Showdown in Choctaw County

Article Tools

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

Now those memories seem dreamlike or unreal. At 50, he likens this AIDS work to having blinders torn from his eyes. He’s found clearings in the woods filled with rows of rusting trailers where people can’t afford electricity, water, or indoor plumbing—places that would be described as shantytowns if they were in Africa or Brazil.

ALABAMA, WHICH HAS always had a relatively low rate of AIDS, now seems primed for a burgeoning epidemic. Crack—which often breeds a sex-for-drugs trade and seems inevitably to show up just ahead of AIDS—has moved in from Florida and Texas and made its way into even the most rural counties. Already black women in the South are 26 times more likely than white women to have HIV. DeShazo is armed with these facts, but they seem somehow abstract in places like Gilbertown. The threat of AIDS here feels deeply entwined with poverty and the lingering effects of segregation.

When deShazo enrolled at the University of Alabama in 1968, the social upheaval that was cutting across the South in the wake of the civil rights movement and Vietnam left a deep impression on him. He became something of a hippie and got into social work with an idealistic notion that he could change the world. He began working in child welfare and spent years taking kids away from ugly family situations and putting them in foster homes that were not much better. He started drinking to numb an encroaching feeling of failure. When he found himself crying at his desk at the end of the day, he quit and got a job at a mental hospital. That work was just as hard. His drinking habit began to develop a life of its own, and his marriage gave out in 1991. He used to get furious at "the system," but it is hard to direct your anger at a faceless bureaucracy.

Increasingly, he internalized his frustrations and lost himself in self-pity and anger. His second marriage fell apart, and his doctor warned him that if he didn’t stop drinking, he would die. He sobered up, but he was out of work for a year and a half. On the most basic level, AIDS work has given deShazo a second chance at his career. But it has clearly come to mean more than that. This job has offered him a redemptive opportunity to be the champion of the disenfranchised that he always imagined he would become. But it is also a dangerous position that toys with his sanity.

EVERY SPRING, SARA and Rebecca Jackson’s high school holds a blood drive. It’s always been a popular event with the students. Giving a pint of blood helps the sick, and it’s an easy excuse to get out of afternoon classes. At least that’s how 16-year-old Sara and her 14-year-old sister, Rebecca, felt one afternoon when they volunteered to have their blood drawn.

Sara was the more rebellious of the two sisters. Always using her quick wit to get her way with her mother, she had declared her independence by marrying her boyfriend and moving out of the house. As soon as she graduated she planned to join the army so she could earn enough money to pay for college and become a lawyer. Rebecca, the baby of the family, was more sensitive and even as a youngster wanted to become a nurse. Their father—who had been in and out of prison for drug offenses when the girls were young—worked as a logger and was making enough money to allow their mom to stay home with Rebecca. On a warm Wednesday afternoon about two months after the blood drive, Sara came home for a visit and greeted her mother, who absently handed her a plain white envelope from the county health department. Simple and straightforward, the letter thanked her for her donation but said that her blood was contaminated with HIV. Sara was stunned. She didn’t know anything about the disease except that it was deadly.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print