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
