Long before any of us learn about sex, we learn about authority: our parents’ over us, the wider world’s over our parents, their response to that wider world’s power, and the costs of any yes or no. The game of school was one game by one group of little girls on one leafy afternoon on the hard side of a hardish town, what used to be the black and Polish East Side of Buffalo, New York, and is now the mostly black, latinx and Bangladeshi East Side. The girls appear to be loved, well cared for, polite, curious. I know almost nothing about their family’s relationship to the landlord, the tax man, the bill collector, the policeman, the boss or social service agent. I know that at a nearby health clinic, adults drop in to talk sometimes about the stigma of being from the East Side, which, as everyone plainly sees, the city’s leadership doesn’t know what to do with. In this particular neighborhood about half the people are officially poor, reports of violent crime are among the highest in the city, and at least a third of the boys and girls in middle school and high school have seen someone shot, stabbed or assaulted—meaning almost every child knows a child who has witnessed violence, and the victim might be a parent, a sibling, a neighbor or friend. The kids learn to hit the ground when they’re told to, and in school what they don’t talk about is often what they can’t talk about. Over the past couple of years, the city’s grown-ups have sought ways to unburden children of the things they carry. One little boy has found a way, sort of, through playing the violin. It is necessary that the community come together to talk about violence. Violence is what nobody wants, not even, perhaps, the stick-up boys who, once upon a time, not long ago, may have been labeled “emotionally disturbed” in school because of the things they carried, and were then put on the short bus or in detention or suspended. Violence is a subject that doesn’t wear out, but its most insidious forms don’t require a weapon.
That little-boy violin player especially likes the “Ode to Joy.” It has been called a balm for things he doesn’t want: anxiety and nightmares, disabling grief over his father’s murder. As for what he wants … How much unarticulated desire is bundled in that choice? How long will he, will any children but especially boys, be allowed to be sensitive? How do they talk about wanting when they want so much? When they might be afraid of their wanting, or the paths to it are obscured?
Listening to the little girls across the fence, I wondered what would be their blossoming pear tree, the emblem that stirs them in their bodies and their souls, as it did Zora Neale Hurston’s Janie,
like a flute song forgotten in another existence and remembered again. What? How? Why? This singing she heard that had nothing to do with her ears. The rose of the world was breathing out smell. It followed her through all her waking moments and caressed her in her sleep. It connected itself with other vaguely felt matters that had struck her outside observation and buried themselves in her flesh. Now they emerged and quested about her consciousness.
I wonder at all that must quest about the consciousness of these children, and all that will, and the distance between lived experience on an ordinary day and the rote political language of essences and -isms that is too straitened to contain it. By way of analogy, it is maybe not incorrect to say, as one high school teacher’s guide to Their Eyes Were Watching God does, that the book “explores sexism, race and class discrimination, and the disappointment of loveless marriages,” but then it wouldn’t be incorrect to say that the book explores a black town, the Everglades, a hurricane and what to do when your man has rabies. Either way, Hurston is spinning in her grave, because the language is insufficient and the optic narrow. Janie’s story is about getting free, about a woman coming to know her own body and mind, and daring, along the stony road and against the common sense of the time, to live and love authentically. Sexual politics cannot ignore the many forms that danger and domination take, else how could it be called politics—hence the explorations of this book—but it is nothing without freedom as its star, and the effort to change the common sense of the time, for the sake of every mother’s daughter and son. I try to remember that.
Summer 2019
They 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