Jamarcus Williams, 3, laughs as sister LaShandra applies lotion to his back. (The Vicksburg Post/PAT SHANNAHAN)

[02/19/01] LaShanda Williams did not expect Warren Central’s season to end like it did. The Lady Vikes were upset by Gentry in the first round of the Division 3-5A tournament on Tuesday.

But it’s not the worst feeling Williams has had to overcome.

On game day, Williams learned that her stepfather had to be rushed to the hospital after suffering what was believed to be a heart attack.

Her play was affected.

“I didn’t say a word on the way up there,” said Williams, a bright-eyed junior. “I was trying to concentrate on the game, but kept thinking about him.”

By now, she is accustomed to worrying about her family. She wasn’t there when her stepfather had his heart attack, but she was their when her younger brother Jamarcus had the fight for his life.

Since that day, Williams looks at her life and her basketball playing very differently.

“He changed me,” Williams said of Jamarcus, her adopted brother who bears a striking resemblance to her and is nicknamed her shadow. “I look at him now, still, and want to cry. I can’t be mean to him.”

Especially not when she and Jamarcus go through what’s now become a daily ritual.

Taking off his shirt, he sits and waits for LaShanda always LaShanda to lather his scarred, peeling back with cocoa butter.

It has become a routine for the pint-sized bundle of energy. But for a long time, it was far from routine, for both of them.

Each time the soothing ointment is applied, each is reminded of the horror they faced six months ago …

Jamarcus was horsing around, not unlike any other 4-year-old, with LaShanda, and her teammates, Wanda Calvin and Lamika Miller. Martha, his mother, was at work.

Jamarcus ran into the kitchen, Calvin chasing him. LaShanda had her hands full with a pot of boiling water. In an instant, Jamarcus crashed face-first into the pot of water.

His skin bubbled over. His shirt melted to his body. His lips quivered with boils and bubbles. Tears streamed down his face.

“I didn’t even know she had the water,” Calvin said. “He ran over toward her and the next thing I knew, he hit her.”

Panicked, the three did the only thing they could think of put him in the bathtub, run the water and call 911.

He was rushed to a Vicksburg hospital, then transferred to the Mississippi Firefighters Memorial Burn Center at Greenville. He doesn’t remember the ambulance rides.

Jamarcus sustained third-degree burns on his neck, face, back, arms and stomach 25 percent of his body was covered in welts.

Doctors took skin from the front and back of his thighs for skin grafts. Doctors said he could have undergone surgery six or seven times.

“They wouldn’t let me in the surgery with him,” Martha said. “I had to sit in the waiting room.”

After several hours, Jamarcus, bandaged almost from head to toe, was still in his bed. It was the first time he had been calm in a long time.

The most painful time for the 4-year-old were the days doctors had to scrape the dead skin off his body, but he remembers little about those procedures.

He remembers more of his two adopted mothers the “smell-good nurse” and “mom number two,” he said. Most of what happened, mercifully, he does not remember.

“They put an IV in me,” said Jamarcus, begging to shoot baskets at Warren Central before a Lady Vikes’ game earlier this year.

He stayed calm not eating or talking until the day after the surgery, the day “Pee Wee” (LaShanda) arrived in Greenville.

“She came in and it was like, let’s eat and talk and laugh,” said Martha, who spent three weeks at the hospital.

“They gave me cereal and chocolate milk,” Jamarcus remembered fondly.

He was healing faster than expected, but for the others, the guilt and pain festered.

Is it my fault?

As the point guard for WC, LaShanda fights through traps and presses on a regular basis, but fighting through the feeling eating her up inside was tougher than any defense.

Jamarcus is her shadow, even though the two are not brother and sister biologically. He was born to a cousin who was planning to give him up for adoption. But Martha stepped in and adopted the baby into her family, which had three children already.

From day one, LaShanda and Jamarcus have been inseparable. He hangs on her hip, and sometimes plays team manager, folding warmup suits at the end of the bench. He’s always playing cheerleader.

School had just started when the accident happened. It took a while for LaShanda to realize it was an accident.

“At first, I was blaming myself, saying it was all my fault,” LaShanda said. “I had a lot of flashbacks. A lot of thoughts about how I could have prevented it from happening.”

At the time, the Lady Vikes’ softball team was playing and LaShanda was starting, but thoughts of her brother never went away.

“I was so used to seeing him around and now they said he might be up there six weeks,” LaShanda said. “He was so far away and I couldn’t go see him when I wanted to.”

With Martha in Greenville, LaShanda spent many nights with Jennifer Wilkerson, the Lady Vikes’ assistant basketball coach. It was Wilkerson who put an end to thoughts of guilt LaShanda was feeling.

Calvin also took a lot of the blame.

“I had to look over the situation and realize that it was an accident,” Calvin said. “It was something that if it was meant to happen, it was gonna happen. I realized it wasn’t my fault.”