Page 1 EARDLEY-PRYOR: All right, looks like we are recording. My name is Roger Eardley-Pryor. I am here with Jalyn Williams for an oral history project called “Imagining Philadelphia’s Energy Futures.” We are in Philadelphia, at the Chemical Heritage Foundation. Today is July 7, in the year 2017. Because this is the first interview, I want to take a little bit of time just to talk about this project itself and some of its goals. And then, Jalyn, you and I will start our discussion together. Does that sound good?

WILLIAMS: Sounds good.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Great. All right, so we call this project “Imagining Philadelphia’s Energy Futures,” and it uses a narrative approach that encourages deliberation, storytelling, and creativity, to imagine a future where Philadelphia uses, produces, and relies on renewable energy. We think that imagining and discussing Philadelphia’s energy futures allows city residents—people who live here, a diverse group of people across the city—to imagine and to inhabit in their minds multiple and alternative visions of the future that may result from choices that we and society are making today. Climate change will recondition our lives, our city, and our planet, and this project explores how current Philadelphians might imagine how future Philadelphians would use and produce power in one hundred years, in one hundred twenty-five years, three hundred years from now. Energy plays a powerful role in any city’s technological infrastructure and in its economic systems, but energy use and production is also inseparable from a city’s social and cultural systems, and especially its environmental relationship. So, when Philadelphians imagine renewable and distributed ways of using and producing sustainable energy in the future, they’re not just imaging new techno-economic systems. They’re also reimagining the ways that social relations and political power works in their lives and in the city. They’re reimagining the interrelationships, as well, between our local, regional, and global environments.

So here are some of the goals for Imagining Philadelphia’s Energy Futures: we want to discuss the implications of climate change for Philly and its possible futures with regard to energy; we want to really use imagination, narrative, and storytelling from diverse participants, with disparate experiences, across Philadelphia; and with them, we want to draw out a variety of visions for energy use and production, and eventually we’ll use these in a one-day workshop to examine some of the ways that those visions might conflict or converge. This project is made possible through the Climate and Urban Systems Partnership—CUSP—based out of the Page 2 Franklin Institute here in Philadelphia, and the project is conducted by a Philadelphia-based partnership between the Chemical Heritage Foundation, PennFuture, Penn Environment, the Energy Coordinating Agency, and Citizens’ Climate Lobby. All right. Thank you for letting me get that on the record there, Jalyn.

WILLIAMS: Okay.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: To get us going with your interview here, could you state your full name, and maybe spell it out for us as well?

WILLIAMS: Okay. Jalyn Noelle Williams—that’s J-A-L-Y-N; Noelle, N-O-E-L-L-E; and then Williams, W-I-L-L-I-A-M-S.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Great. Jalyn, when were you born?

WILLIAMS: January 4, 2001.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Two thousand one. So how old does that make you today?

WILLIAMS: Sixteen.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Excellent. If we were meeting over the phone—we were just calling up, and we had never met before—how would you describe yourself?

WILLIAMS: Short. I’m five-two.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: How else?

WILLIAMS: Dark-skinned?

EARDLEY-PRYOR: What about who you are?

Page 3 WILLIAMS: Right, of course. Intelligent, with time. I can get things if I have time to understand them. I’m kind of like a—there’s those three different kinds of learners—auditory, visual, and tactile—I feel like I’m kind of a tactile and visual learner. I learn by doing things and by seeing things. Hmm. I care a lot about people that I haven’t even met before. That’s why I have so many on my Instagram, I follow so many different people that I don’t even know, just because I care about what they have to say, and how they are, and stuff. I like to say that I’m like—when there’s two different sides of an argument, I can pick both sides, I can see where people come from, so I guess I’m pretty understanding, as well. I don’t know—nice seems kind of a babyish kind of word. Like, sympathetic, I guess. I don’t know. 00:05:00 Ooh, I’m a very heavy procrastinator. I don’t usually, like—if I have a project that’s due next week, I’ll start it next week, or—or so. I’ll have an idea—I’ll have good ideas, but I’ll never, like, carry them out.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Yeah, you've got to let those simmer, right?

WILLIAMS: Yes, right.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Let those marinate.

WILLIAMS: Yeah.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: I’m with you on that.

WILLIAMS: Things about me, things I like to do, as well?

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Sure.

WILLIAMS: I like to watch YouTube. I like a lot of—

EARDLEY-PRYOR: What kind of things?

WILLIAMS: There’s this show called Good Mythical Morning. In it—it’s this daily morning talk show that I love to watch. And they usually do, like, crazy challenges and they like to eat stuff—they had this series called “Will It.” And then they do, like, “Will It Macaroni and Cheese,” and then they try all different things of macaroni and cheese, and stuff like that. Or Page 4 “Will It Shoe,” or “Will It Cinnamon Roll”— whatever they do, I love watching videos like that. I also like to watch FailArmy.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: What’s that?

WILLIAMS: That’s when people are—it’s just regular, like, going about your life, and then people are recording you, and then you fail.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Hmm.

WILLIAMS: It’s like—they have fails for skiing and winter sports, and things, like—

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Oh, like when somebody totally crashes.

WILLIAMS: Yes, on a mountain, yes. I love watching that —

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Those are fun.

WILLIAMS: —as long as they don’t get hurt.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Right.

WILLIAMS: I hate watching—I saw this video of a guy—he was a gymnast, and he was on a beam, and he was running, and he was running off the beam, and he did, like, a flip off of it, and he broke his leg right in half, it snapped—oh my gosh. I hate watching that. That’s the kind of stuff that makes my stomach turn.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Yeah. Yeah.

WILLIAMS: I don’t know. What else?

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Well, you sound like a person I would love to meet, so I love that we Page 5 have the chance to do so today.

WILLIAMS: Okay.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Thank you. Tell me where you were born. Were you born in Philadelphia?

WILLIAMS: Yes.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Where were you living then?

WILLIAMS: I’m not sure what hospital, though. Penn Hospital, or something like that. Where was I living?

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Yeah.

WILLIAMS: The first house I remember growing up in was called fifty—5020, it was Walnut Street, in West Philly. It was an apartment. It was two bedrooms, and I lived there with my sister, and my mom, and my dad—my older sister.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: How much older is she?

WILLIAMS: Three years, so right now, she’s nineteen. She just turned nineteen.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Oh, cool. Are you guys close?

WILLIAMS: Kind of, sort of. We’ve had some fights, lots of fights.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: That happens, especially when you’ve got to share a house together.

WILLIAMS: Right. And we had to share a bedroom for the longest time. But not —

Page 6 EARDLEY-PRYOR: Oh.

WILLIAMS: Yeah, it was at that house. Yeah, we had to share a bedroom. But we had bunk- beds, so it was okay.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Right. Which did you get—which bunk did you get?

WILLIAMS: Bottom.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Which one did you want?

WILLIAMS: Bottom.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Excellent, excellent. How long has your family lived in Philly? If you were born and you grew up here.

WILLIAMS: We lived here all our lives.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Is that right?

WILLIAMS: Well, we kind of lived in Upper Darby, for a little bit—me, and my mom, and my sister, because my mom split from my dad when I was five or six.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Okay. Nice. So, tell me a little bit about your parents. What are their names?

WILLIAMS: My dad’s name is [. . .] Williams, and my mother’s name is [. . .] —

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Great.

WILLIAMS: —so I got my dad’s last name.

Page 7 EARDLEY-PRYOR: And do you have other—so, you mentioned a sister, do you have any younger siblings?

WILLIAMS: No, I’m the youngest. And I have an older half-sister, but she’s really just my sister. Her name is [. . .].

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Awesome. Tell me about extended family. Do you have a lot of local family?

WILLIAMS: I do have extended family, but we’re not really in contact anymore.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: You don’t see them much?

WILLIAMS: Yeah. Because we had family rifts, and stuff.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: That happens. That’s the nature of family, isn’t it?

WILLIAMS: Right.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Maybe you could share some stories from your early childhood memories? What are some—when you think about, “When I was a little girl,” what are some of the things that come to mind?

WILLIAMS: I used to play outside a lot —

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Yeah?

WILLIAMS: I remember that. We had, like—I remember one time my mom bought these Winnie the Pooh-themed—it was, like, a paddle ball and a jump rope, and my sister and I each got one—and I got the paddle ball, and she got the jump rope, because I couldn’t really jump rope. I remember I used to play with that. Then I think I broke it. So, yeah, we used to play outside, and we used to have to be able to—we had to come inside the house when the street Page 8 lights came on.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Where was that? Was that in the West Philly house?

WILLIAMS: That was all the way up until I was eleven, when we started moving.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Oh, so —

WILLIAMS: That was in the West Philly house, and we also lived in Upper Darby for a little bit, and then when we came back to Philly, that’s still the rule, yeah. So we moved a lot of places, actually. Okay, so, when I was young 00:10:00, up until I was, like, five or six, when my parents split up, we lived in 5020, at Walnut Street, and then we moved to 5549 Ludlow Street, and we lived there for a while—that was a two-bedroom house. That was when my older sister did live with us—she started living with us at this new house.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: At the one on W— Ludlow?

WILLIAMS: Five-five-forty-nine, yeah.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Yeah.

WILLIAMS: And we lived there, and we had a cat. Her name was Kiki, and then —

EARDLEY-PRYOR: What kind of cat was she? What color was she?

WILLIAMS: I don’t know. She was gray, yeah.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: What did you think of Kiki?

WILLIAMS: That wasn’t my idea—I think that was my sister’s idea. We got her to get rid of the mice that we had, and she did that—but she was mean.

Page 9 EARDLEY-PRYOR: She was?

WILLIAMS: She—like, when we used to walk past, she would be under the table and we would walk past her, and she would jump at our feet. I’m so scared of her, oh my gosh. I would—sometimes I wouldn’t even leave my room, just because I didn’t want to go downstairs and see her.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: And deal with the cat?

WILLIAMS: Yeah.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: What happened to Kiki?

WILLIAMS: We threw her out.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Yeah. Sounds like she didn’t really need to be there.

WILLIAMS: I’m sorry. But then she had kittens, before —

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Oh, for —

WILLIAMS: —before she got kicked out. She had, like, all these kittens. It was, seven of them—we gave two of them to my mom’s new boyfriend, two of them to my mom’s friend, and then we kept one, and we gave two to my aunt. Only one of them I still know about—his name was Tippy. All the rest of them are—they got thrown out of their houses.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Where did Tippy end up, that you remember meeting her?

WILLIAMS: He’s —

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Or he.

Page 10 WILLIAMS: —yeah, he’s still with my aunt, right now.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: What happened to the one that you—you all kept?

WILLIAMS: Oh, yeah. So, after we lived at 5549, we moved to 524 Woodcliff Road in Upper Darby. We could not bring Kiki with us, because my landlord did not like cats. So we left her in the house, and I felt so bad about that. Hope she got out.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: I’m sure she went on to the next phase of her own life.

WILLIAMS: Oh, that sounds terrible.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: How long were you all at the 5549 Ludlow Street? Do you remember how old you were when you moved in, and when you left?

WILLIAMS: I’m pretty sure I was seven, because I started—no, six. Because I started first grade there. I was there for first and second grade. And that’s when I attended Andrew Hamilton Public School. And I was there for two years.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: What’d you think of old Andrew Hamilton Public School?

WILLIAMS: It was—I don’t know, it was school.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Do you have memories of it?

WILLIAMS: I had these two friends—their names were [. . .] and [. . .], and I liked them, and we were cool.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Tell me about them.

WILLIAMS: Oh, I don’t remember—her name was [. . .] but then people started making fun of her name, [. . .] that’s, I don’t know —

Page 11 EARDLEY-PRYOR: Her real name was [. . .]?

WILLIAMS: Yeah.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Oh, I love it.

WILLIAMS: And then she used to say, “No, it’s [. . .]”—that’s not how you say my name, and I’m like, okay—she changed it in second grade, because she was like, no, you’re not going to keep making fun of me. I remember that. I didn’t make fun of her, but other people did. I don’t really remember much else about them. [. . .] was light-skinned, [. . .] was dark-skinned, like me.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: What kind of thing did y’all get up to? What would you like to do together?

WILLIAMS: We used to just play at recess. I don’t know, we would—whenever they used to bring balls and jump ropes from inside the school, and we would just play outside. And we’d just run around and play tag and stuff. That’s kind of what I remember.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: What kind of school was Andrew Hamilton? Like, what did it look like? Was it a big brick building, was it —

WILLIAMS: Yeah, it was big. It was brick. It was—honestly, I want to say it was K to twelve, but I don’t remember—like, that seems like a lot of people, right?

EARDLEY-PRYOR: That’s a lot, yeah.

WILLIAMS: Maybe it was K to eight. I don’t remember—all those kids looked really big to me—

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Right.

WILLIAMS: —so I’m like, oh, you must be in, like, college. I don’t know.

Page 12 EARDLEY-PRYOR: So, after a couple years there, you moved to Upper Darby—the 524 Woodcliff.

WILLIAMS: Yes, and that’s where I was in third, fourth, and fifth grade, for that time. In third grade, I went to Stonehurst Hills. It was nice. I liked it.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Yeah? Tell me about it. Why was it?

WILLIAMS: We had, like—so there was a lobby. It was much nice than the Andrew Hamilton school, because Andrew Hamilton was dirty, and it was in West Philly so there was all this trash around. Upper Darby was so much nicer—I just loved living out there. Stonehurst Hills, we had—every week, we would get a Wednesday folder of Wednesday, weekday things, or whatever. And I remember that the folder was really pretty, it had a horse on it and it was blue. Because I think our—so our mascot was a horse, or a stallion or something—yeah, Stonehurst Stallions, I guess it was. So that was—that’s something I remember. My teacher—when you’re in lower grades, K to five, you only have one teacher the whole day, and they just teach you one thing. My teacher’s name was Mr. Bell, and he was really cool. He used to wear polo shirts, and that’s why my mom used to call him Mr. Polo.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: What else about Mr. Bell? 00:15:00

WILLIAMS: I remember he used to—if we would come into class and tell him, like, “It’s my birthday today,” he would stop class and be, like, hey, it’s this kid’s birthday, he’s so cool, and he’s like—I don’t know. He would just say nice things about them, make them feel special on their birthday. I told him about my birthday, and he was like, “Oh, a New Year’s baby,” and I’m like, yeah. Because I was only born three days after New Year’s, which was kind of a disappointment to my mom, but, yeah, whatever. And that’s why my middle name’s Noelle, because Noelle means close to Christmas, or something like that —

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Oh.

WILLIAMS: —and my birthday’s ten days after Christmas, I think.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Cool. Tell me a little bit about that move to Upper Darby. You said you liked it.

Page 13 WILLIAMS: Yes, it was much nicer, it was a nicer neighborhood, and people were nicer—

EARDLEY-PRYOR: What made it nicer?

WILLIAMS: The houses looked better. They were the kind of houses that I would want to live in. West Philly, things were broken down, and kind of—I guess they weren’t really that bad, but in comparison with Upper Darby, they were less desirable. Upper Darby, there was a lot that we lived around—there was 69th Street—do you know where that is? Sixty-ninth Street Terminal—we were close to that. So we could get on the train and go wherever we wanted. There were stores we could go to, Ross, and Sears, and stuff like that. There was a lot of food stores—there was, like, Wendy’s—we had a McDonald’s. Maybe there was a Popeye’s—I don’t really remember. There was a movie theater that was really close.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Did you ever go to the theaters?

WILLIAMS: [Yes].

EARDLEY-PRYOR: What do you remember?

WILLIAMS: I remember we went to go see Megamind—me and my sister—after my dad bought us tickets. That’s kind of the only movie I remember seeing at that particular movie theater. Other times—the only times I went to the movies were with my great-aunt.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Where does she live?

WILLIAMS: She lives around Fairmount—she still lives there. I remember that all the fun stuff I used to do when I was little was, like, with her.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Like what?

WILLIAMS: She had a big house—she had a much bigger house than we did. It was four bedrooms, and it was a downstairs and an upstairs, and there was a basement where there was, like, a air hockey table, and we used to play air hockey. She had a treadmill that we could just Page 14 run on sometimes, just for fun. There were lots of, like, old toys down there, because my cousin is adopted, and she’s my Aunt Darlene’s daughter, so she used to buy her a lot of stuff to, like, make her happy and make her feel welcome. So she had a lot of toys, and we used to be able to play with, like, moon shoes—they were, like, moon— they were regular shoes—they were, like, boots that had, like, springs on the bottom, kind of, so you could walk, like, really high —

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Oh, bouncy.

WILLIAMS: Yeah, yeah, like bouncy, moon shoes, or whatever.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Fun. And this aunt, the great-aunt, what was her name?

WILLIAMS: Aunt Darlene, yeah.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Aunt Darlene.

WILLIAMS: She was cool.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Do you remember —

WILLIAMS: She’s still alive, yeah. She still lives in her house, with my grandma and my cousin.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Cool. In Fairmount. Do you get to see them much?

WILLIAMS: I did, yeah, before we stopped talking to them.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: That happens. I’m familiar with that. So you were at Stonehurst School, up in Upper Darby —

WILLIAMS: Yeah.

Page 15 EARDLEY-PRYOR: —from third —

WILLIAMS: Just third —

EARDLEY-PRYOR: —fourth, and fifth —

WILLIAMS: —just third grade.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Oh, third grade.

WILLIAMS: Fourth and fifth grade, I was still in Upper Darby, but I was at another school called Bywood Elementary, because we kind of moved houses. And—where did we live?—I think we still lived in the same house. Yeah, I’m pretty sure. Bywood, fourth and fifth grade. Nobody knew me. It was new. I had two friends named Anai and Kelly.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: How did you meet Anai and Kelly?

WILLIAMS: I think they were in my homeroom class. I guess we just, I don’t know—we just talked.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: What kind of things—yeah.

WILLIAMS: Kelly—her name was Kelly [. . .], and she was the first Asian person that I ever met and interacted with, kind of. Like I’d seen them before, but I hadn’t talked to one, I guess.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Yeah.

WILLIAMS: It wasn’t too different—she’s just a regular person. I don’t know—we used to talk about our different hair. I’d be like, “Oh, yeah, I gotta brush my hair every day. It’s, like, so nappy.” And she would come to school with, like, a little, tiny knot in her hair, and she’d be like, “Oh my gosh, this is what I have to deal with. I have to deal with it, too.” I’m like, yeah, not really. We used to go to the store together sometimes, like if we ever—we never really walked home together, because Kelly used to get a ride home, and Anai lived somewhere else. She didn’t live near where I did. But, I don’t know, I remember us going to the store at some Page 16 point together.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: What’s that memory? Share it with me.

WILLIAMS: I don’t know, I can just picture us all in a store, like in 00:20:00—I remember one time, I was walking—I had to walk up a hill to get to Bywood, sometimes, to get to school.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: What’s the Bywood?

WILLIAMS: The school I went to.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Oh, okay, that’s —

WILLIAMS: To get to school.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: —the one after Stonehurst.

WILLIAMS: Yeah. And I used to have to walk up a hill to get there. And there’s a Wawa that you pass to get up the hill, and I remember Kelly and her mom were, like, in the gas station that’s attached to it, so they were in their car, and they honked. And I was walking past, and I didn’t know it was her. I was walking past, and then she honked again. She was like, “Jalyn!” I was like, “Oh, hey, Kelly.” And she was like, “Oh, you want a ride to school?” I was like, “Yeah, sure.” So I think that’s the— no, that’s not the first time. That’s the second time I got a ride to school from somebody I knew. The first time was with these two kids that used to live near us at 5549. They were our neighbors, but we didn’t really know them. We used to see them around school, but we weren’t really close. So I don’t know why they gave us a ride, me and my sister. It was kind of weird. When we came home and told my mom, she was like, “Don’t do that again. Don’t just get in somebody’s car.”

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Did you and your sister walk to school together most days?

WILLIAMS: [Yes]. Every day, yeah. She used to have to take care of me, and I wouldn’t listen. She would get frustrated, yeah. Because my mom spent a lot of time with her boyfriend, or spent a lot of time at work.

Page 17 EARDLEY-PRYOR: When you have these memories from being a kid—we’re kind of going up through till you’re about ten years old, fifth grade’s around —

WILLIAMS: Yes.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: —ten, right? Ten, eleven. You’ve talked about some of your friends, and some of the things you all were up to. What were some of the games that you remember playing? Either, like, in recess, or I don’t know if you ever went to each other’s houses, or you met up in a park somewhere.

WILLIAMS: I never went to a friend of mine’s house until fifth grade, with my friend Anai, and she invited me to her house—

EARDLEY-PRYOR: What was that like?

WILLIAMS: —after school ended. On the last day of school, she was like, “Oh, you want to come to my house next week?” I’m like, sure. And so I went—I don’t know, it was different, being in somebody else’s house—like, you know, it’s always like—when you walk in somebody else’s house, you’re like, Oh, it smells weird. But in your house, it smells great. So it smelled kind of weird in her house, but I guess that’s just because it wasn’t my house. And I remember her mom —

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Do you remember what it smelled like?

WILLIAMS: No. It was, like, different.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Did it make you feel weird to be in it, or was it just like, “Oh, this is cool—it’s just different?”

WILLIAMS: It did seem kind of weird. I don’t know, it smelled like—like cultural spices, or something like that. I don’t know, something different. Her name was Anai, so I don’t know if, maybe—I think she was—I think she was Egyptian. I don’t know.

Page 18 EARDLEY-PRYOR: Okay.

WILLIAMS: I really don’t know. But I remember I used to talk to her, and she would be like, “Oh, I’m going to”—some other country, I’m not sure where. And she’d be like, “Oh, I’m going to trade my American dollars for their dollars”—or whatever, their currency. And she was like, “Oh yeah, one dollar equals, like, ten dollars there.” I’m like, “Oh, you’d better ask your mom to bring seven dollars,” and she’s like, “No, I’m going to ask my mom to bring me twenty.” So, I don’t know. I remember that conversation. That was pretty cool, learning about how money can change in different place, and—I think that’s called fluctuation, something like that . . . inflation. But, anyways, we were at her house, and I remember her mom said, like, “Oh, do you want to eat fried fish or macaroni?” And I was like, “I want both—why not?” And then I ended up not eating any of them. Like, I ate some, but I didn’t finish them, and Anai was like, “Why did you even ask for it if you weren’t going to eat them?” I was like, “Uh, I don’t know.” And then we were at her house, and we were playing in her room, and I think we were playing on her DS. She had, like, a —

EARDLEY-PRYOR: On her what?

WILLIAMS: Her DSi.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: What is that?

WILLIAMS: That’s a game. It’s like—DS, I think, stands for “double screen.” So DSi is a double screen with a camera. It’s, like—I have one, if you want to see it.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Yeah.

WILLIAMS: That’s a—umbrella. This is a 3DS, so you can see stuff in 3D. Okay, that’s the wrong pocket—you can see stuff in 3D with this. It’s a Nintendo game.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Oh, so it’s, like, a pocket Nintendo, with —

WILLIAMS: Yeah.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: —with two screens.

Page 19 WILLIAMS: One screen on top, one screen on the bottom. Opens up. There’s, like, games you can put in it. There’s a game I have right now, which is called Mario and Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story. I love this game. I’ve almost done it, except there’s this one part that I can’t get past. There’s a part with a stylus. There’s the circle pad, and the D-pad, and the A B X Y buttons, and you can go to all of these different applications, you can see stuff in 3D.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Whoa.

WILLIAMS: I don’t know, can you see that?

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Yeah, I can. It looks pretty amazing. So it just folds out. It’s a—like a flip-phone gaming device kind of thing.

WILLIAMS: Yeah. Clamshell design is what they call it, yeah.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Oh cool. So —

WILLIAMS: She had one of these, and we used to play on it in her room.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Had you played on one of those before?

WILLIAMS: Before I went to her house? 00:25:00

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Yeah.

WILLIAMS: Yeah, I think my oldest sister had one. It was just a regular DS, though.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Yeah. So, video games, some of the things you like to play.

WILLIAMS: Yes. I remember —

Page 20 EARDLEY-PRYOR: What kind of games were you into, or are you into now?

WILLIAMS: Mario games.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Mario.

WILLIAMS: Any kind of Mario games. Yeah, like New Super Mario—that’s one of the Mario lines that they have. And then they have the Mario and Luigi games, and then they have the Paper Mario games. Paper Mario’s my favorite.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: What is Paper Mario?

WILLIAMS: That’s Mario with the characteristics of paper—like, he can turn into a paper airplane, or he can go through very small spaces by turning himself a different way. He can turn into a paper boat, or turn into a tube. It’s so cool.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: How did you get into Mario games?

WILLIAMS: I grew up around them. We had a GameCube—my sister had a GameCube, and she used to play Super Mario Sunshine. And I remember she said something about how she had gotten, like, really far in the game, and then I spilled , milk on the GameCube, and then it was broken. I don’t remember that, but I’m pretty sure I did it. I used to do stuff like that. It probably wasn’t on purpose, though.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Of course not.

WILLIAMS: So, after the GameCube, I think we had a PlayStation 2. I remember we used to play—we had Need for Speed. We had a Simpsons game—two Simpsons games—one called Hit and Run, and one called, like, Road Rage, or something. They’re really cool.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: So, this sounds like driving games.

WILLIAMS: Yeah, but with Simpsons elements, like, cursing, and like, “Hey, what would Page 21 you?” Or, stuff like that. It was not really appropriate, but, you know, whatever.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: And that was—those were games you and your sister played together?

WILLIAMS: [Yes]. And Mario games are Nintendo—PlayStations are from Sony, and Mario stuff is from Nintendo. So we used to play Nintendo games on our Wii that we got in, like, 2007 or 2008. That was the first game that I ever played—not, like, the first game I ever played, but first not handheld thing that I played. That’s the first thing I remember, kind of, because I don’t really remember playing on the GameCube, because I think my sister got a second one, and then was like, “You’re not touching this one. You’re not going to break it again.”

So then we had a Wii, and we had—I remember we got it when it first came out, and it was a set that came with Mario Kart, which is a Mario racing game, just with Mario characters. And there’s a Wiimote that you use to play with the TV and interact with it, and then they had a wheel attachment that you could put the Wiimote into, and you could race it like a real car, which made the game a whole lot more difficult. So we used to play, like, only, like, Oh, you have to use the wheel this time, so you can get a handicap, because I always lost.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Well, you were, what, ten? Nine or ten?

WILLIAMS: No, at this time, I was, like, six or seven.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Oh.

WILLIAMS: Yeah, because we were still at 5549—we just got the Wii in, like, 2007 or ’08. And I remember—

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Oh, right, yeah, because you were—what’d you say, you were born in 2001.

WILLIAMS: [Yes].

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Yeah. Whoa, yeah.

WILLIAMS: And my mom’s boyfriend had two sons, Jonathan and Joshua—they were twins, Page 22 and they were my age. And they used to come over and play the Wii, and they were so much better at it than we were. I would say, ranked, it would be Jonathan and Joshua are the best, and then my oldest sister, then my other old sis—my older sister, but the middle—and then me. I was the worst, probably.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Well, I mean, you’re also the youngest, and have the least experience.

WILLIAMS: Right, right, right. That’s what I blame it on.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: That’s right. That’s right. So lots of video games growing up.

WILLIAMS: Yes.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Fun.

WILLIAMS: And then I remember, in third grade, my dad bought me a DSi XL—the DSi— it’s the regular DS, with the camera, and it was just bigger, and it had, like, a better screen time or whatever.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: And that’s still the clamshell design? Kind of a pocket —

WILLIAMS: Yes.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: —a pocket game?

WILLIAMS: [Yes]. Same thing, minus the 3D, which is basically what that is—just that with 3D. And I remember I had one of those and there was this girl in my third-grade class—her name was Destiny—and she was kind of a bully. And she would—I remember I used to—we used to have cubbies at the back of the room, where we used to hang up our jackets and stuff. And sometimes my dad would give me money to spend at the Wawa that we lived near. And I would put the money in my jacket, and I would put the jacket up, and then I remember that, when we used to line up to walk out of the room—we were lined up against the cubbies, and stuff—and I’m pretty that it was her who used to steal my money every day. And I don’t know why I didn’t move my money somewhere else. I used to just put it in there—I believe in the goodness of other people. I’m going to put it in here again. And so I used to do that, and then, Page 23 one day, I decided to put my Nintendo DSi XL in there —

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Oh no.

WILLIAMS: —for some reason. Put it up, and put it in my pocket—put it on the wall, or in the cubby. Went to go sit down, did our little morning routine, or whatever. 00:30:00 Then we went to go play outside. We went outside; we came back. Then it was time to leave for school— looked in my pocket, and it wasn’t there. I was like, Oh, man. Darn it. And so I kind of knew it was her, but I didn’t go to the school and do anything, because I didn’t think they would do anything about it. So I told my sister, who was in sixth grade at the time. She was at the other school—Beverly Hills Middle School. And when she came to pick me up, so we could go home, I was like, “Somebody stole my DS, and I know who it was. It was her. It was Destiny.” She was like, “Are you sure it was her?” I was like, “Yeah, yeah, I’m sure.”

And so she went up to her, and she was like, “Did you steal her DS?” And Destiny was like, “No.” And my sister was like, “Well, if you did, there’s going to be, like, action, or something. I’m going to do something about it, so you’d better not be lying to me.” And Destiny’s like, “I’m not lying. I’m really not.” And so my sister was like, “Oh, okay, well.” She said something, something, “Do you understand?” And she was like, “Yes, I understand.” And I could tell that Destiny was scared, but she—I don’t know, she was hanging on to this lie. I’m so sure it was her.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Did you ever get it out of her?

WILLIAMS: No. So my dad bought me the new DS version—the 3DS.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Whoa.

WILLIAMS: Yup. So that one was aqua blue. Then I ended up dropping it on the ground, and the two screens broke apart, and then they were broken. So then, my mom bought me a new one in 2014. I’m skipping ahead, I don’t know—2014, I got a purple one. And then I lost that one, and all the games that came with it —

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Oh no.

WILLIAMS: —because it was in a case. It was a DS, all the games, the stylus that goes in it, and these cards that you can, like—you ha— there’s this camera feature—it’s called AR—it’s Page 24 called “augmented reality,” and so there’s a card on a table, and you point your DS at it with the camera, and then you can see through the DS that there’s a character sitting on it. It’s not in real life, obviously. It’s augmented reality. So you look at it, and there’s a character onscreen that’s doing things, and you can make it move, but if you move the card away, you couldn’t see it anymore. So it was, like, on the card, and it was pretty cool.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Sounds pre— do you still have that one?

WILLIAMS: The cards?

EARDLEY-PRYOR: No, that DS.

WILLIAMS: No. That one was the one I lost, yeah.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Wow. This is a tragic story of —

WILLIAMS: Yeah, so many games —

EARDLEY-PRYOR: —these gaming devices.

WILLIAMS: And then I got another 3DS, and that’s this one that I have right now.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: And that one you will protect and take care with all of your love —

WILLIAMS: Yes. Yes, because I recently bought that, and —

EARDLEY-PRYOR: You bought that one?

WILLIAMS: No, my mom paid for it.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Yeah.

Page 25 WILLIAMS: But, just recently, I went on Amazon, and I ordered a bunch of more games. All the games that I lost, I’m replacing them now.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Nice. Were those all—

WILLIAMS: I’m not going to lose them.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: —were those mostly Mario games?

WILLIAMS: Yes. There was Paper Mario Sticker Star, which is a Paper Mario version of that game again. And the way that you battle—instead of using actual hammers and jumping, which is what he usually does, you use stickers, to command those actions. Like, it’s still jumping, but it’s, like, a sticker that—I don’t know. I can’t really explain it.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: When you’re playing with these video games, where are you usually doing it? Because you can be anywhere with the DS?

WILLIAMS: I really—yup. But I have to —

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Where do you like to be?

WILLIAMS: Right now, when I play, I like to just be in my room, I guess.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Yeah.

WILLIAMS: But you can play it anywhere. You just have to be mindful of people who want to steal from you, like Destiny did. So I usually don’t play it outdoors. If I’m walking down the street, I won’t have it in my hands. But it is convenient to play it sometimes, when I’m on the train, and I’m waiting or whatever, I’ll play it then. But yeah, I usually like to be in my room, or downstairs in my house —

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Do you take —

Page 26 WILLIAMS: —where the air conditioning is.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: The air conditioning’s downstairs.

WILLIAMS: Because we only have one air conditioner, and it just pumps the air downstairs. So I usually like to sit down there in summertime.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: That’s a good place to be.

WILLIAMS: [Yes].

EARDLEY-PRYOR: These things are plug into the wall?

WILLIAMS: The games?

EARDLEY-PRYOR: [Yes]. To charge them?

WILLIAMS: Yeah.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Yeah. So they run on electricity.

WILLIAMS: [Yes].

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Cool.

WILLIAMS: So I usually charge them while I sleep.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Can you bring extra batteries with it?

WILLIAMS: No.

Page 27 EARDLEY-PRYOR: Or you just play —

WILLIAMS: You need to charge it.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: —until it goes out and then you just plug it in again.

WILLIAMS: Yeah, you’re not—you’re actually not supposed to open it up. They’re like, Oh, don’t tamper with the inside or whatever. I’m like, Okay. I never really felt I should do that, so.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: You also mentioned taking the train, and being close to the train, at the place—

WILLIAMS: Yes.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: —at Upper Darby. Sounds like you take the train a lot to get around?

WILLIAMS: Yes. That’s public transportation—I use that all my life. I don’t remember—no, I think my dad had a car when I was very young. But I don’t remember it. Like, I’ve seen pictures of it, but I don’t remember it personally. In, like, 2007 or 2008, my mom bought an Escalade, a big 00:35:00— maybe it wasn’t an Escalade. It was some kind of, like, big black truck. I’m trying to remember what it was. Maybe it was an Escalade—it was a Chevrolet something, and it was a big truck. And I remember we had it in—she used to drive my sisters to school in it— Stonehurst Hills, I lived literally—like, I can look from my house and see the school right there. Like, it was so very close, there was my house, then, like, two other houses, and then the parking lot for Stonehurst Hills. So I could literally just walk out my house and be at school.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: That’s nice.

WILLIAMS: It was very cool.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: But then, Bywood, you had to walk up a hill.

Page 28 WILLIAMS: Yes. And that’s why, at Stonehurst, sometimes I was like—believe it or not, sometimes I was late, because I used to overestimate how much time I needed to get there. So I would, like, watch TV in the morning, and it would be 8:40 [a.m.], and I had to be there at 8:25 [a.m.], and I’d be like —

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Oh no.

WILLIAMS: Because I used to be in the house by myself in the mornings, because my mom would drive my sister and my other sister to school, so she wouldn’t be there in the mornings, sometimes.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: What happened to that car?

WILLIAMS: We had to sell it. [. . .] So, yeah, we didn’t have that car for too long. It was a year or so that we had it.

[. . .] At this time, my older sister went to go live with my grandma, because she got pregnant at, seventeen—no, she wasn’t even seventeen yet. That was later on. But she wasn’t living with us at the time, so it was just me and my sister, and we—I don’t know, I just thought that we were going to have to live with my dad, which wouldn’t have been the worst thing ever, but—undesirable. I would rather live with my mom than my dad.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Where did you—so you were still living in Upper Darby then—where did your dad live?

WILLIAMS: My dad lives in West Philly. He’s lived there since I’ve been born as far as I know.

[. . .]

EARDLEY-PRYOR: When did you all leave Upper Darby, and where did you go to?

WILLIAMS: Upper Darby. We left after fifth—no, no. No, okay. This is a long story. So, probably in the middle of my fourth grade year, which was probably 2010, I think—I don’t know—we moved out of that house, and my sister and I went to go live with my dad for a little while. [. . .] So we were with my dad, and he was living with his girlfriend named Sonya, and she had three kids. The youngest was my sister’s age, so the girls were older than me. So I was the youngest, when we were living with them.

Page 29 EARDLEY-PRYOR: What was that like?

WILLIAMS: My dad used to get into fights with Sonya, so her kids defended her, whatever, so they didn’t really like my dad, and, by default, they didn’t really like us. So, we used to get into arguments with them, but usually it was pretty chill, because my sister was, like, their age, and she could relate to them, and I would just kind of be on the side, like, “Okay, you handle that.” Yeah.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: What was going on at school life around then? So, that was like junior high time?

WILLIAMS: Yeah. When we lived with my dad, for that period of time, he lived in Chester. Sonya and him lived in Chester. So we had to commute from Chester to Upper Darby every day, and so we used to have to wake up at five o’clock in the morning, to go all the way to Upper Darby. 00:40:00 We used to have to take two buses and a trolley to get there. It was so exhausting. It was terrible.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: So, a lot of public transit to get all the way back up there for school.

WILLIAMS: Yes, yes. And so we didn’t really do after-school programs, because we had to get home. It takes two hours to get there.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Did it really? And to home, too. That’s a long commute. Very long commute.

WILLIAMS: And we lived with my dad for probably—I don’t remember at all—because I think we lived with him for two periods of time. We lived with him, and then we lived with my mom, and then we lived with him. I really don’t remember. It was—we lived with him for a while. Then we lived with my mom and her boyfriend, and then we moved to live with my mom’s friend, the one who got the two cats that she threw out. Her name was Sandy, and Sandy had a lot of kids. She had, like, seven.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Was that also up in Upper Darby?

Page 30 WILLIAMS: No. She lived in West Philly. So we went from living with my mom—Upper Darby—to living with my dad in Chester, to living with my mom and my mom’s boyfriend in West Philly, and then we went to live with my mom’s friend in West Philly. And we used to live in her house with all her children and her husband.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: What’s your memory of being in that scene?

WILLIAMS: We lived in the basement of their house, where they had a room in the back and then this open space that was open to—if you came downstairs, you could see into that area. My mom lived in that area, because there was a pull-out couch, and she lived in there. And then there was—the room in the back had a bed in it, and me and my sister used to share the bed, and we lived in that room. But there was a TV in there, and that was when I first started watching Avatar: The Last Airbender, which is, like—have you heard of that?

EARDLEY-PRYOR: I have. Tell me about what you like about it.

WILLIAMS: I love that show. Avatar: The Last Airbender, there’s this guy, or this person, who is the avatar, and they can master all four elements—they can master air, water, earth, and fire, and they can, like, bend those elements—it’s like telekinesis, kind of. They can move the air with their hands, and—by thinking about it—and they could move water, and they can create fire from their fingertips, and they can move the earth.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: So they can control nature with their mind, or with their powers.

WILLIAMS: Yeah, with their, like, arms or whatever. I don’t know. And so the avatar can master all four elements, and there’re also other people who can just bend water, and just bend air, and just bend fire, and just bend earth. And they live in all these different places. So the avatar reincarnates. So once the old avatar dies, a new one is born, and they bring balance to the world. And they’re the bridge between the regular world and the spirit world. It’s very cool. But then everything—the theme song for Avatar: The Last Airbender starts out—I love it, because I actually remember the words. Okay, it’s like: “A long time ago, the four nations lived together in harmony. Then everything changed when the fire nation attacked. Only the avatar, master of all four elements, could stop them. But when the world needed him most, he vanished.” So—the world was going on, like it was perfect. It was great. And then the fire nation was like, “We need some more power—we can’t keep doing this. We’re the strongest benders, and we can do whatever we want.” So the first thing they did was, when the old avatar died—no—oh my gosh, it’s a long story.

When the old avatar died—every time the avatar is reincarnated, he’s reincarnated into a Page 31 new nation. So it goes fire nation, air nation, water nation, earth nation, and then it starts over. So the old avatar was fire nation. So they knew the new avatar was going to be in the air nation, so we need to go get them. So the fire nation went and they killed all the air benders— everybody. Everybody died. So they killed all of them. But the avatar—the day before the raid of the fire nation, he decided, “Look, dude”—he was, like, twelve years old. And the air nation knew. They were like, “Man, the fire nation is going to come and get us, so we need to get this avatar started with his, like, training around the world, or whatever.” Because they start out in their element, and then they have to travel around the world to master all four elements. So the air nation was like, “All right, avatar, you got all this responsibility. You gotta learn. You gotta do this, before you’re even ready.” Because they usually let the avatar know that they’re the avatar at sixteen. Like, he knew at twelve, so he had a lot on his shoulders at a very young age. So—

EARDLEY-PRYOR: All this is in the theme song?

WILLIAMS: Kind of. Kind of.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Or is this part of the story, like, when they start the show —

WILLIAMS: Yeah, yeah. It’s kind of in the story. It’s touched on, and they touch on it more in the episodes. So the avatar—he was like, “I can’t deal with this. I can’t.” So he had this—this animal. It’s called a flying bison—that’s one of their nation animals. 00:45:00 So he took that, and he went on this trip, and he was like, “I’m out of here. I gotta go. I can’t be the avatar. Sorry.” So he left the day before the fire nation raid. He had to go. So he was on his bison, and then there was this big giant storm. And he got caught in it, and so did his bison, and they, like, fell into the water. But then the avatar has this power called the avatar state, where if they’re not conscious of their body, they can have the power of all the previous avatars. So he had the power of all these other avatars that were protecting him while he was almost about to die. So they protected him by—he was in the water, and he used his—he wasn’t conscious of this, but he used his air bending skills to move the water and the air around him, so that he was in this big thing of ice, him and his bison.

So they were encased in suspended animation. So he didn’t age. He didn’t die. He was just in it, and he was under the water for a very long time, for a hundred years. The fire nation kept on looking for the avatar, because they knew they didn’t kill him, and they were like, “We’re going to keep looking for this dude.” So the fire nation went on. There’s all these kings. And this king is looking for him. Then his son’s looking for him. His son’s looking for him, then there’s this guy, Prince Zuko. And his father—the only way that Prince Zuko’s father’s going to love him, is if he finds the avatar. So Prince Zuko goes on this journey to find the avatar. To make a long story short, the avatar is found. He defeats the fire nation. The world is harmonious again. And then the new series is called The Legend of Korra, and she’s the next Page 32 avatar.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: I like that it’s a woman.

WILLIAMS: Yeah.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Do you still watch the show?

WILLIAMS: It’s over now.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Oh, is it?

WILLIAMS: [Yes]. There was four seasons. I watched them all, yeah. Actually, the first two seasons were on TV, but then the last two were only online, because, in season four, Korra ended up with this girl named Asami. And so that was the first bisexual relationship on Nicktoons, I think—or on television at all. So they had to take it off the air, because they were like, “Oh, we don’t want any controversy.” But that was the first bisexual animated character that I’ve ever seen. It was very cool.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: That is pretty cool. Wow, how progressive.

WILLIAMS: [Yes].

EARDLEY-PRYOR: When you were watching the show, what was it that drew you in?

WILLIAMS: Thinking that I could do it. I’m like, man, I could be the avatar. Like, I could—I could do all this. So I used to imagine, like, if I had water on my hands, or something, I’d, like, swing my arm up and I’d be like, “Yeah, I’m a water bender now.” So it was—I don’t know, like, it made you think you can do it do. It had a lot of, like, strong messages. In order for the avatar to learn all four elements, he had to get, like, a bending teacher. So one of his teachers was an earth-bending girl, and she was, like—she was his age. She was, like, eleven. And she was blind, but she was, like, the best air—earth bender that there was. She used to learn— instead of sight, she could use her earth—earth bending to see, like, through the ground. She could use her feet to see what was around. It was so cool. So she was one of the strong female roles. So I remember watching her—idealizing her. She was great.

Page 33 EARDLEY-PRYOR: Who are some of the female teachers that you had in your life that you looked up to?

WILLIAMS: Teachers?

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Or mentors, or just older adults that you thought, like—kind of like the way that she was helping teach the—the avatar.

WILLIAMS: Hm. I don’t know—there were other females in the show. Her name was—he person who taught him water bending, her name was Katara. She was strong. People in my life—I had teachers before that were women that were cool. Miss Pemberton—she was my teacher in sixth grade. She taught reading and social studies. She used to motivate me to do better, because she could tell that I had—I don’t know, like, a gift or something. Not really. I’m just kind of smart—I don’t know. And she used to get me to do extra book reports and stuff, and report to the class and stuff, just for me to meet my full potential. Then, in seventh grade, I had an environmental science class, that my first —

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Seventh grade?

WILLIAMS: [Yes]

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Where was that—was that still at Bywood, or are you at a different school by that point?

WILLIAMS: At this point—after we lived with my mom’s friend, we moved in with my mom’s boyfriend, again. But then, after that, we went to go live with my granddad, which is where I’m living now. So that was from sixth grade to now. And I’m about to go into eleventh grade.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Oh, okay. Is that all the same school?

WILLIAMS: No. We—

Page 34 EARDLEY-PRYOR: But all living with your grandfather.

WILLIAMS: Yes.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: That’s your mom’s dad?

WILLIAMS: Yes.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Cool.

WILLIAMS: So after I went to Bywood for fourth and fifth grade, then it was sixth grade, and I went to Joseph Pennell Elementary School, which is actually a K to six school, which is not something I’d seen before. 00:50:00 I thought all sixth and seventh and eighth were together, in different schools, but—I was actually part of the last sixth grade class. They were— they’re not having any more sixth grade classes after mine. So now it’s just K to five.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Is that where you had Miss Pemberton?

WILLIAMS: Yes. She was very cool. Then—

EARDLEY-PRYOR: What kind of stuff would she assign you to read that you remember reading and liking?

WILLIAMS: I remember we read this book called The Skin I’m In, and it was about—I don’t really remember. It was this girl who used to get bullied for her dark skin, and she—I don’t know. I don’t really remember if she ever got over that. It was a book with not a lot of plot, but a lot of character development, like she learned to love herself, or something, maybe, at the end.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: That’s important.

WILLIAMS: Yes. So she made me do a report on—she was poor as well, something like that. So she made me do a report on, like, poor people that live in our world, or something like that. It was deeper research into things that we had researched in class, but—things like that.

Page 35 EARDLEY-PRYOR: She sounds like an awesome teacher.

WILLIAMS: [Yes]. She was very cool. I went to go see her on the first day of seventh grade, and then I never saw her again, because I never went back.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Oh.

WILLIAMS: I actually only live up the—Joseph Pennell’s only up the hill from my house. So I could go see her, I guess.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: You know, I bet you she would love to see you. She would —

WILLIAMS: Maybe, yeah.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: —love to see you, I bet. So seventh and eighth grade, then.

WILLIAMS: Seventh grade and eighth, yeah, I went to Wagner Middle School.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Oh, okay.

WILLIAMS: Seventh grade, I had an environmental science class, with this teacher named Gretchen Thompson.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Environmental science in seventh grade. What kind of—

WILLIAMS: Yes, it was so great.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: —so, was that the first time you had really —

WILLIAMS: Yes.

Page 36 EARDLEY-PRYOR: —taken environmental kind of stuff?

WILLIAMS: Yup. And that was the first time I learned about green, and climate, and this is a problem, and stuff like that.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Tell me a little bit more about—I mean, hearing you talk about the air bender, and these people that can control nature and you being fascinated with this show at this time—

WILLIAMS: Yes. Yes.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: —and then, how did that shape your studies in environmental science? Like, did you see a connection between these?

WILLIAMS: Oh, man, did I?

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Or do you now?

WILLIAMS: A connection? Not—not really. I don’t know, I guess it would be cool. Like, we could use those powers, because maybe our world would be a better place. Like, earth bending, you can send up earth through the ground. You could make buildings if you’re really good at it. So maybe we could like, be like that, if those powers were true.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Baking the buildings out of earth?

WILLIAMS: Yeah. I guess the —

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Or maybe we could.

WILLIAMS: Yeah. That would be cool. I don’t know, I guess we could use our water bending skills to make a better world—I guess that would be cool. I don’t know. I don’t—I’ve never thought about that, till now—a connection to environmental science.

Page 37 EARDLEY-PRYOR: Well, what kind of things did you study there in environmental science?

WILLIAMS: In environmental science, we learned about water, and the bottled water industry, and how that’s not cool, because Pepsi owns everything, and they used to move people out of their homes just to bottle this water. And they just put a different name on it. Pepsi owns six different kinds of bottled water. It’s Dasani, there’s Aquafina—and all this water really comes from the same place, I think it is. Poland Springs, and Deer Park, it’s all the same water, just with different packaging and different prices, and stuff like that. So we learned about that. We watched this documentary called Tap, which described all of that. I remember that. We talked about carbon dioxide, and other pollutants. So it’s carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide—all the things that—greenhouse gasses, that’s what they’re called—and how they affect the environment. And the ozone layer—we learned about that. I don’t know if that’s a myth or not.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: No, it’s a real thing.

WILLIAMS: Yeah. And aerosol is kind of the thing that’s ruining that?

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Yeah. Yeah, that’s right. Aerosol, CFCs—the chlorofluoronated carbons, and—yeah, they make a hole up in there.

WILLIAMS: [Yes].

EARDLEY-PRYOR: And we need that ozone layer to help keep us protected from the UV rays—the radiation. It’s exactly right.

WILLIAMS: One of the things that Miss Thompson did at Wagner was—we used to get lunch in little packages—it would be like, if we had chicken nuggets and tater tots that day, it would be chicken nuggets and tater tots in a little box, or whatever. And there were little milks and stuff. And all the extra food that was left over just got thrown out. So Miss Thompson—she started up a program where she would take all of the old food—and she would get students to help her—she would take all the old food and donate it. Not old food—it wasn’t old. It was just not eaten.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: It’s not used, yeah.

Page 38 WILLIAMS: Yeah. It was the same day. Like, she would sort it all out, so there would be milks over here, juices—all the stuff from breakfast and lunch. She would 00:55:00 sort it out and give it to—she would donate it to different organizations and stuff. Like, organizations for women and children, and stuff like that. It was so cool, now that I think about it, like that’s—

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Did you ever help her with any of that?

WILLIAMS: Yes. I helped her in seventh grade. Then, in seventh grade, she told me that she was moving to Seattle. So she wanted me to oversee the lunch program—or the donating program thing.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Wow.

WILLIAMS: So I did that in eighth grade.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: You ran that program?

WILLIAMS: Yeah.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: That’s fantastic.

WILLIAMS: [Yes]. But she was kind of like helping me from Seattle. She used to call me, “Oh, the people are here now, and you need to go see them.” Like, okay, I gotcha. So me and a bunch of my friends—we would sort out all the food and donate it. We also had a recycling club—it wasn’t, like, a club. It was just those same friends. We would recycle, and we would go around to every classroom, and we would sort the recycling from the trash. It was pretty— people would say it was nasty, but I’m like—I mean, we didn’t use gloves or anything. People wanted to use gloves, and I would let them use gloves, but I wouldn’t, because, you know, we have skin, which is a layer already that’s protecting our insides. We don’t need the—I don’t know. Because we also—like, just your hands afterwards. It’s not that serious.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Right.

Page 39 WILLIAMS: I don’t mind getting dirty, and stuff like that.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Who were some of these friends that you did this recycling, and this lunch—this food donation program?

WILLIAMS: This was also the year that I joined student government. So my friend, who was—her name was [. . .], and she was the president, as well as she helped me with the recycling club and lunch. [. . .] was my other friend who helped me with the recycling and lunch, and she was the secretary. The vice-president didn’t help much. I kind of—he was very lazy, and so I kind of took over his job a little bit, but I was the treasurer. But I didn’t get the title of VP, because he had it, even though he really didn’t do as much as I did, but, whatever.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Sounds like the ladies were in charge here.

WILLIAMS: Right, yeah. So I was the treasurer. The treasurer wasn’t something that you vote for. You vote for—like, the students have a student election for president, and VP, and secretary. But the treasurer is appointed by those who were voted into those roles already. So the president and the secretary voted me to be the treasurer, so that’s what I did in eighth grade.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: That’s fantastic.

WILLIAMS: So I was the treasurer as well as the environmental person to go to for stuff like that. So we used to recycle every day—because we had a prep class, so we used to have, like, reading, math, science, social studies—it was actually pretty dumb how it happened. Like, so we had four marking periods. So, first marking period, you have all the marking period science, and then you have social studies. And you have science again, then you have social studies, because we were running out of teachers or whatever. So we also had a prep class. So we would take—I remember the four prep classes that I had in eighth grade were computer science, gym—maybe we had art—and then maybe gym again? I don’t know, something like that. So during those classes, I would, like, go to my teachers, and I’d be like, “Dude, I gotta do the recycling. I gotta do the lunch. I can’t be here.” So they used to give me pretty much just automatic A’s. Like, they weren’t automatic A’s—I would like—I was doing something to benefit the school, rather than benefit myself, so they would give me grades for that.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: So, instead of taking those prep classes, you were able to go and run this program.

Page 40 WILLIAMS: Yes, which was very cool. So I used to do that, as well as be the treasurer. So I used to help with other things in student government. Eighth grade was really my year, honestly, because I won the spelling bee.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Wow.

WILLIAMS: So I came in first, and I got a seventy-five-dollar gift card.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Whoa.

WILLIAMS: Yup.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: What’d you do with that?

WILLIAMS: So we have—I knew, at the beginning of the year, that we were going on a trip—snow tubing, the whole eighth grade class. And we were going to go up to the Poconos, and we were going to snow tube all day. And I’m like, I don’t have any winter gear. I guess I’m going to have to buy some boots. And so that was before the spelling bee, and I was like, Huh, my mom’s not going to buy me some boots, because I would only use them once. So I’m going to—I guess I’m going to win the spelling bee, and I’m going to use that money to buy some boots. And I told my mom—I was like, “Yeah, I’m going on the snow tubing trip.” And she’s like, “How are you going to do that?” I’m like, “I’m going to win the spelling bee.” So I went, and I won the spelling bee.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Yes.

WILLIAMS: So, then I got the seventy-five-dollar gift card. And I think the boots were, like, forty. So then I had thirty-five left over, and I think I used that for apps.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Nice.

WILLIAMS: Like, you know how apps have, if you play a game, they’re like, Oh, if you want to buy more coins or whatever, you have to pay real money?

Page 41 EARDLEY-PRYOR: Yup, yup.

WILLIAMS: That’s what I used that for. Kind of a waste, but.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: No, it seems like you got to use it how you want, because you earned it.

WILLIAMS So, I won the spelling bee. We helped plan a bunch of dances. We have “Hop till You Drop,” I think it’s called. So it was this competition of a whole bunch of kids who wanted to sign up. You would go into the gym, and you would keep dancing, and then the 01:00:00 last person left dancing got a prize, or something. Like, the last three people.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Yeah, yeah.

WILLIAMS: I tried to participate, I got tired. I gave up after a while.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: That’s a long time to dance.

WILLIAMS: Yeah. It was, it was a while. But then they started—once people started being lazy, and they were like, “No, now you gotta do jumping jacks,” and they’re like, Oh my God. So it kept getting harder and harder.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Yeah.

WILLIAMS: So we had one person left standing. I don’t know who it was. Some boy, probably.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: When you were at Wagner—Wagner sounds like it was a pretty neat experience, and especially with Miss Thompson. Kind of—

WILLIAMS: Yup.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: —set you on a path that you just then took over on your own and ran Page 42 with.

WILLIAMS: [Yes].

EARDLEY-PRYOR: When did you have to leave Wagner? At the end of eighth grade?

WILLIAMS: Yes.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Where did you go from there?

WILLIAMS: Then I was in ninth grade, and I went to Central High School.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Is that where you go now?

WILLIAMS: Yes. So, Central High School was kind of like—I don’t know if you know.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Nope. Tell me about it.

WILLIAMS: It’s like—I don’t know. It’s, like, competing for being the best high school in Philadelphia—it’s one of the best, and then there’s Masterman, which is kind of like our—like, our competition.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Yeah.

WILLIAMS: But then, our competition in sports is Northeast, so I don’t know how that works out. In terms of magnet school, I remember that Masterman was on the same level as Central, so Central’s a pretty, I guess, difficult school to get into.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: So did you have to test into it? Or apply to get into it?

WILLIAMS: Oh, we had to apply, yes. And you had to—the requirements were, like, you had to have A’s and B’s, a motivation to go to college—you had to write an essay. So I wrote my Page 43 essay, and I sent it in.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: What did you say in your essay?

WILLIAMS: I don’t even remember. I really wish I had a copy of it. I had a copy of it I got from my teacher, and then I lost it. I don’t even know what I did with it. I’m so upset. I loved that—that essay. But it was, like, talk about—there were three things you had to talk about. It was what you can bring to the school—what you can contribute—what you would like to learn, and then something else, like, tell me about you. Like, who are you? And I remember the last sentence of the first paragraph, which was who are you, I was like, I am a future Central graduate.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: I like it.

WILLIAMS: I was like already in there—I’m like, yeah, I’m coming here. So, yeah. And I wrote about what I could contribute. I talked about the recycling club, and how I had already been a part of that. And I read that there was a recycling club at Central that I could be a part of.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Have you joined that? Not yet.

WILLIAMS: I feel bad.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Or are you not going to?

WILLIAMS: I don’t know. I might. I think I might do it next year, because they have this club called SEAS, which stands for Student Environmental Action Society, or something like that. And so, S-E—S-E-A-S. Which I was a part of for one day, in ninth grade.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: What’d you think?

WILLIAMS: In ninth grade, I was trying to get used to the school, so I was like, okay, I’m not going to join a club or a sport this year. I’m going to just kind of feel it out, see what’s going on. Tenth grade, I was just lazy—that procrastination, again—and I just didn’t do anything. I feel kind of bad. I feel like I should do something, because there’s not going to be anything in my yearbook. I’m going to be like—it’s just going to be me, and then a picture, it’s going to be like, Page 44 “Honors.”

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Honors is a pretty good thing to have in there.

WILLIAMS: Yeah.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: It takes a lot—it takes some time to get good grades. You’ve got to study.

WILLIAMS: That’s—actually, in tenth grade, which I just got out of—I just graduated—not graduated, I just got out of it —

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Finished tenth grade.

WILLIAMS: [Yes]. Third marking period, I got straight A’s, for the first time in my high school career. All through first, second, all the way up to eighth grade, I was just getting straight A’s, like it was just easy, I guess. But then Central gave me a run for my money, because in ninth grade I had to take biology, and I am not really good in science classes. I don’t know—I like environmental science, but everything else I’m just not good at. So biology was very difficult for me. I really don’t remember learning much. I just remember cramming for tests, and stuff like that. And I swear, it—we used to have—our teacher’s name was Mr. Fowler, and he used to give us little quizzes on his website that he had, and we used to take quizzes and stuff. And then before an exam, he would have a question pool, of all the questions from all the quizzes that we used to have to do, and then questions that might be on the exam. We learned very quickly, after the second test, that all the questions in the question pool were on the exam, so it was very easy to get a good grade on the exams. But here comes that procrastination again—I never did any of the question pools. I used to get seventy-eights on the test, and then I would get B’s in the class, so that was on me. I definitely could of got a better grade if I try harder, I think. That was in ninth grade.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: You learned how to crack the code, but not until—till late.

WILLIAMS: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So I ended up getting an eighty-five in that class.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: What are the classes that you like? The ones that you really enjoy? The ones you feel like—this one’s for me

Page 45 WILLIAMS: I hate math.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: You hate math?

WILLIAMS: I do not like math, oh my gosh. They said that—so, in ninth grade, 01:05:00 I had to take Algebra 1, and I got an eighty-seven in that, overall. I don’t even know how that happened. I really did not like that class. And the school said, “Oh, if you got, like, an A or B in Algebra 1 in ninth grade, then you should double up next year, and you should take Algebra 2 at the same time as geometry.” I’m like, no. I’m just taking geometry. So I just took geometry. I got an eighty-seven in that, overall

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Hey, that’s pretty great.

WILLIAMS: I guess. For not liking the subject, yeah.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Yeah. What are the ones that you like, though? The ones you’re like, you know what, this class is going to be today, it’s at this time. I’m looking forward to it. What are those classes?

WILLIAMS: English was always pretty cool to me.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: What about it?

WILLIAMS: I like reading books. Like, I can power through a book, if it’s a good one. I remember, in first grade, we used to have book fairs, and so they used to be selling all the books, and stuff. And I remember Junie B. Jones was a book series, you know that—

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Junie B. Jones—

WILLIAMS: —I loved that.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: —yeah, of course.

Page 46 WILLIAMS: So, there was a book set of, like, twenty books for forty dollars. And I begged my dad. I was like, “Please buy me this book series.” And so I bought that—the books are actually really short. I really shouldn’t have bought it. It really wasn’t a good investment, but— whatever, I loved those books. And so I bought them and read all of them in the first day. And then I would just reread them, backwards and forwards, and all that stuff. So that was one of my earliest memories of being really good at reading, and stuff like that.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: I love it.

WILLIAMS: So reading is one of my favorite classes. Social studies was good until I got to high school, and it started getting more difficult. I had world history, and I was like, “Oh, okay, I’m not good at this.” Because my teacher, Mr. Lobron, who actually is my advisor now, and the librarian. He moved up, I don’t know—it was cool. He used to make us do a lot of geography. I do not like geography—like, I can’t read a map for anything. I don’t even know where the fifty states are. I think I can name them, probably, maybe, but I can’t look at a map and be like, “Oh, that’s Montana. That’s Pennsylvania—” well, I can tell where Pennsylvania is, because I live there. But other things—I can’t tell where, like, Nevada is, and stuff like that —

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Yeah.

WILLIAMS: —so, like, world maps were crazy for me. I didn’t know Afghanistan from Iraq, and Iran, and stuff like that. I didn’t—I never caught on to that, so those were the places that I struggled in social studies. But, other than that, I liked the class. Science and math aren’t so good at, but English and social studies were okay.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Yeah. It’s good—

WILLIAMS: But then in ninth grade, we had an art class—we had half a year of art, and half a year of gym—I didn’t really like either of them. But in tenth grade, that I just took, I had a Philadelphia history class, and that was with this teacher named Mr. Newman, who was really cool, because he used to teach at West Philly High, which is a much less pristine school than Central. So he had a lot of stories of the kids—I don’t know, he used to get into fights with them, basically. He used to have really funny stories—like, some girl stabbed him in the head with a pencil one time.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Whoa.

Page 47 WILLIAMS: There was one kid who almost died in a fight or something. And it was crazy. So I liked that class because of him. I like classes because of the teachers—I feel like, if I don’t like the teacher, I’m not going to like the class.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Yeah, it’s a personal thing.

WILLIAMS: And Philadelphia history is very interesting. I learned a lot of these buildings that we’re around right now. I never learned about this building. Is this new?

EARDLEY-PRYOR: This building was originally a bank in the 1910s and 1920s, and then it got converted in the nineties to what it is now.

WILLIAMS: Maybe I did learn about this, I don’t know —

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Yeah, probably not. It’s pro—

WILLIAMS: —was the bank —

EARDLEY-PRYOR: —probably not on the tour. Jalyn, what do you say we take a little break here and then we can come back and make the transition to, kind of, imagining the future. It’s been wonderful—I think we’re up to the present, and especially as you were thinking about what’s the future going to be for college, and that sort of thing, to write—to get into Central—it might be a nice transition for us.

WILLIAMS: [Okay].

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Okay.

[Break in audio]

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Okay, looks like we’re recording again. Okay, Jalyn, so for the second part here, we’ll just transition—ask a few questions, kind of, that are sort of up in the air, and Page 48 then we’ll think about what that future might look like then. Those up-in-the-air questions—first one: What are some of the things that you value most? That you love?

WILLIAMS: Value, like, material things or just anything?

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Anything.

WILLIAMS: Anything. Things that I love—since I got an Instagram account, last year— July—I’ve been seeing a lot more problems that I didn’t notice before, like Black Lives Matter, and LGBTQ-Plus problems, so I’ve been learning a lot about those things. So I guess one of my favorite things is equality, so I would love—I don’t know, I just want everybody to be treated the same. I understand why we would put more value on some people’s names than others. And women’s rights, and stuff on, like, abortion—stuff like that—I just wish that—I don’t know, I guess one of the things I value the most is, 01:10:00 yeah, equality—people being treated all the same.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Beautiful. What are some of the things that you would work to protect, or even fight for?

WILLIAMS: Bam, there you go. Women’s rights, and the rights of people of color, that are— yeah, the rights of women and people of color. The rights of the underdogs, kind of people. People of color, disabled people, people in the LGBTQ-Plus community. So those are some of the things that I would fight for. I guess I would also fight for the environment, and stuff like that. I feel like a lot of politicians don’t really care about the environment, and that is something that I actually want to have a job in, one day. Like, I wanted to—when I was younger, I kind of wanted to work in the EPA.

And I wanted to be an environmental engineer, but I’m not too good at science and math, so maybe I’ll just be an environmental studies kind of person. Like, sustainability is something that I’m interested in, which is something that I would fight for, yeah.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: And where did you first really learn about sustainability?

WILLIAMS: Sustainability. I guess that would be that environmental science class I took. Also, at Penn Environment, Sandy, the woman I volunteer with, she—I think she went to college for something about sustainability, three S’s, or something like that. She kind of told me about that when I first met her.

Page 49 EARDLEY-PRYOR: How did you first meet Sandy and work with Penn Environment?

WILLIAMS: So, the school I go to, Central High School—there’s a thirty-hour community service requirement for each year. But now we get half a credit for it, so it’s kind of like a class thing—a graded thing. So you had to do thirty hours of community service, and so I went online and I went to VolunteerMatch.org, and I was like, “I’m interested in the environment,” and they were like, “Oh, well, Penn Environment is this place that needs volunteers. I’m like, okay, so I went in there and one of the first things I did was phone-banking. And then I also did database input—putting people’s names and information from petitions into a computer. And then phone- banking was calling people to invite them to events that Penn Environment was having.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Did you like it?

WILLIAMS: I didn’t really like the phone-banking. I don’t know—I don’t like phone calls. I feel like that’s kind of, like—I’m not going to blame it on our generation, but I never felt the need to communicate through phone calls, except with family members. So I really like email, and stuff like that.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Yeah. Would you describe yourself as an environmentalist?

WILLIAMS: If I knew what environmentalist meant. I guess environmentalist is, like, in the simplest definition of the term, would be somebody who cares about the environment, right? I guess, yeah, I would describe myself as an environmentalist.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: What are—specifically, in terms of the environment—what are some of the issues—environmental issues—that you care the most about? The ones that you want to learn the most about?

WILLIAMS: Really, I don’t—environmental science is cool, but I’m not a science-y person, so I would rather learn about the environment and its effect on people, rather than on nature and stuff like that. So I would rather—environmental studies, and learning about how people in different places are affected by climate change and other aspects of the environment. So, learning about people rather than nature.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Yeah. One more kind of abstract question. What are some things that scare you most in life?

Page 50 WILLIAMS: I think one of—I always said my biggest fear was heights, or spiders—but I think I’m actually scared of being alone.—I don’t know, I’m really apprehensive about going off to college, because I’m going to be on my own. I guess I’ll have a roommate, but I won’t be able to be with my family, and stuff like that.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Where do you want to go to college?

WILLIAMS: I don’t even know. I feel like that’s something I should start researching, but, once again, procrastination. I’m looking into it, but not really. I’ve been getting emails from colleges, but not—it’s like, [. . .] if you take the PSAT, you can check a box that’s like, “Oh, I want the College Board to send me information on colleges, and I’m interested in the environment,” and then all these colleges that have environmental studies as majors, they email you. So I’ve been looking into those kind of colleges. Bennet College is one of the places that keeps emailing me, but I don’t know if I want to go there.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Cool.

WILLIAMS: I want to stay local. I want to stay in Pennsylvania or in this area.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: It seems to me like, with the activities you’ve done, and especially if you do more of them in these next coming years you’d find yourself getting a scholarship to some of these places.

WILLIAMS: Yup, sounds good.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: That sounds real good. Yeah. Let’s transition and talk a little bit more about some of these environmental things, and specifically about energy, which seems kind of also abstract.

WILLIAMS: [Okay].

EARDLEY-PRYOR: When you think of energy, what comes to mind?

Page 51 WILLIAMS: Electricity? Actually, I went to this camp, in seventh and eighth grade—the summer of seventh and eighth grade, which was this girls’ STEM camp, where we learned about—I don’t know, building robots and stuff. But one of the things we did was an energy debate, and we were talking about different types of clean energy, and which were more efficient. I remember the first time 01:15:00 I did the camp, I was assigned shale gas, which—if I remember correctly, shale is a natural gas that is underground. And you use hydraulic fracturing to get it, you hydraulic drill, or something—you drive it into the ground, and then the gas comes up. And it powers turbines and stuff like that, that makes turbines turn, and makes electricity. That debate we got third place, because I don’t think shale gas is really that efficient.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Do you remember who beat you—who got numbers one and two?

WILLIAMS: I’m thinking of the persons who won—I’m pretty sure it was biomass and solar energy. But then, the next time I was in the camp, I got hydroelectricity, which is much better, I think. And one of the things I remember from camp was that we won the debate, because we were against biomass in the last tier of the debate. And I remember one of our question—the winning question was, “How do you suppose we make use of biomass in places affected by drought, such as California?” Which is also a question you could ask hydroelectricity—it’s like, how are you going to get water in drought-stricken places—but we got the last question. So they didn’t get to ask us the same question back. So we won against them. Because biomass, I think, is when you grow corn and stuff like that, and you use it to burn it and make energy. So that’s how we won that, with that question. And so we won.

So hydroelectricity is one of my favorite clean energies. But then my real favorite is geothermal energy. Which is what I was talking with my—I was talking about with my mom yesterday, when we were talking about this interview, and she was reading the release form. And she was like, “Oh, talking about energy, huh?” I’m like, “Yeah, I love geothermal—it’s probably my favorite type of clean energy.” She’s was like, “yeah.”

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Why is that?

WILLIAMS: I think it’s very interesting. I think—because, the way I talked about it was—my mom said I was wrong, but geothermal energy is when you take a drill—like, you have to have really good equipment, and you drive not to the center of the earth, but very close to the earth’s core, or the crust, or whatever—like where it gets really hot. And then you throw water down there, and then the water comes back up as steam, and then you use it to turn these turbines, and then that makes energy. Which I think looks really cool—like, in my mind, I can see lava, and water, and then coming out of the steam, and turning turbines—that sounds really cool to me.

Page 52 EARDLEY-PRYOR: Yeah.

WILLIAMS: In eighth grade, I had to write an essay about a form of clean energy, and I got geothermal, so that’s where I first started learning about it.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Can you imagine geothermal happening here in Philadelphia?

WILLIAMS: I’m not exactly sure about the parameters of geothermal energy. Like, where do you have to go? Where is the best place to get to those hot places in the earth? But I think if we could use it, it would be efficient. I would like do that—it seems cool.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Why do you think it matters to have renewable or efficient energy be a part of the future?

WILLIAMS: Because we have to care about the earth we live in. These dirty energies that we use—like coal, and gas, and other natural gas, which isn’t really that good—they create greenhouse gases, and they ruin the ozone layer, and they pollute the world that we live in. And then, you know, people have all these respiratory problems. And the people in politics who don’t care about the environment also don’t care about people’s health care. So then, it’s like, “Oh, you’re ruining the environment, and you’re ruining people’s health,” but then you don’t want to give them health care and you don’t want to protect the environment—I just don’t understand what your plan is. So I think that’s one of the reasons why we should care, because it’s affecting everybody.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: That’s the truth.

WILLIAMS: Even if, like—because—I’ve heard people ask politicians, “Oh, do you think climate change is real?” But instead you should ask them, do they understand it? Because it is real. That’s not something that you can debate, if you understand it, and if you care, and if you want to do something about it—that’s the question that you should ask them. So, yeah, it’s a real problem, and that’s why we should want to use renewable energy, so that we can keep Mother Earth living.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: I love it. Do you know where you get—at home, where you live—where they get the energy from? Like how it’s made? Is it made from coal? It is made from hydro? Is it made from geothermal?

Page 53 WILLIAMS: I’m pretty sure it’s not any of those—I’m pretty sure it’s coal, yeah. It’s not, renewable, because our house is pretty old. Yeah, I’m pretty sure it’s coal.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: This is a thing I just learned recently, that as of 2016, most Philadelphians use the standard PECO service for their energy, that’s the energy provider.

WILLIAMS: Yes. Yeah, I’ve heard of that.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: And most PECO energy comes from fossil fuels—coal or natural gas, like you’d said, or even some nuclear power. 01:20:00 And that renewables are only, like, five percent of the total energy supply. But Pennsylvania’s also—this is the thing I just learned—one of only seventeen states in America that lets the citizens of the city choose what type of energy they’re going to have from their energy provider. So—including the ability to select renewable energy—so it’s the same bill; it would still come from PECO, but you can choose how that energy is being made, and know what you’re paying to get.

WILLIAMS: What? I didn’t not know that.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Pretty neat, isn’t it?

WILLIAMS: [Yes].

EARDLEY-PRYOR: So maybe you—you guys can talk about—the challenge is—is it does cost a little bit more usually, so you’re—you’re paying a little bit extra to get something that’s not as harmful.

WILLIAMS: Yeah, right.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: It’s kind of the nature of anything these days, right? Okay, well this sounds like this could be a really great time to think about the future here. So we’ve started playing with it—I loved the description you had of the geothermal. So let’s think about Philadelphia here.

I guess when we’re thinking about the future, I think there might be two extremes we can play with. One is business as usual: there’s no change to energy use, greenhouse gas Page 54 emissions keep on rising, and all the consequences that come from that. Another extreme would be everything’s awesome, right? It’s super renewable—everything’s 100 percent—positive visions of change, renewable energy, greenhouse gases being reduced. More likely, it’ll probably be some sort of hybrid.

WILLIAMS: Right.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: But with this sort of gaming idea—this playing with ideas of the future, you can choose whatever you like, right? So maybe we could start with—because you’ve—you kind of hinted at this—you could imagine a future energy source or a technology. And let’s just talk about, maybe—we’ll move through three different times. We’ll just think about fifty years in the future, the year 2067—fifty years from now.

WILLIAMS: Okay. I’ll be sixty-six.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: You will be sixty-six years old. And what do you see in your head? What image do you see when you think about energy technology in the future?

WILLIAMS: I feel like way back when, going back about fifty years—that would be 1966?

EARDLEY-PRYOR: That would be 1967.

WILLIAMS: Yeah, ’67, yes. I feel like people back then were like, “Oh, by the time it’s 2017, we’re going to have hover boards, and we’re going to have robots, and robot maids,” and stuff like that, and then at this point, we’re like—not even—the only robots we have are the ones that clean the floor. So I feel like we won’t progress too much—well, I feel like we’re making a lot of progress, in terms of technology. So I guess, fifty years from now, we will have moved to more clean sources of energy—not everybody, though, because the implications of having to pay more—people don’t want that. They don’t care about the environment, whatever. Forget my future kids, I guess. So, I guess, I would imagine that more people would be using clean energy. More people would be more educated on it, through classes at school, and stuff like that.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: What does that look like? What does that clean energy look like? What do you see in your head when you picture?

WILLIAMS: Solar. I think solar is one of the most popular—not popular about, like, Page 55 everybody has a solar panel on their house, but solar, because people know about it. They know about, like—the sun can give you energy, and it can create electricity. So I feel a lot more people would be using that.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Will it look like it does today?

WILLIAMS: Yeah. It’s pretty efficient now, but it will advance, of course. It’ll be like, “Oh, well now, our cell batteries can carry more energy, and you can use the sun for less time, and you don’t even need the sun sometimes.”

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Where would those solar panels be?

WILLIAMS: Still on the roof, yeah. Or maybe we would have smaller ones, that would connect—they would all connect to a big generator of energy—or, of electricity—and then it would be small ones, wherever you think the sun its your house the most. Like, if it—maybe it’s not on the roof, maybe it’s the front porch gets the most sun, or maybe other places in your house, if you think they get more sun, then you would put solar panels there. So they wouldn’t have to only be on the roof, which is all I’ve seen, solar, so far. I think we would use—I can’t think of any renewable energy that doesn’t use water, and stuff like that. Hydroelectricity seems like it would be efficient, but, what with situations already happening with water right now —

EARDLEY-PRYOR: What do you mean?

WILLIAMS: Flint, Michigan—their water is still terrible. I think that’s been two years now, that they’ve been without clean drinking water. So I think we’ll put more value on water for people, rather than the environment. So I don’t see hydroelectricity 01:25:00 moving in any way more than it has. So, yeah, I think solar energy will probably be the big one. But we will use less dirty energy.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: What about how people get around town?

WILLIAMS: Yeah, I can’t imagine anything else. I really have always thought about a monorail, like—this, I can’t even remember this guy, but it’s, like—it works on one rail, and then it’s kind of like a train, but it’s sleeker than a train. It moves faster than a train. It’s just better than a train. It uses less energy—I’m not exactly sure how monorails work. I’ve never been on one. I know there are monorails at Disney World, and stuff like that.

Page 56 EARDLEY-PRYOR: Do you picture them in Philadelphia?

WILLIAMS: Yes, going all around. Maybe we’ll replace the El train with some monorails.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: What about cars?

WILLIAMS: I see that.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Will cars still be around?

WILLIAMS: Cars.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: So, it’s only fifty years. You’re—I mean, you’ll be sixty-six.

WILLIAMS: Yeah. Yeah, we’ll still use cars, but they’ll be better. If we have—ooh, there are already hybrid cars, that run on electricity as well as gas. Maybe we’ll have cars that will run on solar energy as well as electricity, or, like—we’ll have renewable energy cars, yeah. Like solar- powered cars. But then the people who drive regular cars, who still use gas are looked down upon as, like, [scoffs] get with the times. So I think that’ll be the new norm—the social—the solar-powered cars.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: That’ll change the way that people—people will want that, and that’ll be—you have to kind of get that to be cool.

WILLIAMS: Right. Yeah, because we already have sun roofs on cars, so we should just have, like, a solar panel on top of the car.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: I love it. Let’s step forward a little bit further, to the year 2140. So this is about one hundred twenty-three years in the future—about, you know, almost one hundred twenty-five years. Just as a reference point, if we can think back—maybe thinking about the past will help you think about what changes might happen that much further ahead. So, one hundred twenty-three years in the past was the year 1894.

Page 57 WILLIAMS: Okay.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Coca-Cola had just been sold in bottles for the very first time. Milton Hershey had just started his brand-new chocolate company. Brand-new versions of gas-powered internal combustion engines had just really been invented. Cars were really not the norm at all. And coal had, for the first time in history, taken over wood as the dominant energy source. This is long before oil and gasoline had really kind of arisen, in part because cars hadn’t been expanded and invented. Thomas Edison, in New York City, had built the world’s first coal-fired power plant just a year or two before. So that was a real kind of transition into a coal age in the United States. And that was one hundred twenty-three years ago in the past.

WILLIAMS: Right.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: So let’s think about right now and [then] zoom forward one hundred twenty-three years. What’s the world look like? What colors do you see?

WILLIAMS: Gosh. I’m trying to decide if there would be more green or less green. Well, if we care about the environment more, then there will be more green. We’ll have more parks and more trees, instead of just, like—if you go down the block, there’s a tree, and a tree, and a tree—it’s like all trees —

EARDLEY-PRYOR: All trees.

WILLIAMS: —everywhere. People have plants in their—on their porches and stuff, and that would be the norm, yeah.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: So lots of green around?

WILLIAMS: Yes. The buildings would be sleeker. There’d be no more of this brick, and mortar, and stuff like that. It’d be all glass and sleek, and they’d be really pretty.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: What’s the weather like? I’ll share some of this about scientists’ projections, and you can tell me whether you think—in your head, what you’re picturing right now—if that matches, or if you think it’s something different. So here—some people think that the climate effects in the future—about one hundred twenty-five years—could be strong enough to destabilize governments. There could be waves of refugees. There may be a collapse of Page 58 certain types of agriculture, and some real challenges for plants and animals to adjust to this warmer temperature that we might have in the future. Ice caps will have continued to melt a little bit more, so sea levels will have risen in a lot of the world’s coastal cities—like New York, Miami, Los Angeles.

Here in Philadelphia, the expectation is that some of the neighborhoods of Philly might actually be flooded, because the coastal rivers that we’re on—these tidewater rivers—would rise a little bit. So most of the city will be okay, but some of the ones, like east of I-95, or the neighborhood of Eastwick, 01:30:00 down by the airport—those very well could be starting to get some flooding. That’s at least what some predictions are, possibly. There’s some science fiction writers that think about these kind of things, and write about this. But I’m wondering, in your vision—this vision that you have in your mind—what is Philadelphia like?

WILLIAMS: I didn’t even think about those problems. I —

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Does it have more people or less people?

WILLIAMS: More people, because more people want to live here, because our—we do have better—this is a better city than other cities. We have better energy and stuff like that. So there’s more people, but I don’t want there to be overpopulation. Oh, that’s so—that’s so crazy.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: So will those more people—because there’ll be more people, will there be more solar panels, or are they leaning more towards natural gas or coal, because there’ll be more people needing energy?

WILLIAMS: Realistically speaking, honestly, I feel that those scientific predictions are right. I’ve heard those before. But I don’t want to believe that. I can believe the future that I want to? Okay, so yeah, there are more people, and they’re using solar panels. And now we’re moving on to other forms of energy.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Like what?

WILLIAMS: The more difficult ones—the geothermal. The reason that we’re not using geothermal—back in 2017—was we didn’t have the equipment to deal with the heat from the earth, but now we’ve worked on it. There’s titanium, steel hydraulic drills, and stuff like that. And now we’re tapping into the energy, which seems constant, to me. As long as we keep the earth alive. Solar energy, still a thing, because the sun is still a thing. Maybe—I don’t see how we could get more water, so maybe not hydroelectricity. Maybe that’s some places, for those Page 59 places that are flooded, I guess. They would use hydroelectricity.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Yeah, I mean, there’s a couple of rivers that kind of flow—maybe there?

WILLIAMS: [Yes].

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Tell me more about this geothermal. I love this vision. So where do you see this? Does each person’s house have one? Is there a big one in the middle of the city?

WILLIAMS: Yeah, I feel like there’s a big one. They—like there’s a—you know, we used to have quarries of—there’s rocks here, and then we use the rocks to build our houses. We have an area where we tap into the center of the earth with these drills, or whatever. And we get that energy. We get that steam. And somehow we get the steam to hit these turbines that people have in their homes. Or, like, turbines that hit these central hubs for energy. So those turbines will spin, and they’ll give the energy to—they’ll give the electricity to other people’s houses, and stuff like that, which is how I think it works in 2017, I’m not sure.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: So it’d be, like, a big power plant that’s steam generated, and they shoot the electricity out from there.

WILLIAMS: But it has a better name than a power plant. Power plant sounds very negative.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: What would you name it?

WILLIAMS: Hub, yeah. Central hub, or something like that—like an energy hub. I like that better—not power plant. And that’s what we would have. We’d have energy hubs, in a couple different places. I think we have, like a Navy Yard where ships and stuff are. Maybe we don’t need those anymore. Let’s get rid of those. We’re not—we’re not doing water travel anymore.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: What’re we doing instead for water travel?

WILLIAMS: We’ve got hovercrafts and stuff like that. We’re over the water. Forget the water. We’ll let the animals keep the water—animals, you keep the water, and we’ll travel in the air. So I feel like air travel will be used more.

Page 60 EARDLEY-PRYOR: I love it. How will the air travel—the ships—be powered? The air—the air travel? Will they run on solar?

WILLIAMS: I feel like, they’ll run on, like—I feel like they would be—if they were hovercrafts, then they would use—they would take the air around them, and then push that through the bottom of it—make sure that they’re always hovering at one point. So they’re taking air from the atmosphere, and then they’re using it to hover above things. So there’s no energy for them. It’s just air.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Air powered.

WILLIAMS: Yeah.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Love it.

WILLIAMS: So that’s the kind of travel we would have. I don’t know about food—I wonder.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Yeah, what about food? Do people just grow it at home? Are they still going to stores?

WILLIAMS: I think we still go to stores. I think more people are doing gardening themselves, and stuff like that. But there’re no more of these, like, big chain markets. Now it’s more like everything is a Whole Foods, and everything is a Trader Joe’s, and it’s not just—like a specialty store anymore—that’s the norm. Organic food and gluten-free food, and stuff like that. 01:35:00 Superfoods—we use those a lot. Like, kale is a superfood, because it has potassium and calcium. And then there’s other things that are superfoods. But somehow we find a way to mix all those things up together—not in a smoothie kind of way, but in—I don’t know, different forms, and then we eat those to get our energy, and it’s not putting—food doesn’t have to be an activity anymore. I guess it is, in some places, but here we won’t have to make this a foodie scene as much as it is right now. It’ll be different.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Do people still go to restaurants?

WILLIAMS: If they want to. Like, there’s a few restaurants that still serve regular food. It’s Page 61 like, “Oh, we have vintage pizza,” and stuff like that. But the norm will be to eat those superfood mixtures. So that we get everything that we need from one thing, and then we can spend time worrying about other things.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Yeah. When you picture somebody growing up in that world, what’s their day like? When they wake up in the morning?

WILLIAMS: I don’t know about the school thing. A kid, I guess, having fun would be—I feel like we could find a way to—because now, in 2017, everybody’s like, “Oh, well screen time ruins your brain, and you’re frying your eyes, and you’re hurting yourself.” I feel like we could find a way for those screens to still be implemented, but to be less damaging. So, there’s still lots of screen time for these little kids, but it doesn’t hurt them as much. They can go outside and play, without there being a lot of danger. There would be good air—nobody’s going to have asthma anymore.

Will kids go to school? I’m not sure. I feel like there are things that people all need to learn. I guess learning about history can prevent those same things from happening in the future, so—I guess we will start learning about some stuff, but I guess it’ll be like a microchip kind of thing. Like, you can get a chip in your brain, and it has all the information that we want you to know. And you can still load it up if you want to—you can learn new things, but the basic things, you grow up learning. Like, you—maybe by the time you hit a certain age, like when you’re five, you get that microchip and you’re like, “All right, you know everything now, little kid, and now it’s up to you to use that information to do something good with it.”

EARDLEY-PRYOR: I love it.

WILLIAMS: Games and stuff—I don’t know, I guess kids play together, because they’re more—they’re less judgmental. Everything’s less superficial. We’re caring more about each other and—rather than how we look.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: I love it. Let’s jump even further. This is where things get real far away, almost three hundred years in the future. We’re going to jump to the year 2312. Now, as a reference, thinking about the past —

WILLIAMS: Three hundred years.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Three hundred years ago, about two hundred ninety-five years ago, it was in the 1720s. Back then, England, France, and Spain all had these colonies in North Page 62 America. Native Americans dominated the continent, it was still their home. It was unclear what the future was going to be for who or which of those peoples and nations would move forward. Philadelphia had already been founded as a city. It was already forty years old at that point, but the American Revolution wouldn’t happen for another half century. At that time, energy—wood was the dominant energy source, along with food and plants to use for fuel, for people or for animals to have muscle power. There were some windmills, some water wheels, but coal use in the United States wouldn’t take over wood for another one hundred fifty years.

So what we’re going to do is we’re going to imagine not one hundred fifty years from now—from 2017—but double that. Three hundred years into the future, what’s—what do you see? Is Philadelphia still here?

WILLIAMS: Trying to figure it out—is it still Philadelphia? Is it still the city of brotherly love? Philadelphia is still called Philadelphia. Philadelphia still has all the area that it has in 2017. It still has all that land, but perhaps it has a little more.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: So the city’s gotten bigger?

WILLIAMS: Yeah. I don’t know if the— I don’t know if there’s more people. I guess we have a suburbs now. No, there won’t be a suburbs, because people that move to the suburbs to get away from the city, but the city is good now. So people live in the city, and they don’t want to leave. But you don’t have to stay if you don’t want to. You can go if you want to, but why would you want to? I don’t know. I don’t see it changing much. I guess—

EARDLEY-PRYOR: What do the buildings look like?

WILLIAMS: Buildings? 01:40:00

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Are they taller? Are they still the same size? Are there still as many trees as what you had imagined in the year 2140? Three hundred years from now.

WILLIAMS: Like, would buildings still be made out of glass, and stuff like that? I’m not sure. Because I know that there’s this, like, super-grit material—it’s not graphite. It’s something close to that, it’s —

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Graphene.

Page 63 WILLIAMS: Yes, that, yes. Is that see-through?

EARDLEY-PRYOR: I think so. It’s pretty thin.

WILLIAMS: You know, in three hundred years it is. And so we use that [graphene] to build buildings and stuff. This is the graphene age, at this point. We’re not in the glass age or plastic age anymore. And we’re using that for building buildings, because it’s strong, I’m pretty sure. It’s more readily available for even low-income people, so everybody’s house is made of it. It’s great. Trees are a novelty. They don’t—they’re not the dominant producers of oxygen. I feel like we could find a way to make oxygen. So then we’d have the—

EARDLEY-PRYOR: So we have our own technologies that make oxygen now?

WILLIAMS: [Yes]. So we’d have, like—they look like trees, but they’re not trees. They’re fake trees that look so much like the real thing, but they have vents on them that push out real oxygen at intervals—like, maybe every twelve hours, you push out a little bit of oxygen from each tree. I don’t know if we’re still messing around with dirt. I don’t think they grow into the ground. Maybe they’re above ground. Yeah, I don’t see dirt being much of a component of this society.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Where are people getting energy from in these graphene houses, and these trees that give off oxygen?

WILLIAMS: What are people doing, you said?

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Where are they getting their energy?

WILLIAMS: Oh, where are they getting their energy?

EARDLEY-PRYOR: How are they powering the things that—what are they doing with the energy?

WILLIAMS: That’s true. What do we need energy for? Hmm. Okay, houses made of graphene. We get our energy from . . . . There’s a new renewable energy source, I can tell. I’m Page 64 not sure what it is, though. Something that we have a lot of, that we use for energy, like—in Monsters, Inc., laughter used to give energy for the monster world. So I feel like we would do something like that—not like, screams or laughter, but, like, good vibes. Good vibe energy! Something like that, even though I know it’s not really realistic. But I guess, as renewable energy, if it couldn’t be good vibes, it would be still solar, because the sun hasn’t destroyed us yet. Still geothermal, because the earth is still here. The earth and the sun are still major components of our life.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Is it—

WILLIAMS: Oh, yeah, maybe we live in space. Maybe we have space travel by this point. Yeah, yeah. We’re in space.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: So there’s multiple Philadelphia’s—there’s the one above, in outer space, and the one here on earth?

WILLIAMS: Yeah. Yup. There’s a bunch of Philadelphia’s. Okay. Maybe one on every planet—City of Brotherly Love, you can come here for, like, novelty cheesesteaks and stuff like that. We’re still doing that, kind of, but it’s not, like, popular. We’re still doing our superfoods. What are people doing? Jobs? I don’t even know.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Do people need to work anymore, in the future?

WILLIAMS: I don’t even think so. I think we’re—I think we’re good. I guess, or —

EARDLEY-PRYOR: What about machines?

WILLIAMS: I hope singularity doesn’t happen. I feel like, I don’t know—like robots—we don’t need them, but we have them. Yeah, I feel like they would turn on us at some point— maybe five hundred years? At that point, they will turn on us. But, at this point —

EARDLEY-PRYOR: So this is before the robot revolution has happened?

WILLIAMS: Yeah. They’re still working for us. They’re still helping us out.

Page 65 EARDLEY-PRYOR: Are they—are they plug-into-the-wall kind of power? Or do they do something different for their energy?

WILLIAMS: No, they—they’re powered like the houses. Kind of like, they get their power from the central hub, from the geothermal and the solar.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: That’s still there, one hundred fifty years later?

WILLIAMS: Yup. And these robots are sentient, but we kind of have governor on them, like, Dude, you can’t make your own decisions, but you can help us out, but you can’t 01:45:00 —I don’t know, I feel like we could have a robot world, where we could let robots live. But they would also be helping us out somehow.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Would there be —

WILLIAMS: I feel like we would live together in harmony.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: There’s a harmony between the humans and the robots.

WILLIAMS: I don’t know about animals, though. Animals—they might be gone, by this point.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: It’s just people?

WILLIAMS: Yeah.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: And no more trees?

WILLIAMS: No more trees.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: How do people get around?

Page 66 WILLIAMS: We’re still rocking the monorail —

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Monorail.

WILLIAMS: —and the hovercraft. Maybe there’s a new—I always thought that they should have—like, at the airport, in 2017, there’s that conveyer belt that they get on. I feel like we could have one of those, but, like, far—to far away. Like, we could have, like—maybe a monorail to faraway places. Like, we could get—because I know that, if you go west from California, in 2017, you get—you hit Japan. So maybe we have, like, an above-water monorail that takes you straight from California to Japan and back. And we have—so we don’t have to travel by water anymore. We’re going over the water still. So we’re still doing monorails and hovercrafts, which are readily available, at this time. Everybody has a hovercraft.

Some people still use cars, but there’s less roads now, because we don’t need them. So those people are kind of screwed, a little bit. Other kinds of—I feel like we will have another kind of transportation by this point, I’m not sure what. Maybe—like an elevator—a space elevator! Definitely. We have one of those—space elevator—because we’ve gotta get from Philadelphia to Philadelphia. Yeah, monorail—monorail. You know, we’re doing the monorail. Just some kind of train kind of thing that will take you from one place to another, yeah.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: I love it. When you are picturing somebody that’s at this geothermal energy hub, or you’re picturing the solar—the solar panels that are kind of on everything—on the graphene, and on these giant buildings—how has it changed? Since those things were invented, one hundred fifty years ago, how are they different now?

WILLIAMS: I feel like—it’s kind of like the DS I just talked about. Like, how 3DS changes to 3DS XL, and then new three— Nintendo 3DS XL. Like, it just gets bigger. It just has more capacity, at this point. Like, maybe solar panels look better. Because, now [in 2017], they kind of look like little grids of blue, and they just kind of suck up the sun’s energy. But maybe now [in 2312] they’re light commands, so it starts out grey or whatever, and then once it’s at full capacity, it turns all yellow—like sun color. So, yeah, they’re color activated. They look better.

Geothermal—I don’t see too much change. I feel like the drills were good, and they still work. And now it’s just more capacity, yeah. It just holds more, and we have more—we don’t have to drill into the earth as often, which I feel could be a problem, in some way. Yeah. Everything pretty much looks the same. It’s just—everything is more efficient at this point. It holds more.

Page 67 EARDLEY-PRYOR: What do you think the politics are, of this time?

WILLIAMS: I feel like we don’t have representatives anymore. We can represent ourselves in government. There’s no more classes and stuff like that—everybody’s on equal terms. So there’s not really need for government, but then we don’t want there to be anarchy, you know. Which would be overthrowing the government—that’s what that means, right? That there is no government?

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Anarchy is just chaos, yeah.

WILLIAMS: Yeah, yeah. We don’t want that. But everybody’s just peaceful. Everybody’s cool.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Not chaos—it just means no government.

WILLIAMS: Yeah. No government. Everybody just—everybody just works together. There’s no need for a government. Nobody’s, like, opposing anybody. By now, we have that equality, and everybody’s just living together.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Plenty of food, plenty of energy.

WILLIAMS: Yup, yup.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Philadelphia sounds like a good place.

WILLIAMS: Yeah. No currency. Everything is just available. Everybody just has everything—no poor people, and no rich people. Everybody’s equal.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: I love it. All right. Well, thank you so much for taking all this time —

WILLIAMS: Oh, that’s it? Okay.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: —and dreaming and visioning with us today. Do you have anything else Page 68 you wanted to share?

WILLIAMS: I hope that, if you’re listening to this in the future future future, I don’t know— good luck, I guess. I hope that you take some of the cues, and you hear what I’m talking about, and that’s what you experience every day, and you’re like, “Yeah, she knew about this. She’s a psychic.” I want you to think of me as a psychic. I know everything about what’s going to happen, and that’s the world that you live in, right now.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: You heard it first, from Jalyn Williams.

WILLIAMS: Yeah.

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Thank you so much.

WILLIAMS: You’re welcome.

[END OF INTERVIEW]