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My mother would cover me with her body when the shooting would start.”ĭanny left the neighborhood and worked as a machinist in Garland for 10 years before Daron convinced him to move back and manage the farm. “Growing up in Bonton was like growing up in Afghanistan or Pakistan,” he says.
He was raised in this neighborhood and remembers when people from the Rhoads Terrace housing project would take potshots across the street into the police station and shoot at the officers’ wives when they’d come by with lunch. Hawn Freeway in the 1960s served to further segregate the neighborhood, and crime and blight escalated in the ensuing years.ĭaron introduces me to Danny George, the manager of Bonton Farms, who takes me on a tour of the goat pen, chicken coop, beehives, in-vessel composting machine, and rows of vegetables. My mother would cover me with her body when the shooting would start.”Īfter World War II, when returning black veterans tried to move into neighborhoods just to the north, many of their homes were bombed by white residents, and Bonton became known as “Bomb Town.” The construction of the C.F. “Growing up in Bonton was like growing up in Afghanistan or Pakistan,” Danny George says. An area near the confluence of the Trinity River and White Rock Creek, former farmland that routinely flooded (the Rochester Park levee wouldn’t be built until the early 1990s), was set aside for blacks. When blue-collar whites started to move in after World War I, according to the documentary Bonton + Ideal by bcWORKSHOP, Jim Crow laws were used to enforce segregation, limiting black residents to the least desirable areas along the flood plain and train tracks. In the early 1900s, this area was home to black workers who were brought in as cooks, maids, and yardmen for the Jewish merchants in the mansions on Park Row and South Boulevard. Standing amid the tidy rows of San Marzano tomatoes, multicolored globe eggplants, collard greens, and pepper plants, it’s hard to believe this is South Dallas. I am struck: for moments like this, he gave up everything.īonton Farms is set on a 1.25-acre plot of ground bordered by Bexar Street to the east, the Trinity River floodway to the south, and the Buckeye Commons public housing complex to the west and north.
Peanut turns back to his music and Daron turns back to me. They were basically trying to get me in this program, like an intern thing or something, and get me in a homeless shelter. “You should have gone to Cafe Momentum like I told you.” I worry that Daron may not want to talk about his personal life in front of a stranger, and I’m about to change the subject when he turns to the young man. He has earbuds in, a cigarillo over one ear, and is smoking a cigarette. He’s wearing sweatpants and a green Henley shirt. It seems improbable, to put it kindly.Īs I ask Daron how the death of his first wife, Marcy, drove his radical life change, a young man walks up from the street and sits down at another picnic table. I am trying to understand how this successful businessman and father of two could sell his 3,600-square-foot home in Frisco, give up a job with a mid-six-figure salary, move into a Habitat for Humanity house with a two-time convicted felon, and start a farm in a food desert. A cool fall breeze blows down a levee at the end of a cul-de-sac.
We are sitting at a covered picnic table across the street from Bonton Farms, the urban oasis he founded in South Dallas. With thick, wavy hair and sky blue eyes that match his checkered shirt, Daron Babcock looks like Ryan O’Neal if the Ryan O’Neal from Love Story had hit middle age sober, healthy, and at peace with his demons.