While the news media celebrates declining case numbers in the major cities on the east coast, they are not noticing the significance of what is happening in the South. Wilkerson says that “the people of the Great Migration who ultimately made lives for themselves in the North and West were among the determined of those in the South, among the most resilient of those who left, and among the most resourceful of blacks in the North.” I am not at all sure that such a qualification is defensible or needed. The African Americans who make up the black belt of the Deep South deserve to be counted among the strong, the resilient, the determined. They have survived and persisted in a place that is endemically underfunded and short-shrifted. A place that has come up short because the white interests in this country didn’t care enough to change that trajectory. In the tiny town of Greensboro, Alabama, for instance, you can visit the safe homes that Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis used the night before the Selma march. People stayed to fight; they still do.

Now, the coronavirus looms like a ringwraith over what Flannery O’Connor called a “Christ-haunted” land. It finds a new foothold in the places that have the fewest recourses, the furthest trips to get to a hospital, the worst experiences with healthcare. The virus is settling in the counties where, 160 years ago, white plantation owners ran work camps for enslaved people enforced by daily violence. It is not a coincidence that COVID-19 is settling in here. Left is the mark of that legacy of slavery—descendants three and four generations later, taking this next round from the coronavirus. Only now, the national eye is not looking with the same intensity as it did when New York and New Jersey were the epicenters.