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6 Being Black in Orange “I had four helpers. That’s how much work they had. But now you see, the job I had, if I was white I’d a-been the plant superintendent. But by being black I was just Doug. A plant superintendent is a man that knows everything about a business, and that I knew.” Douglas Briggs “If we’ve got anything in the house to eat you can eat out of the same skillet .”1 Such was the relationship that existed between some blacks and whites in Orange. Black domestics might nurture several generations in a white family and be treated with the same love and affection as the most cherished family member. Peggy Garrett spoke of the intimacy in her own family: “We had the same black lady that worked for us for fifty-two years, and we were her family and she was ours. It was just like losing another mother [when she died]. She was part of us. When she died she still called my children her babies, when here they were grown and long since gone. But that’s the way she felt. She was one of us.”2 White southerners felt they enjoyed with blacks a rapport unknown in other parts of the country, and what white worker would not “rather have a good black at the other end of the crosscut saw than a lazy white man” or who would not respect a good black man in the cotton patch.3 Nevertheless, Orange was southern —very southern. The word “South” itself suggests location or place, and place was something with which black residents were all too familiar. Whites “didn’t come over, and you didn’t go over.”They knew their place, their space. Some perceived it as a “corner,” others a “boundary line,” but all knew there were “plenty of restrictions.”4 A directory prepared by the Supervisor of Shipbuilding, U.S.N., “The Orange Crate: A Handbook of Orange,Texas,”5 provided information and listed recreational activities for officers and enlisted personnel and dependents. For Negro personnel and their families, one site only was identified: the Booker T. Washington Recreation Hall. While there was an Orange City Library in the Women’s Club House with its “wide assortment of books . . . spacious Reading Room, and a librarian in attendance,” Negro personnel were directed, again, to 207 Being Black in Orange the Booker T. Washington Recreational facility for their books. The handbook mentions swimming options, including the “swimming hole” in Cow Bayou. There is little suggestion that blacks would have been any more welcome there than at the Beaumont Country Club pool, another of the recommended sites. Where black citizens lived, ate, learned, worshiped, worked, walked, socialized —even where they waited for the bus—were all restricted.There were front doors black people never entered and back doors they were required to enter.There were pews they never occupied. They had to eat back in the restaurant kitchen, ride in the back of the bus, and watch the movie from up in the balcony. The black male best step off the sidewalk and let the white woman pass.There were— “Well, you know how it was.They had the two restrooms and blah, blah, blah.”6 If the line were long, some whites thought nothing of stepping in front of a black person ahead of them. Inside, the black man best take off his hat; the black woman best buy the hat without trying it on.They knew how to tend to their own business . If you were white and wanted to be polite you spoke of “colored town,” and the “nice” blacks were to be referred to as “colored.” If you were black you were expected to be polite.“On the farms—anywhere—it was ‘Mister’ and ‘Yes sir.’”7 In the black schools students received tattered and dated textbooks handed down from the white schools. One East Texas native recalled, “We would cry sometimes because a page would be missing out of the book, and the pages would not be missing out of the teacher’s book.”8 A swift reckoning, for certain, awaited that student suspected by the teacher of tearing out a page in order to avoid completing a lesson.9 In his 1934 study of Negro education in East Texas, William Riley Davis concluded that the state had a dual educational system, but dual in name only. “[T]he Texas system is essentially a...

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