Showdown in Choctaw County

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Three days later an identical letter arrived for Rebecca.

Sara and Rebecca dropped out of high school. Sara’s marriage didn’t last, and the girls’ father was soon back in prison for drugs. Their mother has tried to care for the girls and her grandsons as best she can but has avoided asking welfare workers or AIDS agencies for help.

DESHAZO IS TALKING to Rebecca and Sara’s aunt in the kitchen. He has been at the trailer for about an hour now. He is worried that he is not going to be able to keep these girls alive without help. He wants to enlist family and neighbors who can drive Rebecca two hours to Mobile to see a specialist. That is going to be tough as long as the sisters keep their illness secret. When he comes back into the living room, he says to Sara, "I know the doctors in Waynesboro have been good to you, but it may be time for you guys to see a specialist. How do you feel about that?"

"I’ll do anything that’ll keep me healthy like I am ’cause I don’t want to leave my children like this," Sara says. But when he asks if she would consider telling her grandparents or the host of cousins and in-laws who live in the area that she’s infected with HIV, she is silent. All the MASS caseworkers have heard stories about clients getting discriminated against at their jobs, frozen out by their churches, and abandoned by their families. Occasionally, the social worker who handles the agency’s rural cases must deliver medications to clients at "secret" locations like a grocery store parking lot.

DeShazo tries to convince Sara to find the family members who will help her, but it is clear that he’s not getting anywhere. Needing a break, he offers to go down to the pharmacy in Gilbertown and pick up Rebecca’s medication. Once he’s in the car, de-Shazo looks shaken. He lights a cigarette. Like a correspondent who has spent too much time reporting from a war, he seems exhausted and frayed around the edges. At the Gilbertown pharmacy, a small one-room store, deShazo buys a pillbox, hoping to make it easier for the girls to stick to their prescription regimen. Behind the counter, a white woman with feathered brown hair tells him that she’s heard that Rebecca is in bad shape. She mentions that they have a couple other women and a man who order HIV medication as well.

AIDS CAN MOVE relatively quickly through a rural county. HIV spreads mainly through what epidemiologists call "sexual networks," social groups in which people are sleeping together. On paper they can be traced like genealogical trees. When HIV is introduced into a small town where a significant number of people belong to a single tree, there is a real risk of an epidemic. (When two girls in a rural Mississippi town were diagnosed with AIDS several years ago, the state health department found a heterosexual network of 44 people, of whom 34 were tested and seven were found to be HIV positive. When the Centers for Disease Control followed up several months later, only two of the seven were receiving medical care.)

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