A little city, battered by the virus, tells its stories
CENTRAL FALLS, R.I. (AP) — The beleaguered people of Central Falls moved quickly through the high school gym’s injection stations and then to rest on dozens of metal folding chairs, borrowed from the Knights of Columbus.
Immunity was at hand, but no one was celebrating.
Central Falls — the poorest and smallest city in the nation’s smallest state — is also among the hardest hit by COVID-19. Sorrow reaches across the city: The dead husband. The mother who came from Guatemala in search of a better life, only to die in a new land. The Polish priest who buried parishioner after parishioner.
The city has endured repeated waves of illness, with rates of confirmed cases that often dwarfed cities across New England.
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EDITOR’S NOTE — Another in an occasional series, COVID’s Scars, looking at how some of those battered by the pandemic are trying to recover after a year of pain and loss.
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But the troubles of Central Falls extend far back, long before the coronavirus arrived: Moonshine in the 1920s, cocaine in the 1980s. Illegal gambling dens in the 1940s, when policemen who tried to shut them down were fired for misconduct. Cascading mill and factory closures in the years after World War II, starting an inexorable slide into poverty and, finally, city bankruptcy in 2011.
So the people of Central Falls — mostly Latin Americans these days, and before that immigrant waves of French Canadians, Irish, Greeks, Syrians and others — are accustomed to hard times. But in the gym on this dreary Saturday, they were mostly stoic. A few gossiped quietly. Some stared at their phones.
If you asked, though, they would tell you their stories of their COVID year — how they suffered, how they rose to the occasion and how they failed, what they...
