In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle

by Madeleine Blais

  Jamila’s father got a job teaching in the master of fine arts program at U Mass in 1986; he joined other black intellectuals and writers and musicians at the university, including Julius Lester, James Baldwin, and Max Roach.

  Jamila became mysterious and legendary almost upon her arrival in Amherst, instantly known in the town’s basketball circles as the only girl on the fifth- and sixth-grade traveling team. Diane Stanton has a son the same age as Jamila: Chris, who would go on to become the captain of the boys’ team during their senior year. Diane remembers asking Jamila’s oldest brother how she got to be so good.

  “When she was little,” he told her, “we let her play with us whenever she wanted, but we didn’t give her any breaks.”

  Jamila tells people she started playing basketball the minute she was born. When she was a toddler, she watched the game being played incessantly. She finally felt like a real player when she was six or seven: “The first time I made an overhead shot as opposed to shoveling it under.”

  When she tried out for the varsity team in the seventh grade, there was no question about her making it.

  “Jamila wasn’t trying out. I was,” says Coach Moyer. “Judy wanted to make sure her daughter was being coached by someone she approved of.”

  Two high school seniors on the team took Coach Moyer aside after seeing Jamila in action.

  “You’re going to keep her, right?”

  “Who?” he asked.

  “The little one. She’s unbelievable. We want her on our team.”

  Tennis almost won Jamila over. During her one season as a varsity tennis player, she was Western Massachusetts champion.

  In a 1993 cover story entitled “Queen of the Court” in Hampshire Life, a magazine pull-out section of the local Daily Hampshire Gazette, her former tennis coach Geoff McDonald (now the women’s coach at Duke University) said, “She was one of the best athletes I’ve ever seen: she got stuff so fast it was frightening. She had the ability to come out of concentration, perfectly mimic what I showed her, and get right back into concentrating.” Even in her friendships with the other Hurricanes, when she was out of town for an extended time and seemed to forget about them, her teammates sensed it had less to do with forgetting about them than with her unique ability to “be in the now, to live in the moment.”

  In the eleventh grade, she was the javelin champ in her league and also the Western Mass one-hundred-yard-dash champ.

  If Jamila ended up taking on her father’s game, she did so with her mother’s wiry build and some measure of her intensity.

  Jamila hoped to study law and African-American studies in college. Her mother was in her second year at Western New England Law School, and they joked about starting a firm called Wideman and Wideman. As a child of mixed races, Jamila was often asked by interviewers whether she identified more with being white or with being black. She answered that she identified most with being herself. Still, her bedroom featured pictures of Winnie Mandela, Jesse Jackson, and the children of Soweto. After the riot in Los Angeles, she wrote several poems, including this excerpt from “Black”:

  I walk the tightrope between the fires

  Does anyone know where I fall through?

  Their forked daggers of rage reflect my eye

  Their physical destruction passes me by

  Why does the fire call me?

  Jamila’s mother, with her long dark hair and glasses, a video camera hoisted on her small shoulders, was a fixture at all the games. She underwrote the purchase of new uniforms until the school and team’s fund-raising efforts could afford to reimburse her; these were uniforms, chosen by Jen and Jamila, from a collegiate catalog. They liked the Stanford style, with its long wide legs, in large sizes. “Mr. Moyer,” Jamila wrote in a note, “As Jen and I (Jamila) paused to observe a catalog we were struck by the beauty and elegance and class of the Stanford uniform example. Except those wretched socks. The rest we will take.” “Yes,” said Jen, “we want loose and big. Nothing tight. We want to be able to exhale. Inhale, too.”

  It was Judy Wideman who almost always prepared the pre­game carbo-loading feast for the Hurricanes. After experimenting with several recipes, she settled on chicken sautéed in oil with garlic and lemon juice, served on pasta. John Wideman sometimes gave the play-by-play for the local cable network, and he always tried to work the many demands on his schedule as a lecturer and reader around his daughter’s season. At the games his voice, with its distinctive blend of the street and the academy, could often be heard booming above all the others: “Go to the hole! D! Don’t forget D! Oh, oh. Here comes the Brute,” referring to Lauren Demski. It seemed to please him that in the sporting circles in which his daughter excelled, his work as a writer and the precise meaning of his awards were not always understood; he was once referred to as “Jamila’s dad, winner of the prestigious Ken Faulkner award.”

  Jamila had a reputation for being treated protectively by her parents, and there was a myth that Jamila’s parents did not allow her to ride in cars driven by people under twenty-five years old. At home she ate healthy food; at school she sometimes indulged her hankering for candy, and when during her junior year she made her thousandth point, she was honored by her friends with a thousand M&M’s. Her favorite meal was breakfast; when she and her friends went out in a group, she tried to orchestrate their selections so the morning meal would be Chinese style—a pancake, a waffle, a piece of French toast for everyone, plus eggs and regular toast and juice.

  One of Jamila’s signature expressions was “Knock on wood.” She carried a purple nylon fanny pack to all her games stuffed with mementos and amulets. She had a medallion that displayed a map of Africa in the colors of the ANC flag (black, green, and gold) and a miniature African mask, both from her mother. She had a blank book autographed by Nelson Mandela and Winnie Mandela and Desmond Tutu, given to her father on the day Mandela was released. She had Kenny Anderson’s autograph; he was, like her, a left-handed point guard—he had played for Georgia Tech before joining the Nets. She had a necklace from one of her brothers—a peach pit carved so that it looked like two monkeys, a mother and a baby. She had an old silver spoon (she doesn’t remember who gave it to her or why), as well as some lucky dice, a picture of Michael Jordan, and a page of quotes from him, including the one that most perfectly describes what it is to be a gifted individual on a team. “Basically, Jordan says the formula of success is learning how to balance being selfish in order to reach a certain level with being part of a team.”

  All of her teammates described Jamila as someone who leads by example. She often preferred to express herself outside language, in her actions as the Hurricanes’ point guard. Her uncanny ability to know the narrative of a play, the plots and subplots, well before almost everyone else on the floor did, had attracted the attention of the local press when she was still in junior high.

  Coach Moyer has a habit of referring to his strongest players as “leaders,” but outsiders often called Jamila the “star” of the team, unaware that something about that word star made everyone on the Hurricanes, including Jamila, flinch. It was ignorant, or, as the teenagers like to say, clueless, annoying in the same way as people who persist in pronouncing the silent h in Amherst. For the same reason, periodic efforts to attach nicknames to her, by those who did not know better, never really took. Jamila was Jamila. It was that pure.

  Jen Pariseau was known locally as the best thing that ever happened to Pelham, which to most people was nothing but a twinge of highway on Route 9; the sign that says ENTERING PELHAM is followed up so quickly by the one that says ENTERING BELCHERTOWN that Pelham appears to be not so much a real place as geographic sleight of hand. Now you see it, now you don’t.

  Compared to Amherst, Pelham has an outlaw quality upheld by its history as the place where Daniel Shays led the local farmers in a tax rebellion in 1787. Angry because so many farmers were being turned into debtors, Sha
ys and his men, called a regiment or a mob depending on whose point of view you support, marched all the way from Pelham to Springfield, closing down a session of the state’s supreme court authorizing even more foreclosures. A riotous night followed, in placid South Hadley of all places, site of Mount Holyoke (the oldest women’s college in the nation, with its famed tradition of “gracious dining” at least once a month and pianos and chandeliers in the dorms)—a riotous night that may have involved garroting and definitely involved rum.

  There’s a small general store near Jen’s house where you can get soda and wine and doughnuts. “If you look hard, you can find something without dust on it. There are a couple of bait shops, a turkey farm, and lots of rocks with big dents supposedly caused by dinosaurs.”

  Pelham is so hilly that Jen was one of the few Hurricanes not to have some kind of hoop in her yard, no matter how rusty or weather-beaten.

  “Why bother? The ball would just roll downhill to Amherst.”

  To an outsider, Amherst and its neighbors in the Pioneer Valley of the Holyoke mountain range look like just one place, a series of small towns and cities united in geographical fate. The locals know better, know how all the little towns and small cities in the Pioneer Valley vary depending on accidents of politics and geology, luck and the lack of it, depending on who got the rich farmland and who got the river, who got the university or the prison or the mental hospital or the state school for the intellectually disabled, but most especially, on who got drowned. The drowning happened in the thirties when the citizens of Boston, worried about their water supply, decided to ensure copious quantities by creating the Quabbin Reservoir. Four towns were given notice of their eventual demise: Greenwich, Dana, Enfield, and Prescott. Houses were razed, town halls torn down, cemeteries dismantled, stone by stone. In the year preceding the flooding, humans were forbidden to live in the valley, and the land was cleared of trees and bushes and any remnants of construction. Even so, the rumor persists that if you stare long and hard enough at the waters of the Quabbin, you will see schools and steeples and sidewalks. On December 31, 1939, the final town would be covered by water from the Swift River, a roar of liquid. The town of Pelham was spared, barely. Boston would not drown it, but instead used the state’s powers of eminent domain to seize more than five thousand acres to provide the reservoir with a scenic border. As rugged and lovely as the Quabbin Reservoir is, the price was high, and for over half a century one of the deepest bonds in Western Massachusetts has been the resentment aimed at the eastern part of the state, perceived as high-handed and bullying.

  “Those people in the East, they’re different” is the usual tight-lipped code for the ongoing anger at the amputation of Pelham and the annihilation of four fine towns. But once you acknowledge a shared distrust for the eastern part of the state, the towns divide into self-standing units, filled with their own nuances and traditions.

  The people who live in Pelham take a certain cantankerous pride in being next to, but nothing like, Amherst, and when they offer the name of their hometown, there is always a silent beat before they intone that name, bell-like yet faintly belligerent: “I’m from . . . Pelham.” During her frequent visits to Pelham, Jamila found the people there to be more outgoing, looser than those in Amherst. As she once told her parents, “Everyone in Pelham is funny.”

  Jen had been raised by her father since she was two and her brother, Chris, was four. Her father was a former basketball player himself—for the nuns back at Holy Family of New Bedford. He is tall, with curly hair that reinforces the good cheer of a round face quick to smile. The hats he habitually wears hide a hairline that his loyal friend Coach Moyer says is “fading as fast as his jump shot.” Only if you really press Bob Pariseau will he admit, in an accent faintly flavored with the broad A’s of his southeastern Massachusetts upbringing, that his team was called the Blue Waves, a name that owed its inspiration to the nearby ocean. He’s more eager to tell you about his team going all the way to the finals in 1967, only to lose at Boston Garden. Every now and then Jen wore his letter jacket. Once someone asked Jen if the jacket belonged to her boyfriend: “It would be pretty illegal if it did.”

  Occasionally she tells people ahead of time that he has a stutter: “It goes away, for some strange reason, when he’s really angry or upset about something. That’s one way you can tell,” she says, letting her eyes bug out menacingly in imitation of the anger. The loyalty runs deep. When, during the recruiting process for college, a representative of one of the Ivies wouldn’t let her father finish his sentences, Jen decided to turn the school down then and there.

  Sometimes Jen teases her father, tells him there should be a statute of limitations on embarrassing childhood stories, especially the one about the day—after driving an hour that morning to drop both children at day care before getting to his work and an hour again in the evening to get everyone back home—he’d walked into the house, overwhelmed by the demands of dinner and laundry and a diaper to change.

  “Jenny,” he’d said. She’d looked up, with her small freckled face and dark cap of hair. “I can’t deal with these anymore. Use the toilet . . .”

  From then on there were no more diapers. Years later as a student at the Pelham School, when asked to fill out a report about what others did for you, she didn’t bother to hand one in.

  “But, Jenny,” her teacher had protested, “what’s up? You always hand in your schoolwork.”

  “It’s just that I do everything myself.”

  “She was,” says her father, “always very independent.”

  As a teenager she was tall (five feet, nine inches), taut, and tightly built. She joked about being flat-chested, and when during a sports physical a nurse practitioner asked if her family had a history of breast cancer, she said, “Ma’am, we don’t have a history of breasts.”

  Across the road from Jen’s house is a trail leading to a waterfall where Jen liked to sit and think what she called “fruity thoughts.” Every now and then when exploring these woods one encounters a column of bricks sticking up out of the ground unconnected to anything else. The strange druidic sight of what Jen called “random chimneys” is deeply New England; they are relics of houses in the woods lost, usually, to fire. Sometimes Jen stopped off at the Pelham graveyard, a gold mine of lore for scholars of moldering stones, engraved with jingles like

  Death is a debt to Nature due

  Which I have paid and so must you.

  The burial ground in Pelham has in it a soldier from the Revolutionary War, and it offers proof that even in death we are not all equal. Only men were allowed to be pictured in their carved likenesses with buttons, the more the better. Buttons meant wealth. During that summer before her senior year, Jen often found time to slip off and run on trails of her own making. With her trademark running style she would frequently travel down these private paths of her own invention, speeding along in a kind of glide, never faltering over the easy traps of rocks or roots.

  This was where she felt peace come dropping slow. “In the woods,” as she always says, “everyone’s a poet.”

  She started playing tennis at the age of three with a whiffle ball and a racquet. When she was six or seven, she played T-ball. She loved Little League, where at first the boys on the opposing teams would poke each other in the ribs at the sight of a girl on the mound: “Ha, ha. We’re not going to let that girl strike us out.” Soon these comments changed to “Oh, no, we gotta go against Jenny! Again!” By the time she was in the sixth grade she knew she wanted to be an athlete, but her budding career met with a rebuff that she still can’t bring herself to fully forgive. An ace shortstop and the only girl on a Little League team called the Red Sox, she was passed over when it came time to name the all-star team. “I’d been playing for three years. I was a pitcher, a first baseman, and a shortstop. But when it came time to pick the all-star team, I didn’t make it. I was told it was because I couldn’t bunt. It left
a bitter taste about being excluded.” She lamented the coverage of female athletes in sports magazines and papers: First, there was so little; second, what there was tended to include adjectives like lithe and winsome and gorgeous, which she thought should be outlawed in favor of more pertinent descriptions.

  “You know. Words like strong.”

  She hated the way female athletes were presented in magazine photos too. “Whenever possible,” she said, using one of her many funny accents, this time to imitate a publishing honcho giving mock directives, “they should be pictured wearing next to nothing. The poses should stress anatomy rather than skill, and ideally female athletes should be given a ton of attention only during negative times, especially when they are victims. Common examples? Like they’re stabbed by a fan or something bad happens with their boyfriend.”

  Jen and Jamila both remembered what it was like at the beginning of basketball, when Coach Moyer had trouble convincing players and their families of the seriousness of the commitment to the girls’ basketball team. In junior high they’d played varsity games when the gym would be empty of spectators except for maybe their parents and a few lost souls who had missed the late bus. Coach Moyer was always getting upset at girls who cut practice to go to their boyfriends’ games. A few years ago, during play-offs, a captain had left to go on a school-sponsored cultural exchange for three weeks in the former Soviet Union (with Moyer’s reluctant permission). Since then his standards had changed, and so had girls’ basketball. As far as he’s concerned, the current policy could not be clearer: You want cultural exchange? You can have it with Hamp.

  Even during their junior year when the stands had started to fill out in the scruffy but hopeful fashion of a tree in spring, the announcers still had trouble with both their names: “And here we have, representing the Lady Hurricanes, number eleven, Jamilia Whitman, and number twenty-two, Jen Parisio.”