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)
What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About #MeToo
Amid the chorus of stories that define the #MeToo phenomenon, there remain other, unattended stories. These others do not displace the chorus. They do not say, You are wrong, shut up. They do not exist in the world of Keep quiet or Be good. They do not deny the reality of power, of men’s long dominance over women or of conformity as a silencing force. They say power is cunning, power is a hydra; it has more heads than any story or group of stories can describe. They say history does too. They invite us to inspect the hydra.
What follows is my invitation.
We both were young, twenties, but I was older. We worked for the same outfit, but I was paid. We kissed while walking home from a party, and then at the back of a bus, and then in his stairwell. He had made the first move, but only I could say, in the midst of our distraction, “Of course this means I can’t hire you.” He was an intern, I a department chief. The declaration astonished him—whether because he sensed I underestimated him I cannot say. Ultimately, he so surpassed the qualifying test’s requirements that not hiring him would have been absurd. Years later a catty friend would say ambition alone drove the boy’s kisses: “After all, he was gorgeous, and you …” I was his boss and lover, he my assistant and lover, each of us on the seesaw of power and weakness that those dual roles implied until, over time, the temperature changed.
That is a true story, true to me, and the telling, I suppose, encourages you to believe it. But what do you know? Say I were a man and the intern a woman. Say I called her a girl and someone said that her desire for a job figured in the encounter. Say you knew nothing of her side of the story, as you know nothing of his—as, actually, you know only the barest details of mine. Say, finally, that she knew the value of her kind of beauty in seduction and social competition—how could she not?—but also its curse. Does that imaginative exercise open what for me is a sweet, if complicated, memory to sinister interpretation? Is the intern now a victim? Am I a predator? And yet the information is unchanged, as revealing and partial as it was at first telling.
The story, like any told from a single point of view, raises an unnerving question about certainty: how can we determine the truth from what we cannot know? In his Histories, Herodotus tells readers that x is what he heard but could not confirm, that y is what his informants say they believe, that z is something he highly doubts but is, in all events, a cultural consensus. Readers might not have verifiable truth, but they are invited to interpret what those views might say about the people who hold them (or the writer who chose to record them). At the detective’s desk, a story of crime is pieced together from multiple sources; even then a charging document is not the truth, it is subject to challenge. In literature, truth is an investigation not an endpoint, so the story is an instrument for revealing the complexity of being alive, and wisdom, rather than certainty, is the hope.
In politics, truth tends to be whatever those holding the bullhorn say it is. During the spectacle of the Golden Globes ceremony, television viewers would have seen this graphic commercial:
He said. She said.
He said. She said.
He said. She said.
He said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said.
She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said.
The truth has power.
The truth will not be threatened.
The truth has a voice.
The New York Times.
Afterward the ad flickered from New York subway platforms. As cultural messaging, it resolves the problem of uncertainty by saying, first, that truth lies in the teller and, second, that social truth—the reality of sexual violence—may obliterate the particulars of any individual life by the sheer number of tellers saying “Me too.”
Given the timing of its debut at the start of Hollywood’s award season, the “She said” cascade could be read narrowly to represent producer Harvey Weinstein’s accusers and the Times’ role in his fall. It is now accepted as fact that Weinstein is a violent criminal. He may be,