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