REPORT FROM THE FROZEN HEARTLAND: PART II

By Juan Montoya

My friend came to pick me up at the Hartford, Conn., airport after 5 p.m.

The cold air of a Northeast winter cut through my jeans and light jacket like a scythe though tall grass. The cold air hit you like the slap of a high school girl on a date with someone with Roman hands. It was cold.

But unlike the cold of blue northerns in South Texas that seeps though your body with dampness, this cold dry, but all pervasive. If the wind was not blowing, and you were not wet, you could actually stand it.

My friend was still trying to tie up the loose ends and take care of the business of taking his wife's mother home with them to Houston. The couple had found her living in unacceptable conditions with her mate. He, in a cold, damp basement. She, an asthmatic, sleeping in a lounge chair keeping him company there.

They decided a 73-year-old woman should not be compelled to bear those conditions and now they were busy taking care of the business of moving. Utility services, bank accounts, bills, etc. At the same time, there was the whole business of packing her stuff, storing it, and looking after her needs.

I was there to help with the moving and to accompany my friend, his wife and her mother on the drive to warm Houston.

For the meantime, we would all stay at the Heritage Inn bed-and-breakfast in Milford, Conn., a typical New England city dating back to pre-Revolutionary War days. The bed and breakfast was a remodeled tobacco warehouse built in 1830 and, transformed into an inn in 1988, and selected for inclusion in the National Register of Historic Places the same year.

"Did they bring in the tobacco from the South and distribute it here?" I asked the night clerk. "No," he answered. "Local farmers grew tobacco here and cured it and dried it here before putting it in the railroad for distribution."

I never knew tobacco was grown that far north, but apparently, since the Native Americans smoked it, it was.

New Milford also had a long history. The Connecticut General Assembly agreed to buy the land from 14 Indian families in 1702. In 1712, it authorized for a patent to establish the town. The town prospers and new families arrive to settle there.

By 1756, the town census reads that there are "1,121 whites and 16 Negroes" living there.
In 1757, Mary Roberts frees Dan, her black slave, upon the execution of an agreement that requires him to pay her an annual sum for the remainder of his life.

During the Revolutionary War, a field nearby is used by the patriot army to train and await the British that never came.

The wall near the reception desk of the Heritage Inn has a photograph of President Theodore Roosevelt, who briefly stopped outside on Sept. 3, 1902 aboard his presidential train to address his fellow veterans of the Spanish American War. That same day a member of his presidential party ( a Secret Service agent) was killed in an accident and Teddy declines to speak, begging the indulgence of the veterans waiting for him to address them.

All this, of course, has nothing to do with my visit here, except for the fact that the town still has a city green, and a New England-postcard look in the snow that I never knew still existed. It isn't made to look historical. Like Brownsville, it is historical.

But there are a few differences. There are few blacks here to work as domestics. Now, it's Aurora, the woman from Peru (yes, Peru in South America), who does the maintenance at the inn.

And next door to the inn is a Hispanic Deli where you can send money grams home to Mexico and Latin America (for a fee, of course) and also buy some of the food items sold in Mexico and Latin America.

And just last week, in a dispute with one of his tenants, a landlord got into an argument with an Ecuadorean renter and killed him.

How did these Hispanics get here?

"A friend told me that they were looking for someone to clean the inn and I came to apply," said Aurora. "I need to work and I'm here."

Does she like New England?

"Esta bonito, pero esta muy frio," she says.