Cherelle Sparkman knew. She didn’t need a little blue “positive” sign to tell her what her body was already saying.

Her boyfriend knew it, too.

“We just wanted to make sure,” she said.

So Wendallen “Pooh” Adams, then 19, bought a couple of pregnancy tests for his 16-year-old girlfriend. It was a summer morning on Timpson Street in Longview, and Adams was still asleep when Sparkman took the first test.

“I took it and I saw it, and I just dropped it,” she said.

She tried the other. Same result — positive.

Tall and strongly built, Sparkman has an easy smile that reveals a row of braces on her upper teeth. She says she was not smiling on that day. She was scared, and she wasn’t ready to talk about it. So she left one test in the bathroom and the other in the bedroom, and she let her boyfriend sleep. He would find the tests when he woke up.

She was climbing into her car to leave for work when she heard him burst through the front door of their house. He ran to her.

“I have to go,” was all she told him.

“He was happy, though,” Sparkman remembers. “He had one of those big McDonald’s smiles” — a regular Ronald McDonald — “and his smiling just made me mad. I was scared. He wasn’t, but I was, because I was the one that had to deal with it.”

A NEW NEIGHBOR

Around the time she became pregnant, Sparkman and Adams had been dating for about three years. They met in 2004, when she was in the seventh or eighth grade and he had just moved into the neighborhood from Beckville, a country town south of Longview. He was tall and thin — “skinny, skinny, skinny,” according to Sparkman.

It was not love at first sight.

“I met his mother first,” she said. “My birthday was coming up. I wanted to throw a little party in the yard, and my mom wouldn’t let me. But his mom said OK. We had this cooler, but he was sitting on it. I wanted to get some food and something to drink out of the cooler, so I told him to move.

“He told me no, I was fat. So I wanted to fight him.”

The next time they saw each other, at a party up the street, Sparkman was dancing with someone else. Adams didn’t like that, he recalled.

“My partner was dancing on her, and I told him that she was my girlfriend and to get off of her,” Adams wrote in a letter to this reporter.

“That’s basically what happened,” Sparkman said.

And that’s how they became a couple. They talked and hung out for several months. They went to dinner at CiCi’s, the pizza place, they played Mortal Kombat like crazy, and they started having sex.

MOM STEPS IN

Sparkman’s mother, Ursula Jackson, caught them.

Until Sparkman moved in with Adams, she lived in her mother’s tidy house with burgundy trim, just off Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. Jackson, 40, was taking a shower one day when she heard Adams come over. He lived a short walk away at his grandmother’s house. He went into Sparkman’s bedroom, and Jackson said she got dressed and sat down in the living room to watch TV.

As Adams was leaving, a condom fell to the floor.

“I run out the door screaming and hollering, and I say, ‘Get back in here and pick that up,’ and I say, ‘What is this?’ I set both of them down, and that’s when I tried to get her contraceptives. And she denied it.”

Sparkman said they used condoms at first, but they soon stopped. She didn’t want to use birth control.

“Those pills have so many side effects,” she said. “People say they make you fat. They have different side effects for different people, and I just didn’t want none.”

As the young couple spent more time together, Jackson said she began to worry for Cherelle. Adams had been seen in “bad spots” around the neighborhood, reminding Jackson of the relationship she once had with Sparkman’s father, Terry.

Terry Sparkman was a sweet, kind-hearted man, according to Jackson. He was shot and killed when Cherelle was 3 years old.

MAN OF THE FAMILY

The day Cherelle Sparkman’s parents met, on an afternoon in 1988, Jackson said she was stuck on the side of the road with a flat tire and no spare.

“I was just sitting there waiting on somebody to see me and stop and help. I didn’t know him, and he stopped and said, ‘You need some help?’ and I said yes,” Jackson said. “He took his spare tire and put it on my car, and I said, ‘Well, you can come by the house later and get it.’ So when he came by later, he had a pizza, and I guess that was his way through the door.”

They hit it off, and a few years later they had a child together. They named her Amber. A year went by, and they had Cherelle.

Sparkman was a maintenance worker for the city of Longview from 1981 to 1993, according to city employment records. But he injured his finger on the job and was tested for narcotics.

He had smoked marijuana. He was fired.

“When he lost his job, he decided selling drugs was a way out, and he was at this house where drugs was sold and someone came there to rob them,” she said. “And he was the one that answered the door.”

Sparkman was shot multiple times in the chest, and he died on a Wednesday night in March 1994. According to the newspaper article at the time, police believed it was a “drug deal gone bad.”

“I just didn’t know how I was going to accept that,” Jackson said. “We was together six years. I thought my world came to an end, because I depended on him so much to be the man of the family and now he’s gone. But as time progressed, I got stronger all the time, and I moved on.”

Now her daughter was falling for a young man who, to Jackson, seemed to be headed down a similar path. “Generational curses,” she called it.

“I used her dad as an example. She won’t listen,” Jackson said. “I mean, she loves him so much that what I say is irrelevant to her life.”

Sparkman insisted to her mother that Adams was a good guy. “You know how girls are,” she said. “They fall in love and want to be with that person no matter what somebody says.”

EXPECTING

It’s true that Adams was spending time in the streets, Sparkman said, but he was thrilled to be an expectant father. He threw her a baby shower. When they lay in bed, he would talk to the baby growing in Sparkman’s belly.

That fall, Adams was arrested. According to a police report, he pointed his 9 mm handgun at a woman during an argument and threatened to hit her in the head with it. He told police he found the gun when he was fishing.

The young couple had been living in a rent house on Timpson Street, but the place began to stink. They tried to locate the source of the stench, and when they couldn’t, they moved into a room in Adam’s grandmother’s house.

Months went by. Sparkman’s due date was approaching, in the spring semester of her junior year at Longview High School. She started throwing up blood. “But after I’d throw up, I’d feel like I could run a mile,” she said. “I felt real good.”

She called a hospital and says she was told to take Mylanta. Then she threw up bloody chunks. Adams’ grandmother dragged her out of bed and forced her to the hospital.

EMERGENCY SURGERY

The baby was tearing holes in Sparkman’s placenta, doctors told her. They performed an emergency Cesarean section on March 27, five days before her daughter was due.

“I was scared. C-section — you’re fixing to cut me open. That was scary,” Sparkman said. “The doctor said if I had waited to my due date, I would have died or she would have died.”

By her side, her boyfriend tried to comfort her.

“Pooh said I was being a big old titty baby. I was real emotional,” she said. “After that, I was out. I didn’t remember nothing.”

Doctors operated around midmorning, and Sparkman was allowed to hold her baby sometime after midnight. Adams named his daughter D’Niya Charnell Ann Adams. A family photo shows Adams, a very young and very proud father, holding D’Niya in the delivery room.

Two months later, he was arrested again.

SWEPT UP IN THE STING

Carolyn Adams, 51, helped raise her grandson. She named him Wendallen after a former fiance of hers, and she gave him the nickname “Pooh” when he was a baby. She said she had noticed a difference in the young man when he became a father.

“He had quit going out with his friends,” she said. “He was changing. He wasn’t out in the streets like he was. He had got him a job and all.”

Wendallen Adams was doing temp work, and he had recently been hired full-time with a starting wage of $10.50 per hour. On May 27, two months to the day after D’Niya was born, Adams was due in court for the charge stemming from his earlier arrest. He asked Sparkman to skip school to join him in the courtroom.

“He knows when bad stuff is going to happen,” Sparkman said.

When he appeared before the judge, Adams was instead arrested on a new charge — conspiracy to distribute crack cocaine.

For two years, federal, state and local law enforcement agents had been secretly building a case against two large drug rings in south Longview. Dozens of men were arrested in the sweep.

Carolyn Adams disputes the charge that her grandson was heavily involved in drug dealing.

“Well, where are all the cars he’s supposed to have, you know what I’m saying?” she said. “I don’t even want to talk about it, because I get pissed off about it. I cannot stand a liar.”

WORK AND SCHOOL

Meanwhile, Sparkman was learning to be a mom. She missed school for about a month as she nursed D’Niya and recovered from her emergency surgery.

As soon as she was able, she was back at school and back at work. She had been fired for absenteeism from her job at a grocery store, due to complications from her pregnancy, she said. Sparkman owns several animals and has considered becoming a veterinarian, so she applied for a job at a pet shop.

“When I put down all the pets I have and how I take care of them, she called me that same day and said can you start today? I was like, ‘Yes, I can,’ ” Sparkman said.

Now a Longview High School senior, Sparkman attends class full-time and works six days a week. D’Niya attends day care offered by Longview schools, and friends and family watch the baby when Sparkman is at work.

She said she is determined to graduate from high school and go to college. Her mother dropped out, as did her father and Adams. Her older sister also quit school when she gave birth at age 18. Jackson said she is proud of her daughter’s determination to finish school, but she is also sad that she’s missing out on the fun side of being a teenager.

“I can’t say the last time she went to a movie, went out to eat with her friends,” Jackson said. “It’s been a long time.”

Sparkman laughed.

“Naw, I ain’t got time for that stuff,” she said.

GROWING LIKE A WEED

D’Niya is 8 months old. She has five teeth, crawls everywhere, and with the help of an adult’s fingertips, she can stand for a few seconds on her two wobbly legs.

Adams remains in jail, awaiting sentencing on a federal conviction of conspiracy to distribute cocaine. Other people involved in the case have typically received eight-year sentences. Sparkman and Adams’ grandmother say he constantly asks about his daughter.

“She’s growing like a weed, and he’s missing her steps,” Carolyn Adams said.

Sparkman, now 17, recently moved from the Adams house into an apartment with her boyfriend’s female cousin. Money is tight, but for Christmas, Sparkman bought D’Niya a walker and new clothes, and she is saving to buy a few new toys. “I’m going to make sure she has a good Christmas. If I don’t have one off day, I don’t care,” Sparkman said. “That’s my main goal.”

* * * *

Q&A with Wendallen ‘Pooh’ Adams

Q: What was going through your mind when you found out your girlfriend, Cherelle Sparkman, was pregnant?

A: The more important things were: Finally I got a family. I was very excited. Now I had to start doing positive things. We had to start thinking about our child’s future. When she had Niya I was there through everything, I stayed with her from day one until it was all over, until Niya was getting ready to come home. Rell was scared, but I was ready.

Q: When is the last time you held your baby? How long until you are out of jail and can be with her again?

A: The last time I got to hold Niya was May 26. Hopefully not long, I’m ready to come home. Not only to Niya, but Rell, too. We getting married and we going to be a complete family.

Q: If you could go back in time, what would you do differently?

A: I would do positive things, the homeboys I hung around, I would have not hung around them, I would have did more with Rell and Niya. We would have went more places and did more things together.

Q: What do you do and think about all day?

A: I work out Monday-Fridays, and on Mondays and Wednesdays I go to G.E.D. classes. I write from time to time, I talk to Rell on the phone every day. She comes to see me Tuesday and Saturday. I read the Bible every day and go to church and I play chess a lot. I think about Rell and Niya all the time, and wish I could be there with them, but I will soon.

Adams, 20, is in the Gregg County Jail awaiting sentencing for a federal drug crime. The jail does not allow the media to interview inmates in person. Adams responded to questions through the mail.

* * * *

A word from grandma

Ursula Jackson spoke about her daughter Cherelle Sparkman’s experience as a teenage mother to 8-month-old D’Niya Adams.

Daughter becomes a ‘statistic’

“I wasn’t always there to protect her, and she wound up doing the wrong thing. She just became another statistic, basically. And I feel so sorry for her. I’m the type to where when I tell you something, OK, now it’s time for you to learn the hard way if you don’t do it.

“But when it happens, I sympathize because I feel sorry that you’re going through it. But I tell them if you don’t listen, you’ll learn the hard way. And she’s definitely learning the hard way.

Determined to overcome

“Cherelle is so determined, being that she comes from this type of neighborhood. She is a strong girl. She’s seen homicides, she’s seen prostitutes, she’s seen raids and she’s still determined to do what she needs to do to better herself. That’s one thing about her, she’s strong.”

Leaving the neighborhood

“I would not want her to stay in this neighborhood. I want to see my children do better than I did. I did the best at the time. We didn’t have much money, and we got what we could, but I want to see mine do the best they can.”

Jackson, 40, lives next door to her childhood home on Timpson Street, off Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in Longview.