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 was deemed “depressed” and “dreary” but also somehow “safe” and “mostly bucolic”—“Middle America” with “a solid, conservative social fabric,” the kind of place where, as Mayor Richard Kimball put it, “it [is] hard to believe that something like this could happen.” Mostly, though, whether in dreariness or small-town naiveté, it was exceptional—the setting for a local tragedy, not the emblem of a national truth.
Williams was the simplest of all, a “lethal lothario,” a “sexual predator,” a “one-man plague,” a “monster.” Dr. Robert Berke, the Chautauqua County health commissioner, said, “He’s not a monster. … We have the devil here,” and Montel Williams told millions of television viewers that the death penalty would be the right punishment for what Williams had done. What he’d done, according to health and law-enforcement officials, was intentionally infect or try to infect young women with the AIDS virus—intent here resting solely on the fact that he’d been told he was HIV positive and didn’t tell them. He’s been charged with statutory rape for having sex with the thirteen-year-old, and further charges have been bruited: first-degree assault for every woman he had sex with who is now HIV positive, and reckless endangerment for every woman he had sex with who is HIV negative. Each assault rap could get him up to twenty-five years in prison; each endangerment rap, seven.
Chautauqua County district attorney James Subjack and New York State attorney general Dennis Vacco initially outdid each other in telling the media of their desire to prosecute Williams on such charges. Six months later, with no formal action taken, the two were being evasive, low-key, as if the legal machinery they’d endorsed with such confidence was flawed and they weren’t at all sure they wanted to try it out, once again, with all eyes watching.
A preview of the kind of justice Williams might expect upstate has already been played out in New York City. Like legions of young black and latin men caught in the criminal justice system for petty drug sales, Williams had been awaiting formal sentencing on the crack charge in the Bronx when the posters proclaiming him a public sex enemy went up. He had already sealed a plea bargain with the DA to serve one year in jail. Normally, a judge just approves such deals, but on February 20, 1998, Judge John Byrne of the Bronx Supreme Court threw Williams’ deal out—largely on account of the potent mix of rumor and allegation in Chautauqua County. Due process? Presumption of innocence? Integrity of a solemn promise? The same questions can be brought to bear on the decision by upstate officials to breach Williams’ confidentiality and convict him as a “cold-blooded murderer” in the court of public opinion. On the straightforward matter of the drug charge, Williams was given a Hobson’s choice: more jail time because of unproven and unrelated claims in a different jurisdiction;