Letter From Harlem

DARRYL PINCKNEY Normal is not coming back, my partner’s arm around me in the cold and dark says. A virus has given victory to the burkha. We will be masked. Public space is lethal not in new ways but in ways we thought were past. In histories of the Jazz Age and the Harlem Renaissance, the madness of the 1920s is viewed as a reaction to the slaughter of World War I, an expression of loss of faith in the idea of a rational society. As another cause for the wildness of the Roaring Twenties, the Spanish flu — the influenza epidemic of 1918 and 1919 — has been forgotten. We are always dancing on graves. I had never known completely empty New York streets at seven in the morning, the senior citizens’ shopping hour at loathed but nearby Whole Foods. I’d never before hurled myself up the middle of…