In the state capital, meanwhile, New York legislators used the crisis to plump for a range of legislation that even Dr. Berke acknowledges would have done nothing to prevent it:
§ laws making it a felony for anyone who is HIV positive to have sex without first telling a partner;
§ laws forcing doctors to report the names of all positive cases to the state;
§ laws requiring persons who test positive to reveal the names of all their partners or face criminal charges;
§ laws establishing a state registry of everyone who tests positive;
§ laws allowing the use of this registry to divulge the names of positive individuals while notifying anyone who has ever had sex with them;
§ laws compelling the testing of prisoners, criminal defendants and arrested persons under a variety of circumstances.
None of those laws would have made any difference in the case of Nushawn Williams, who had an HIV test while at a county clinic for treatment of another sexually transmitted disease; who identified almost two dozen sex partners and agreed to let health officials contact them under the current system, which Berke says “worked perfectly in this case”; who went by so many aliases as to make name reporting irrelevant, was identified publicly under the “clear and imminent danger” provision of existing law, and may well be prosecuted even without a special statute criminalizing HIV status.
More important, they would have made no difference in protecting him from the virus in the first place, and they will make no difference in the lives of the young women of Jamestown—or in the lives of their mothers or sisters or kids. They will not make HIV-positive individuals more responsible to tell, partners more responsible to ask, or any of us more responsible to hold out for our own safety in time before, as one Jamestown woman put it, “the question Why am I doing this? gracefully turns into Why did I do that?”1
“What makes you vulnerable is what’s complicated,” said Amber Hollibaugh, national field director of women’s education services at Gay Men’s Health Crisis in New York. “It’s the secrets that people can’t talk about that put them at risk—always, always. It’s not a question of whether people do ‘risky things’; that doesn’t deal with the real issues in the lives of real women and real men.”
No one knows what goes on behind the doors in any town, just as no one knows what goes on between two people. But from what’s in plain sight, it’s hard to understand how anyone could consider Jamestown safe in the fullest sense of the word.
Nothing here rivals the devastation of parts of Buffalo—the ruined avenues empty at night but for a single driver and a guy powering his wheelchair through the mist. But neither is there the energy that animates other parts, even poor parts, of that wounded city. Jamestown’s inner city, mostly white and black neighborhoods where Williams and many of the young women lived, consists of solid blocks of two-story frame or brick houses on hilly streets that rise up sharply from a stretch of factories on one side of the Chadakoin River—the old Swede Hill—and lead more gently out of downtown and into what’s called the Valley on the other side. Rounding out the inner city, away from the center along Second Street, is the latin section. Only rarely do you find a house boarded up, and there are fine, even beautiful, structures here. But most are worn rough, and too many have doors lost, steps broken, hallways naked to the street. People make an effort or they don’t, but the effort is often too small and probably too hard-won as well—a garden but not the steps, a gate but not the door, a curtain but not the window, some Christmas lights but not a coat of paint. On these streets, most likely they don’t own the place anyway.
A lawyer named John Goodell told me he and others were angry that some reporters had said Jamestown was depressed. Indeed, the Jamestown Post-Journal printed a front-page story on November 7, 1997, lashing out at the national media and reminding readers of the city’s virtues. Goodell took this a bit further. “Have you seen our ghetto?” he asked. “I bet you’d be happy to have our ghetto in New York.” It seemed a slim choice, trading one zone of poverty for another, and all I could think of was Billy Preston’s words: “Nothing from nothing leaves nothing …”
I found myself raiding the icebox of pop culture a lot while in Jamestown, and not only because so many white, black and brown teenagers here testify to the universality of hip-hop style. There are also the city’s own contributions to the culture: Lucille Ball and 10,000 Maniacs. Lucy grew up here. The Lucy–Desi Museum, around the corner from the high school, is a monument to mirth and marriage, though if you find the right button to press and wait long enough you can hear how, just before the divorce, Lucy clenched her teeth, dug her long red nails into Desi’s shoulders and growled, “I could kill you.” The Maniacs have far less claim on the local consciousness, except that they practiced in a warehouse that became the focus of a satanic-cult hysteria here in the late 1980s. Parents kept children home from school in record numbers one Friday the 13th when word spread that blue-eyed blonde virgins would be sacrificed. Countercultural kids were considered the dangerous element in that panic; one of them wore a jacket to school with the slogan FUCK AUTHORITY and eventually had to leave town because he was so beset with threats.
There was no blood sacrifice, nor any satanic cult (though one blue-eyed blonde who’d later be with Nushawn Williams did get a black rose from some kids making sport of the scare), just as there was no perfect happiness for the screwball comedienne whom some old-timers still denigrate as a teenage slut, running wild with a bootlegger’s son before leaving town. But the culture has a way of conjuring up a good fright when that’s what’s needed as distraction.
Jamestown had its start in 1811, when James Prendergast, a doctor from Tennessee, set up saw and grist mills by the Chadakoin rapids. From 1823 to 1873 it was the largest furniture-manufacturing city in the country, and up until the late 1920s was second only to Grand Rapids, Michigan. The lush forests that in 1800 blanketed the land, broken only by Indian footpaths, were gone a century later. The Indians were gone too. By then Jamestown was known as The Pearl City, owing to its production of pearl ash, used in making soap and glass. In the early days, while those with some capital set themselves to lumbering or artisanry—or, later, to establishing textile mills, small metalworks and photographic-paper businesses—the poorest settlers survived by hacking at the forests, burning the wood to ash and bartering this for staple goods from storekeepers, who sold it to asheries. As the forests passed from memory so did the asheries, along with the reason for the city’s moniker.
These days there are many “good parts” of Jamestown and, beyond the city limits, rambling houses and gracious country in the resort areas near Chautauqua Lake. (There are also year-round cottages off dirt roads hard by the water that recall places I’ve seen in Mississippi.) Jamestown High School’s Red Raiders play football on a million-dollar field covered with AstroTurf, and on special occasions they have been known to step out in identical gray slacks and blue blazers, courtesy of local donors. Some old fortunes remain here, concentrated in five foundations worth $160 million combined, and the entertainment pages note high-culture events befitting that part of the past memorialized in standard histories.
But downtown presents only mute mementos of the “air of constant activity and bustle” that guidebook writers of the New Deal found in 1940. The population, 45,500 then, is now 34,500 and falling. The rumble of public transport is gone, the Art Deco station for the Erie Railroad sooty and abandoned, its clock frozen like a prop out of Great Expectations at 9:25. The elegant Hotel Jamestown is an old folks’ home, as are several erstwhile commercial buildings, reflecting the only segment of the population that is growing. At the other end of Second Street from the high school, the cavernous Furniture Mart, to which buyers and dealers once flocked from all points, now houses Kelly Services, one of five temp agencies.
A slight, wise-eyed Puerto Rican girl named Tania, who left home at fifteen and later became a roommate of Nushawn Williams, went through one of those agencies for a job at Bush Industries, a furniture maker and the city’s biggest employer. She worked graveyard shift on the packing line when she was seventeen, along with nine other teenagers with whom she shared a two-bedroom flat. “They showed