We hope you have been enjoying this series of dispatches from Kopkind participants, advisers, guests and friends on life in coronavirus time as they observe and experience it. With each week’s Bonuses during this long, gray season, we have featured about 80 stories, songs, art works, videos, photographs, radio shorts, excerpts or notes from across the country and the world. We hope you are safe and ready. And we ask that, if you can, please press the Donate button (above) on this site—because we’re also hoping to survive this thing, to flower again on the green grass of Vermont; and we could really use a little help from our friends. Thank you all.

by Kevin Alexander Gray

Smoking Meat, Hoping to Survive

Columbia, South Carolina

Yeah, it is hard as hell operating a restaurant in the midst of a pandemic. Very f-ing hard.

Last week around 7:30-ish in the morning I was awakened by a phone call. The voice on the other end said, “Mr. Gray, this is Officer So-and-so with the City of Columbia Police Department.” I didn’t get his name, as the call caught me off guard. Without hesitation I asked, “Is there something wrong at the restaurant?”

“No,” he said, “I was just checking in to see if everything is all right with you.” Turns out he was one of the community relations officers.

I’m not used to connecting police with a morning howdy-do except on reruns of The Andy Griffith Show—the black-and-white episodes. Most of my life I’ve spent in political struggles, which have involved burning the Confederate flag on statehouse grounds, organizing electoral defeats of racist sheriffs, defending free speech, and resisting violence, be it at the hands of police or presidents or individuals who themselves are often familiar with systems of economic or physical meanness. Some of the history of those struggles—and, really, a sampling of black political and social history of South Carolina over the past 60 years—is represented on the walls of this barbecue restaurant, which seemed like a simple idea when my friend Keyur Naik and I came up with it six years ago. Keyur was the businessman. We were going to run it together, as I knew nothing about the restaurant business. Then he moved to Dallas to work with his brother.

Barbecue is comfort food. History isn’t exactly comfort but, traditionally, gathering over food is. Of course, where you eat, what you eat, and whether you even can eat are weighty with historical and political meaning. It should tell you a lot that a barbecue restaurant is the closest thing to a museum of civil rights history in South Carolina’s state capital.

We opened Railroad BBQ officially in February, and the virus shut us down in March. Generally speaking, the experience of the past few months has made me hopeful about people. Especially when they work cooperatively versus competing on even the smallest things. Or when return customers say, “We’re here for you” and “we’re going to spread the word.” The other side is the higher cost of everything. I call it the “Covid surtax.” And because we profess to try to do the right thing in our business practices, we’re often held to a standard that folk don’t hold themselves to. That depresses me.

Since “reopening” with take-out, delivery, and patio seating only, we’ve built a base of regular customers, probably a 50-50 racial mix. First, the firemen started coming, then the police, then EMTs. We give a first-responders discount. It’s a matter of pride that county health department workers are regulars, but many other employees from the county administration building across the street, our anticipated lunchtime base, have been working from home because of Covid. We were set to cater the police department’s Thanksgiving affair; they wanted brisket, 300 meals. Canceled because of Covid. We had a catering contract with the Census Bureau. Canceled because of Covid. People come in to take pictures; many have wanted to do events—anniversary dinners, even a wedding reception. Impossible because of Covid.

Still, we’re trying to keep people working, and when you’re smoking meat that means every day. Our Houston-born pit master, Marco Brito, often works through the night, as it takes 12 hours to smoke brisket and seven hours for ribs. We use peach and hickory wood. I believe we have some of the best “que” in the state thanks to Marco and our sous-chef, Keshaun Boulware. Those fellows love to cook. We have seven workers. Linous, and our lead hostess, Sharon, were hired as wait staff; they’re cashiers now. Yet folk leave tips. Linous was supposed to return to college at St. John’s in New York this fall, but he missed the New York State quarantine requirement, so he does school work between shifts.

About two-thirds of US restaurant workers were unemployed in April, and 8 million more were fired or forced to quit. Now it’s estimated that half the restaurants in some cities will go under. Almost 25 percent in this state don’t expect to be around in six months without government help. As good as our food, workers, and community support are, we know we survive by chance. Having renovated an old gas station, we’re not burdened by an extortionate landlord. We have a partner, Francie Close, who’s been our financial backbone from the start. Without her support, we’d be closed down. We didn’t apply for a PPP loan; Francie said, “There are other people who really need it.”

Covid is a test of everybody’s solidarity, but this is South Carolina, and that means something too. I won’t lie, it is not fun to wear masks and gloves all day long. We do it because we know that if one person gets sick, we have to shut it all down. Beyond our doors, not everyone has got the memo. My running joke has been that Republicans and poor black folk got the memo and ripped it up. Trump Republicans see Covid as a Democratic plot, and poor blacks are skeptical of a government that didn’t care about them before, so why should they believe it now?

Signs upfront require masks, and one says, “We reserve the right to refuse service to mean people.” We’ve had more than a few white men come in, then balk when told to wear a mask. One guy came in with his family; gave a speech about wanting to patronize us but he wasn’t going to wear a mask while ordering. I wasn’t at work the day a white couple with Florida tags stopped by. The man kept calling Linous “boy” This isn’t the first, second, or third time that we’ve had to deal with such slights. One morning as I was getting out of my truck a delivery man addressed me as “Bo.” When I was growing up if someone called you “bo” (short for “boy”) or “buddy,” the common response was, “Bo and Buddy are a white man’s hunting dogs.”

I write off the bo, boy, mask thing to the Trump effect, whereby overtly racist people feel even freer to be overtly racist. But you can’t run a business on the black side of town without constant reminders of subtler racism. Our monthly hospitality tax payments go primarily to the “hospitality districts,” which are overwhelming white. There, “yellow shirts” ride around in golf carts or on Segways keeping the areas clean. We have to pick up trash on the streets and sidewalks ourselves. We’ve had to clean up by the county building to keep trash from traveling our way. We’re located by the railroad tracks; when it rains, the ditch beside the track along the potholed gravel lane fills with water. Both our city and county councils are majority black, but drive around the city and you see where the money and effort go.

We’re not yet at break even, but Railroad BBQ will survive, we think. Our other partners, my older sister Doris and her husband, Elliott, have saved my sanity, although I’m sure many would argue that point. They do all the admin work, taxes, payroll, keeping up with sales, and such.

I’m looking forward to the time when our place runs itself. Back at the start, we faced a stream of mostly white male vendors or government petty tyrants who suspected us of being drug dealers trying to wash money. We faced workers who were so used to being exploited that they seemed to be waiting for us to mistreat them. Then there were those who saw Covid testing as another form of discrimination. Our next challenge is to convince people that a vaccination is important to our survival; it may be a job requirement if we want “butts in seats,” which is the goal. So there is light at the end of the proverbial tunnel, but then you never know. I hope it’s not the kind in Jesse Jackson’s old line, “We always thought that it was light at the end of the tunnel, but nobody told us it was a train coming at us.”

Kevin Alexander Gray was Jesse Jackson’s South Carolina campaign manager in 1988. The author of Waiting for Lightning to Strike: The Fundamentals of Black Politics, he is co-owner of Railroad BBQ in Columbia. He was a mentor at Kopkind in 2002 and 2008.

Scenes From a Pandemic is a Kopkind/Nation magazine collaboration. This piece originally appeared on The Nation‘s website on December 23, 2020. We thank Katrina vanden Heuvel, D.D. Guttenplan and The Nation crew.

Bonus: Another Seasonal Pleasure

We hope you have been enjoying this series of dispatches from Kopkind participants, advisers, guests and friends on life in coronavirus time as they observe and experience it. With each week’s Bonuses during this long, gray season, we have featured about 80 stories, songs, art works, videos, photographs, radio shorts, excerpts or notes from across the country and the world. We hope you are safe and ready. And we ask that, if you can, please press the Donate button (above) on this site—because we’re also hoping to survive this thing, to flower again on the green grass of Vermont; and we could really use a little help from our friends. Thank you all.

by Peter Linebaugh

The Most Vital Transition Is Ours

Ann Arbor, Michigan

We’re at a historical pause far deeper than the interregnum between Trump and Biden. Amid planetary warming, the pandemic has forced us to slow down if not to stop in our tracks.

Locked in, I read a lot. So when JoAnn Wypijewski, author of a terrific new book about gender, sex, and silences, What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About #MeToo, asked for a dispatch on the pandemic and Michigan from my experience this year, it was books I had to write about.

First, about pandemics then.

At the end of the 1790s, Charles Brockden Brown wrote Arthur Mervyn; Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793. It tells the tale of the yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia in the context of merchant capitalism. While the “founding fathers” evacuated the diseased capital city, Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, formerly enslaved men, nursed the sick and buried the dead. They were “essential workers” of the day, the “heroes.” From their deeds the AME church was formed, the chief good that resulted from that year, unless you accept the installation of the Cult of Reason and the revolutionary calendar in France. Otherwise in the USA that year, the Fugitive Slave Act made it a crime to help a slave escape to freedom, and cotton mill owners found the small hands of compliant children to be profitable resources. Slave labor and child labor went together as a new mode of production, industrial capitalism, spun bonds of global servitude.

On Michigan—so much in the news, so divorced from history—I asked a friend (he’s in his 80s) what I should read. With the libraries closed, he went to his garage and picked a couple of volumes. The first, Michigan: A Guide to the Wolverine State, was compiled by workers of the Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration during the Depression. These writers, the book’s introduction says, were “forgotten men—slightly frayed and sometimes hungry.” They had pencil stubs and wastepaper to record what they learned. “Thinly clothed and with belts pulled in,” they were without cars and “thumbed their way to their rendezvous with their source materials.”

What is a Michigander? The worker/writers hitchhiking and writing with pencil stubs in the mid-1930s couldn’t really tell. Michigan consists of two peninsulas amid the Great Lakes and is without uniform statewide geographic characteristics. If the WPA guide was only lightly touched by history from below, it was bold in another radical sense, its materialist periodization of history. This matters for us today.

A couple musty treasures from a friend’s garage spark remembrance in the flat Zoom time of pandemic. What new composition of our ‘we’ can make the earth move?

The land was taken, stolen, over a cask of rum. “The dignity of the savage,” write these frayed, forgotten men, “was shaken by the white man’s most potent bargaining asset”—booze—and “the rape of the Michigan forests was on.” The joists and rafters, the posts and beams of the big Midwest cities were composed of Michigan lumber, from which timber barons amassed vast fortunes. Meanwhile, wood lodged deep in the cultural consciousness, evoked by the Mackinaw plaid shirt and the smell of a fireplace. The economy based on wood went, and the state’s next economy “for contribution, exploitation, and, perhaps, error was in its minerals.” I like that choice of words, “perhaps, error.”

The material basis of capitalist dynamics, or its human and ecological catastrophes called “investment/development,” was first in the fur trade, then in timber, third in minerals, fourth in automobiles. We can see aspects of these different property regimes stretching from the communal life of indigenous folk in the 17th century to the lumber camps for the expropriation of the forests of the 19th century to the boarding houses of remote mining towns to the massive mechanics of the auto assembly line in Dearborn, River Rouge, Detroit in the 20th century.

The working-class composition in each of these periods was different as far as the work was concerned (trappers, lumberjacks, hard rock miners, auto workers). It was also different as far as its reproduction was concerned: In the 17th century bands of indigenous Ojibway and Potawatomi; in the 18th century colonial settlers from New York and New England; migrants from Scandinavia, Ireland, and southern and Slavic Europe in the 19th century; African Americans in the Great Migration from the South in the 20th. Just as one period was replaced rather than destroyed by another, so it was with the composition of the Michiganders. After these constellations of the labor market pass away, their experience as culture and ideas may persist. What’s left over is Hemingway’s subject.

My friend’s second recommendation was Ernest Hemingway’s The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories. During the summers of his first 20 years (1899–1920), this son of a Chicago doctor vacationed in Michigan’s north woods. His Nick Adams stories, published in 1938, tell about it. These coming-of-age tales were part of my own adolescent reading back in the 1950s. One of them, “Up in Michigan,” I thought, taught me about sex, though 66 years later the stories are a testament to growing up with the privileges and silences of a white man during successive recompositions of capitalist relations. Prison, the hobo jungle, the woods, the prize ring, are the locations where lost, wandering, traumatized people meet in transition times.

In “The Light of the World,” a couple of guys thrown out of a bar go down to the train station waiting room, “five whores waiting for the train to come in, and six white men and four Indians.” Two of the women argue about who slept with the champion African American boxer Jack Johnson. “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife” contrasts views on private property of white man and Ojibway:

“Well, Doc,” [the Ojibway hired hand] said, “that’s a nice lot of timber you’ve stolen.”

“Don’t talk that way, Dick,” the doctor said. “It’s driftwood.”

Nick Adams learns a way of love, and why not to kill a rival, from an Ojibway woman. His neighbors called her “skunk.” Hemingway’s style works by what the characters don’t talk about. The woman’s name is Prudence Mitchell. She breaks his heart. Suddenly, the famous declarative reticence of the prose bursts with seeds of possibility. In the last story, “Fathers and Sons,” he writes:

Could you say she did first what no one has ever done better and mention plump brown legs, flat belly, hard little breasts, well holding arms, quick searching tongue, the flat eyes, the good taste of mouth, then uncomfortably, tightly, sweetly, moistly, lovely, tightly, achingly, fully, finally, unendingly, never-endingly, never-to-endingly, suddenly ended, the great bird flown like an owl in the twilight, only it was daylight in the woods and hemlock needles stuck against your belly. So that when you go in a place where Indians have lived you smell them gone and all the empty pain killer bottles and the flies that buzz do not kill the sweetgrass smell, the smoke smell and that other like a fresh cased marten skin.

The cascade of adverbs falls into a disappearing world. The tragedy of this intersectional intercourse was, to express it in the lazy slang of the present, that it was not sustainable, not transparent, not resilient. But pay attention to what he says.

Skunk, marten, beaver, wolverine: These are creatures from that first period of Michigan history, that early phase. Even now, they’re not quite finished off. Anishinabekwe botanist and writer Robin Wall Kimmerer explains the fragrance of sweetgrass in her scientific and spiritual book, Braiding Sweetgrass:

Its scientific name is Hierochloe odorata, meaning the fragrant, holy grass. In our language it is called wiingaashk, the sweet-smelling hair of Mother Earth. Breathe it in and you start to remember things you didn’t know you’d forgotten.

Yes, that would be the commons. The earth to share, with delight, not ravage yet again in the sequence of error: That is what Hemingway’s love-making was trying to get at. Talk about “what we don’t talk about”!

Hemingway had a geological reference for orgasm, “the earth moves.” Actually, he violates the known laws of physics when he writes, “time having stopped and he felt the earth move…” You find that in For Whom the Bell Tolls, his novel of “premature anti-Fascism,” as he’d later say. In adolescent insecurity I learned from the mystery of such phrases and later learned to mock them.

As yet another catastrophe looms, a new era is laboring to birth some world that might avert it. This is the vital interregnum. A couple musty treasures from a friend’s garage spark remembrance in the flat Zoom time of pandemic. What new composition of our “we” can make the earth move? We start by talking it. The soulful descendants of Richard Allen, Absalom Jones, Prudence Mitchell, and those forgotten, “with belts pulled in,” have something to say.

Peter Linebaugh, a historian, is the author, most recently of Red Round Globe Hot Burning: A Tale at the Crossroads of Commons & Closure, of Love & Terror, of Race & Class, and of Kate & Ned Despard (University of California Press). He was a Kopkind mentor in 2014, and a guest speaker in 2019.

Scenes From a Pandemic is a Kopkind/Nation magazine collaboration. This piece originally appeared on The Nation‘s website on December 16, 2020. We thank Katrina vanden Heuvel, D.D. Guttenplan and The Nation crew.

Bonus: Happy Solstice Season

We hope you have been enjoying this series of dispatches from Kopkind participants, advisers, guests and friends on life in coronavirus time as they observe and experience it. With each week’s Bonuses during this long, gray season, we have featured more than 70 stories, songs, art works, videos, photographs, radio shorts, excerpts or notes from across the country and the world. We hope you are safe and ready. And we ask that, if you can, please press the Donate button (above) on this site—because we’re also hoping to survive this thing, to flower again on the green grass of Vermont; and we could really use a little help from our friends. Thank you all.

by Jamilah King

What I Learned Moving Cross-Country Twice in Four Months

On the Road, and home again

It was June, three months into the pandemic, and I was stranded on Interstate 80 a few hours outside of Salt Lake City when I started to think that all of this was maybe a bad idea. Something had happened miles ahead, and both lanes of westbound traffic were at a standstill. Ten minutes ticked by. Then 20. People turned off their engines, climbed out of their cars, and started stretching. I’d been in rapid, manic motion for weeks.

Stillness was not part of the plan.

The plan, to the extent that one existed, went something like this: I was on a mission to save my mother, who at the time was withering away all alone on the third story of a Victorian apartment building in San Francisco.

Her physical health had been in decline, but her mental health was what worried me the most. So much time spent alone, isolated, with only her ghosts and bottles of Hennessy to keep her company. In May, her calls had begun to become more frequent, more desperate. They were monologues of regret. I should’ve bought a house, she’d say, with the unmistakable lisp that always lets me know when she has been drinking. On especially bad days, she would call and berate me for being so far away. I would never do to my mother what you …

In two weeks’ time, I did what no sane New Yorker would ever do: I broke the lease on my rent-stabilized one-bedroom apartment, and I bought a car. The stretch of Crown Heights between Schenectady and Utica Avenues became ground zero for a biblical flood of my belongings. Clothes, bedding, shoes, went to men’s and women’s shelters. Books, magazines, pamphlets, went to park benches and the fronts of stoops. I was on a mission. To do what? I didn’t know yet.

I pictured myself back in the Bay Area surrounded by family members who’d put aside their decades-long feuds to come together in Covid-safe normalcy. I thought that the ruptures between my mother and me could be paved over with proximity. I’d forgive her for her not-so-subtle guilt-tripping and periodic slide into narcissism, and she’d make peace with having a divorced lesbian daughter who preferred life a continent away. I’d have my own apartment, but we’d order a delicious Christmas dinner and do something hopelessly normal, like watch A Christmas Story on TV. I’d have proof that my sacrifice, the great burden of inconvenience for which I’d given up everything and driven across the country, was worth it. People all around me were making similar, life-altering decisions. Certainly, there was a reason for it all.

Here’s what I did instead: I tried to force-feed my own brand of healing onto my mother. I did so pompously, outrageously, endlessly. Every phone call was a check-in about progress: Did she make that doctor’s appointment? Would she be okay with me calling her doctor? Maybe she should drink more water. Every visit was a chance for me to say what was wrong and offer, unprompted, ideas for making it my definition of right. I was the prototype of the know-it-all millennial, badgering my mother as if I were the parent, pushing her closer to a casket than any virus ever could.

Sometimes you make big, costly decisions during global pandemics just to feel a little bit more alive.

I’m back in New York City now. My mother and I both agree, on some level, that it’s for the best. The Christmas thing is definitely not going to happen. I’m in a new apartment with new roommates and a car that’s already earned me two parking tickets and a speeding violation in rural Illinois that I can’t figure out how to pay online. I am deeply in debt from the summer’s excursions, and as I write this, I’m still trying to figure out how to get a studio apartment’s worth of brand new furniture shipped from San Francisco to Brooklyn at a rate that’s less than my monthly salary.

My mother and I are both physically healthy, no better or worse than we were in June. We talk several times a week, and though they’re superficial conversations about the weather or the election, I’ve found them to be small joys. My mother still drinks too much and tells me that she doesn’t. I still offer unsolicited advice, sometimes based on dumb inspirational quotes I’ve favorited on Instagram. And you know what? That’s okay. Because the summer taught me this: Sometimes the world is falling apart and all you want is your mom, and you better take what you can get while she’s still around. And sometimes you make big, costly decisions during global pandemics just to feel a little bit more alive.

Sometimes I wish I could go back to that gridlocked road outside of Salt Lake City and warn myself of what was to come, of the tens of thousands of dollars that I did not have but somehow spent, of the arguments my mother and I would have, of the sheer hubris in thinking I knew better than a woman who’s lived twice my age. I would take a moment to think about the fact that two hastily arranged cross-country moves in four months is, in fact, batshit crazy and definitely not a good look on my credit score.

And then I would do it all over again.

Jamilah King is a writer based in Brooklyn who is also host of the Mother Jones podcast. She participated in Kopkind’s political camp in 2009.

Scenes From a Pandemic is a Kopkind/Nation magazine collaboration. This piece originally appeared on The Nation‘s website on December 9, 2020. We thank Katrina vanden Heuvel, D.D. Guttenplan and The Nation crew.

Bonus: The Social Contract, Cuban Style

Cuba has more doctors per capita than the United States and an expansive system of community health workers. ‘The family doctor’ is alive and well. To date, 137 Cubans have died of Covid-19, a rate of 1.5/100,000 population. By contrast, Covid deaths in the US and the UK are 91.03/100,000 and 96.44/100,000, respectively. Cuba’s famed traveling medical corps, whose some 4,000 members have visited more than three dozen countries since early in the pandemic, helping them care for their sick, has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. From Albany, Jon Flanders, a retired railroad worker, longtime internationalist and Kopkind supporter, sent the link below to a documentary on the role of The Henry Reeve International Medical Contingent and, more broadly, on the coordination of the Cuban health system in prioritizing public health. The film is a collaboration between Dr. Helen Yaffe of the UK and Dr. Valia Rodriguez of Cuba.

We hope you have been enjoying this series, now in its 35th installment, which, with each week’s Bonuses during this long, gray season, has featured about 70 stories, songs, art works, videos, photographs, radio shorts, excerpts or notes from Kopkind’s extended family across the country and the world. We hope you are safe and ready. And we ask that, if you can, please press the Donate button above on this site—because we’re also hoping to survive this thing, to flower again on the green grass of Vermont; and we could really use a little help from our friends. Thank you all.

Scenes From a Pandemic: 35

by Roberto Lovato

A continuing series of dispatches from Kopkind participants, advisers, guests and friends on life in coronavirus time as they observe and experience it.

Good Times, End Times on 26th and Folsom

San Francisco

I’m standing near the sunny corner of 26th and Folsom, two blocks from my writer’s cave, across the street from the projects and down the block from my birthplace, in San Francisco’s Mission district.

The projects are surrounded by apartments that used to house big immigrant families—up to a dozen members in my family’s case—apartments that now house the DINC (dual income, no children) people, who also own the Victorian duplexes priced from $1 million on up.

Two men, Seyfu and Ricky, are kicking back smoking a blunt in front of the small gray apartment building that houses Iglesia Arca de Dios, the Pentecostal church that’s been reviving the Holy Spirit three to four days a week since I left the Mission for wartime El Salvador in 1990.

I approach them, hoping they can give some small sense of how Covid-19 has hit the old hood. The most visible indicator: It’s 3 pm and there are no people on the street—no kids coming home from school, no Mexican and Salvadoran moms pushing baskets with food or laundry, no groups of men hanging out on the corner. Just Seyfu and Ricky, standing next to the church.

I look at the church. Images of the Salvadoran and Guatemalan migrants who once packed it rush to mind. They first came to the Iglesia seeking solace from the apocalyptic ravages of war. These days, immigrants come for other reasons. Clients at the Clínica Martín-Baró mental health center, founded by my friend Felix, tell social workers their main fear is that they will be uprooted because they can’t make the rent. Local children echo this sentiment in a poetry collection filled with stories of being pushed out, or of robots protecting their families from evil landlords. At the church, the booming voice of the 5’2″ pastor provides succor.

---

The weed is legal and sweet smelling, the virus is spiking, homicides are down but kids write poems about being pushed out, or dream of robots protecting their families from the landlord.

---

“Who are you, bro?” Seyfu asks hesitantly, his muscular body tightening as if getting ready to light me up, if necessary. Ricky stands quietly, looking more chill and pretty high. Their eyes move up and down my leather-jacketed body to see if I’m friend, foe, or fucking cop. Neither of them is wearing a mask. I am. The wondrous perfume of the legal kush they’re smoking wafts through the air with a freedom I never knew back when I dealt joints and nickel bags of Colombian and skunk weed that, by comparison, smelled like dirty tube socks.

“I grew up down the street, near the corner of 25th,” I quickly respond.

“So, where’d you go to school at?”

“Horace Mann.”

“Yeah? So, if you went to Horace Mann, who was Mr. Sullivan?”

“You mean Sullineck?” I say, referring to the nickname some of us gave Horace Mann’s truant officer because of the blob of pinkish white flesh that occupied the space where his neck may once have been.

“Aw, fuck!” Seyfu exclaims, as he steps back and cocks his head, laughing in a gesture of surprise. “This dude is the real Horace Mann deal! What up, bro? Whatdyu need?”

“I’m just here trying to understand what daily life is like now, especially with Covid.”

“Well, there been a few cases in the projects, but it’s been chill.”

In February, San Francisco became the first US city to declare a state of emergency in response to the virus, thanks to Mayor London Breed, who grew up in a Western Addition housing project. Breed’s model Covid response is guided by veteran doctors and scientists who garnered great experience back when the AIDS epidemic ravaged the projects down the street. Sadly, Breed’s housing, policing, and other policies are guided by Big Real Estate, Big Finance, and Big Silicon, whose greed has gentrified the Mission, exacerbated homelessness, and defined the city’s inhumanely shitty response to these and other crises that are hollowing out gorgeous San Francisco, exiling poor black and brown people.

“The thing that hasn’t been chill are the cops,” Seyfu continues. “They still on everybody’s ass.”

“For what?”

“They can’t bother us about weed anymore,” he says before taking a hit off his joint. “But they goin’ crazy about crack, heroin—and guns.”

“Has Covid slowed down the pace of people getting shot?”

“Nah. People dealin’ and shootin’; people still doin’ their thing.”

I think on how relative the ideas about violence and calamity are as I walk around to look at the church founded by Central American war refugees.

Homicides in San Francisco are down. Way down. On the very day Donald Trump and William Barr were raging in the Oval Office against MS-13 last July, escalating the rhetoric and legal persecution by labeling its members “terrorists,” I interviewed members of the SFPD’s gang unit. They told me that MS-13 in the Mission had killed two people in 2019. Zero this year. Meanwhile, Covid has killed 154 in San Francisco County since March, low for a population this size, though there’s a spike in new cases now. In the city, the Mission has endured the highest number of those since mid-October, and the hottest spot in the district is three blocks from 26th and Folsom.

In front of the church dozens of ancient pieces of discarded bubble gum are embedded into the concrete, blackened from years. The sidewalk there has the misfortune of being next to Rubin’s Market on the corner. I remember when kids and adults would come out of Rubin’s chewing gum, hang out in front of the church and spit out their gum. I remember when the gum was fresh pink and purple, cuz I was one of those kids.

Rubin’s was also one of the major centers of the black market in the Mission. Rubin was my father’s black market mentor.

I look at the church and see myself as a deacon who turned to Jesus as a way to redeem myself from the shame of my father’s—and my—criminal dealings.

“They just started havin’ services again,” Seyfu tells me. “Things gettin’ loud around here.” Apocalyptic preaching became a sign of better days under loosened Covid restrictions. Since the spike in infections, things have tightened up. The church meets less frequently, but, when it does, the high-volume voice on the hulking loudspeakers rages about End Times every Monday, Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday, as it has for decades.

Roberto Lovato is the author of Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs and Revolution in the Americas (Harper Collins), a New York Times “Editor’s Choice,” which the paper hailed as a “groundbreaking memoir.” He is also an educator, journalist, and writer based at The Writers Grotto in San Francisco. He was a Kopkind participant in 2005.

Scenes From a Pandemic is a Kopkind/Nation magazine collaboration. This piece originally appeared on The Nation‘s website on November 25, 2020. We thank Katrina vanden Heuvel, D.D. Guttenplan and The Nation crew.

Bonus: A Music Video From Canada

Jesse Freeston, a Montreal-based filmmaker who participated in Film Camp, Kopkind’s collaboration with the Center for Independent Documentary, in 2011, brings this new music video which he made with Malika Tirolien, singer/songwriter/pianist, of her just-released single “RISE”. You can find all the lyrics translated on the YouTube page linked above; here, a sampling:

We ain't here to ask anymore
We ain't got chains anymore
We are free in our countries, we are free in our minds
It is not only in movies that we steal the show
Everyday day we create some Marielles Ninas and Malcolms
The pyramid is falling, we're changing the game
We rise
We rise yeah
We rise

Tirolien, originally from Guadeloupe and long part of the Montreal jazz scene, fuses the musical influences of the Caribbean and Latin America, North America, Europe and East Africa. For more of the pleasure of her sound, here is another song, “I’m Not the One”, from her collaboration with the Grammy-winning instrumental group Snarky Puppy.

At Kopkind, Jesse workshopped an early version of his powerful documentary Resistencia: The Fight for the Aguan Valley, which tells the story of Honduran farmers who took over the plantations following the US-backed coup. Recently he has been in the woods of northern Canada, documenting the resistance of the Wet’suwet’en Nation, defending their land and law against construction of an oil pipeline. For more of his work, go to jessefreeston.com.