just on the cusp of expulsion, the county runs an alternative education program. They go to school in the evening, when the regular students are home, and the emphasis is on behavior modification. A policeman escorts them in, watches them remove engagement rings and other jewelry, and stands guard the whole time. Sometimes the chief of police comes to teach English or Behavior.
The idea is “to make everyone part of the team,” Coffman told me. It’s an experiment borrowed from Erie, Pennsylvania, forty-five miles away, and Coffman urged me to remember that the program is in its infancy. I believe he was sincere when he said that the county wants to help these kids succeed. Over the years it has put a tremendous amount of energy into various schemes advanced by one or another national expert. But often the experts haven’t a clue. Observing one evening’s session—the teachers exhausted from working all day, the kids surly though full of secret knowledge, the cop on the beat, the lessons stripped of anything that might provoke surprise or curiosity or love—I took it as preparation for prison.
Jamestown is the kind of place that can make a person’s hate pure, and not for anyone in it, or anything particular to the town. I left it as I’ve left countless places in America where people labor for so little and the spirit has been so robbed—praying that every kid I met could get out, and moved by the strength of the people who fight for the future: Ron Graham, who coaches girls’ track and consults on youth programs; Matt Milovich, who runs the shelter; Sam Teresi; Nancy Glatz; Rose Torres. There are others. And there are more still who refuse to pass judgement on the young people caught up in the crisis. “Unless you walk in their shoes, how can you know what life is like for these girls, or even for that fella?” an older woman who works as a cook and waitress said to me. For months people have been meeting to decide what to do next. “Low self-esteem” has been identified as the basic problem of “kids at risk,” but some aren’t so sure.
“I think it’s too easy,” Rose Torres said. Rose worked at the runaway shelter and was on welfare with her three-year-old daughter before coming to AIDS Community Services. “I can have a lot of self-esteem and still make bad choices—based on need, based on want. I’m still going to do what I have to do. It may go against reason. Am I going to stay in an unhappy relationship with someone who abuses me, with someone who cheats on me, because it will let me take care of my child? If I go to a hospital and they say they can’t do something for my sick child because Medicaid won’t cover it, do you think I won’t do anything to get that child what it needs? If I just want to be loved and I don’t make someone wear a condom for all the reasons any of us might not do it, is he a monster? Am I a victim? I’m not a victim; I’m a volunteer. We need a little honesty. Why do any of us make the choices we make? A lot of women don’t have a lot of options.”
None of the young women with Nushawn Williams had enough options. Neither did he. Neither does Jamestown.
(1998)
