Working at the Nursery Farm

3 min read

Just now

William L Slager

One summer about 1956 , when I lived in Dickinson, Texas I got a summer job working for a nursery man who had his main nursery in Dickinson. In this nursery he had a lot of raised beds with different kinds of plants and flowers which he and his wife grew and sold.

He had a growing ground located out in the country between League City and Friendswood. My job, along with his black helpers Roy and Dave, was to tend to all the plants in this growing ground.

I was sort of the de facto foreman, because I was white, although I didn’t know anything about growing plants. Fortunately Roy and Dave did, so I would help them do whatever was needed to do. This growing ground was not real large, I think it was about an acre or two. There was also an empty house situated on this property to store things in and where we could go inside to get out of the heat to eat our lunch. I would pack a lunch at home, go over to the nursery and get the nursery mans van-truck, then go and pick up Dave and Roy, and drive out to the growing ground.

Once we were there we would water plants, using water from a cistern next to the house, pull out weeds, and maybe sprinkle a little fertilizer here and there. Dave was a younger black person about twenty five years old, and Roy was an older black man about fifty years old, who was the real boss, since he knew what to do.

I think sometimes we would dig up particular types of plants and put them in plastic pots, and then put them in the back of the van to take back to the nursery. I don’t recall being told to pick a particular type of plant, but perhaps the nurseryman told me and then I was supposed to tell Roy.

All three of us got along just fine, and we would all work away all day long and then I got to drive the truck back to Dickinson and drop off Dave and Roy at their houses. Dave was always very anxious to get home and encouraged me to drive faster. He probably wanted to get home to his wife as quickly as possible.

He and Roy lived in houses fairly close to each other on the first street of the black part of Dickinson which was on the north side of the city. North of this street was all black people and south after a space of two empty blocks was all white people. I didn’t even know this part of Dickinson existed until I took this nursery job. It had been invisible to me before.

Everything in Black Dickinson was the same as in White Dickinson. For example, their elementary school looked EXACTLY like our elementary school. It was a duplicate in all respects. It was very curious to me at the time, and I’m guessing it had something to do with a separate but equal doctrine.

What is amusing to me now, is that when I was in Mr. Polke’s civics class at Dickinson High School, in one of our civics lessons we were encouraged to write learned essays about the plight of the poor segregated black people in Chicago or somewhere else in the North. We students didn’t even know that black Dickinson existed. Mr. Polke must have been laughing his ass off inside.

In any event, we all seemed to accept the situation and we all got along just fine in our separate but equal lives.