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
