The pandemic hit Albany “like a bomb,” wrote the New York Times last year. Around 90,000 people live in and around Albany, and seventy percent of them are Black, including Johnson and nearly all of her clients.
“You can imagine every Black family either knows somebody or is someone affected by COVID-19,” Johnson told me in a May 2020 interview. “Three or four generations of a family may live in one house, so you’re seeing families with multiple cases across generations at one time. It has been the craziest thing, so much grief, so much pain, but people are persevering with their businesses because they want to provide a life for their families.”