Read Online Let Me Be Frank With You by Richard Ford - Free Book Online

Yuletide winter coat, black, shiny boots, and carried a large black boat of a purse, appropriate to her age—which from the back seemed midfifties. She was also wearing a Christmas-y green-knit tam-o’-shanter pulled down like a cloche, something a young woman wouldn’t wear.
    I immediately assumed she was a parishioner-solicitor collecting guilt donations for the AME Sunrise Tabernacle over on the still-holding-on black trace of Haddam, beyond the Boro cemetery. In later years, these tidy frame homes have been re-colonized by Nicaraguans and Hondurans who do the gardening, roof repair, and much of the breaking-and-enteringchores out in Haddam Township, or else they run “Mexican” restaurants, where their kids study at poorly lit rear tables, boning up for Stanford and Columbia. These residences have recently faced whacker tax hikes their owners either can’t or are too wily to afford. So the houses have become available to a new wave of white young-marrieds who work two jobs, are never home, wouldn’t think of having children, and pride themselves on living in a “heritage” neighborhood instead of in a dreary townhouse where everything works but isn’t “historic.”
    A few vestigial Negroes have managed to hold on—by their teeth. Since my wife, Sally, and I moved back to Haddam from The Shore, eight years ago, and into the amply treed President streets—“white housing,” roughly the same vintage and stock as the formerly all-black heritage quarter—we’ve ended up on “lists” identifying us as soft touches for Tanzanian Mission Outreach, or some such worthwhile endeavor. We’re likewise the kind of desirable white people who don’t show up grinning at their church on Sunday, pretending “we belong, since we’re all really the same under the skin.” Probably we’re not.
    Snowflakes had begun sifting onto my driveway where I saw the black woman at my door, though a raw sun was trying to shine, and in an hour the sidewalk would have puddles. New Jersey’s famous for these not-north/not-south weatheroddities, which render it a never-boring place to live—hurricanes notwithstanding.
    Every week I read for the blind at WHAD, our community station, which was where I was just then driving home from. This fall, I’ve been reading Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival (thirty minutes is all they or I can stand), and in many ways it’s a book made for hearing in the dark, in a chill and tenebrous season. Naipaul, despite apparently having a drastic and unlikable personality, is as adept as they get at throwing the gauntlet down and calling bullshit on the world. From all I know about the blind from the letters they send me, they’re pissed off about the same things he’s pissed off about—the wrong people getting everything, fools too-long suffered, the wrong ship coming into the wrong port. Despair misunderstood as serenity. It’s also better to listen to Naipaul and me alone at home than to join some dismal book club, where the members get drunk on pinot grigio and go at each other’s throats about whether this or that “anti-hero” reminds them of their ex-husband Herb. Many listeners say they hear my half hour, then go off to sleep feeling victorious.
    Across the street, my neighbor Mack Bittick still had his NO SURRENDER ROMNEY - RYAN sign up, though the election’s long lost for his side. It sat beside his red-and-white FOR SALE BY OWNER , which he’d stationed there as if the two signsmeant the same thing. He’s an engineer and former Navy SEAL whose job was eliminated by a company in Jamesburg that makes pipeline equipment. He’s got big credit card bills and is staring at foreclosure. Mack flies the Stars and Stripes on a pole, day and night, and is one of the brusque-robust, homeschooling, canned-goods-stock-piling, non-tipper, free-market types who’re