A father’s influence on his daughter can be as powerful as a mother’s can be on her son. I’ve interviewed women who strived for years and achieved considerable worldly success out of yearning for a father’s approval, but felt their efforts were failures because of their father’s need to bestow his hopes and expectations on a son and male heir, something they could never be no matter how hard they tried. Girls, white, middle-class girls, born in the early decades of the 20th century were usually educated to the extent that the law required and then expected to work only until they married; if they received further education, the purpose was usually the same, that is, to catch a good provider and become a homemaker. As late as the 1960s, most women enrolled in colleges were less interested in preparing for a career than with finding a mate. The African-American experience is different, and girls knew that, as women, they would most likely be expected to work, although the Victorian lady, a female who stayed home, did not work for pay, and was taken care of well by a husband, was considered by both races as the ideal destiny.
     William Southern would rank as an outstanding father for a girl of any race, and an unusual one for the first half of the 20th century. How much of his wisdom was the legacy of his Blackfoot Indian paternal background or his Virginia slave maternal background is uncertain. What is clear is that he had great expectations for his eldest daughter, and he let her know it, and his belief and support served her well.
     Just as successful men, in discussing their achievements, cite their mothers unflagging support, so do successful women sing the praises of their fathers. And Helene Slater’s deep love for the father who raised her expresses what women feel for men who stand behind them through thick and thin. Two previous stories, now in the Archive, dealt with Helene’s struggle against racism. Here she pays tribute to the man whose skill as a father imbued her with the self-esteem, strength of will and courage that enabled her not only to survive but to overcome obstacles that have broken so many others.

HELENE SOUTHERN SLATER
Pop

My father always laughed at bald-headed men. He thought nothing in the world was funnier. He’s say, “I never saw a bald-headed Indian,” and he would talk about his father wearing his hair down to his shoulders. Pop’s father, my grandfather, was a Blackfoot Indian. I never saw him. I never knew his tribal name, only his American name—Anderson Southern.
     My father’s first name was William. His nieces and nephews used to call him Uncle Will, but to my sister and me, he was Pop. Never daddy. I never had a daddy. It was always Pop, Pop, Poppa.
     His mother I did know. Grandmother was a dear little old woman who had come up from slavery. She would sit in her room and smoke her pipe. After Mama died, Papa sent for her and she came to live in our house so we would be raised in a family.
     Mama died in 1918, the month that World War I ended. At that time an influenza epidemic traveled around the whole world, and it carried away my mother along with hundreds of thousands of other people. One of my earliest memories of my father is of him sitting in one of the armchairs at the dining room table. This happened right after Mama died, and he held my little sister in his lap, and I was leaning up against him, with my right side pressed against his left side. The tears were coming down his face. I was five years old.
     My mother had been a school teacher in a little country school in Fairfax County, Virginia. Pop was a chubby little gentleman, handsome as far as I’m concerned. He grew up on a farm in Virginia. He was not an educated man, but he became a successful businessman. He was a painting contractor. The name of his company was the Crescent Paint Company, and a silver crescent moon was on his stationery and business cards. His paint store was at 15th and Bainbridge, but he also had an office in the white section of Philadelphia. Neighborhoods in Philadelphia were segregated in those days.
     Pop’s clients were major corporations like the Campbell Soup Company whose main offices were in Camden, New Jersey. He painted the home offices of the B&O Railroad and the Baldwin Locomotive Works. In the summertime he hired young medical students from Meharry Medical School in Nashville, Tennessee (that was a famous colored medical school; in those years, coloreds couldn’t attend medical school with whites). These students worked for my father during their summer vacations and saved money so they could pay their tuition in the fall.
     Pop was a member of the board of directors of the Birmingham Loan Association and also of a hospital. In other words, he was what people call a self-made man. We lived in a fourteen-room brick house in a middle-class colored neighborhood, and Grandma didn’t have to lift a finger because he hired girls to do all the house work. As children, my sister and I never wanted for anything.
     When I was young, my sister and I would wait for Pop to come home at night to read us what we called the funnies, the comic strips in the newspapers. Mutt and Jeff. Maggie and Jiggs. My sister and I loved the funnies and we even created our own. In mine, I was the person named Beauty-o-Rose, and my sister’s name was Lots-o-Cranberry. We drew the pictures and wrote the blurbs with ladies saying things to each other. We didn’t show our comic strips to Pop. They were just between my sister and me. But we couldn’t wait for Pop to get home from work to read us the funnies, that was the highlight of our day.
     I remember the Christmases. The trees with real candles on the branches that we would light with a match. My father, God love him, would get up in the middle of the night to trim the Christmas tree and put out all those toys for us two little girls. I’d be awake at five in the morning, and he would be surreptitiously coming up the stairs from filling our stockings with gifts he would say came from Santa Claus. He bought us dolls, but he also bought us an electric train, and drums and horns and things that made noise. Naturally, first thing my sister and I did was blow the horns and bang on the drums. Poor man, what he must have gone through with us two little loudmouthed things, up at five o’clock in the morning blowing horns and banging drums. Even after I had grown up, when I would come home at two, three o’clock in the morning, a gift from Santa Claus would be waiting for me on my bedroom door.
     When she was still a baby, my little sister was stricken with polio. Her neck was crooked. The kids called her “crooked neck.” I did too; you know how mean kids can be. My sister couldn’t straighten her neck out and she had to wear a brace at night—lie in the bed with this strap under her chin, her head held back by heavy weights. That lasted for years.
     The doctor said she needed a certain kind of climate to get better, so Pop bought thirty-three acres in Pleasantville, New Jersey, six miles from Atlantic City, and he built a beautiful summer home where we went every year as soon as school was out. We drove there in our family car, which was a Locomobile. That was the Mercedes of that period. It was a big pale green touring car, and Pop used to take us kids and our little friends for rides.
     At Halloween, other kids were out in the street walking around with their costumes on. We didn’t go anywhere trick or treating, just stayed in the house. One year Pop dressed up in a clown costume, and my sister and I were two little clowns.
     Pop didn’t have girl friends while my sister and I were growing up. He had one very dear friend, a lawyer, Mr. Mitchell, an old bachelor man who liked the opera, and my father began to like the opera along with him. They would go regularly to performances, and afterward my father would buy the record of the opera he had just seen. We wound up the victrola to make the table spin, and then we put the arm with the needle down on the record, and that’s how we got music to play. We listened to Enrico Caruso and John MacCormick. They were our favorite singers. Then my father bought a big book with the stories of all the great operas, and from reading that book and listening to his records I learned the operas and came to understand what the music was about.
     When radios came on the market, Pop bought one. Here we were in Philadelphia, and we got a radio and we turned it on, and we could hear people in New York or Chicago talking. It was a miracle. I can remember how astonished I was the first time we tuned in California. That was amazing to me! I listened to Douglas Fairbanks on the radio! Not Douglas junior, but the first one, the old man. I remember shouting, “Pop! We got Douglas Fairbanks!”
     Pop gave us every advantage he could, but he was very strict. He wore his britches with a belt, and if he was mad at me, he would pull his belt off and whip my legs. That’s how I got punishment when I disobeyed. The beatings hurt, but they weren’t severe. My legs didn’t bruise or bleed. The worst thing was that this whipping had been done in front of the other kids. Embarrassment—that was the thing that did me in.
     In 1929 the Depression hit. Pop lost everything. He lost all his money, he lost our house. In the parlor we had a big chandelier with glittering crystals. When we had to leave our house, Pop was up on the ladder taking the crystals down one by one, and I was so nervous was that he might fall. He was so unhappy, so broken down because he had lost everything and he made the remark, “If I didn’t have my children, I would kill myself.”
     He fixed up an apartment for us above the paint store, and that’s where we went to live. He lost his business, and after that he sold Real Silk stockings door to door. Still he found the money somehow to send me to Howard University in 1931, and he kept me there for two years. Then one day a check Pop had sent me bounced. His money was gone, and I left college and started to work. Years and years passed before I finally got the degree he wanted me to have.
     In the fifties when I lived in Brooklyn, I spoke on the phone to my father every week. Our arrangement was that Pop would call me one Sunday morning, and the following Sunday morning I would call him. My father always called me by my childhood nickname. He’d say, “Hello, Nana.” And I would say, “Hiya, Pop.”
     There was a summer when I decided to take a vacation and visit my Aunt Elizabeth and Uncle Jake. They had purchased a fifteen-acre farm in a place called Mizpah, New Jersey. Pop said “I’ll go too. I’ll drive you down there.”
     Aunt Elizabeth was my father’s baby sister, and she was married to Mr. Livingston from Florida, who was my Uncle Jake. They made their income in real estate. They bought houses and rented floor-through apartments. When I was growing up, they lived in North Philadelphia.
     I came down to Philadelphia from New York, and Pop and I drove to Mizpah. Vacation time there was going to be very pleasant.
     Mizpah is not too far from Atlantic City, and quite close to the Atlantic City race track. In New York City, I had been going to the races at Aqueduct. I talked about that. Pop had never seen a horse race, and he was very anxious to see one.
     Here I am, the New York sophisticate, the smart aleck, the know-it-all. I buy a racing paper. I stay up the night studying the record of the horses, the histories of the jockeys. I’m figuring what horses we’re going to bet tomorrow at the track.
     The next day we go to the track. Uncle Jake and Aunt Elizabeth, my aunt’s friend Miss Jasper, Pop and me. So what happens?
     Uncle Jake was a farmer and he knew horses. He said, “I don’t intend to lose my farm pig by pig. I’m not going to bet on a horse.”
     My aunt and her friend were betting. The way they choose a horse was according to how cute it looked; if they liked the way a horse held its tail, or its face.
     I’m betting according to the racing sheet, the horse’s record.
     In one of the early races a horse named Hiya Pop was running. He had a pretty good record so I decided to put some money on Hiya Pop. My father decides he’s going to bet Hiya Pop, like me. Don’t you know, Hiya Pop came in and paid twenty-one dollars. It was wonderful!
     This is the way we go on and on and on through the day.
     We get to the last race. A horse named Flatbush was running. Flatbush was a sad-looking horse, dark gray, almost black-gray. Nothing much to look at. He wasn’t cute. He didn’t have any record to speak of. Flatbush never won a race in his life.
     As I said, I was living in Brooklyn at that time, and many people lovingly called that place Flatbush. Pop decides to bet on Flatbush. Why? Because I was living there. Pop was sentimental. And that’s how he placed his bet. Bet on Flatbush, who nobody else could find a reason to bet on, because that was where I was living.
     Don’t you know that Flatbush won that race and paid fifty-seven dollars.
     This happened in the fifties. But it was true before that and after that. My father always bet on me, and I always tried to come through for him.
     My father brought me up to expect the best from life. I didn’t expect evil things to happen to me, or to be without, although I ended up being without, and I have known a lot of sorrow. When bad things happened to me, that was always a total shock. Yet thinking I was entitled to better things and to a little happiness helped me over the years to accomplish more. Many people don’t expect good things to happen to them, and when something does, they’re stunned and they can’t act on their own behalf. They put their left foot forward, they don’t know how to enjoy it or make the most of it. I always expected, I still expect the good things from life. That expectation helped me to stand up for myself, to fight for better things. It is the source of the strength that flows through me to fight on for another day.
     Pop died from a cerebral hemorrhage. I was living in New York when I got a phone call that Pop was gone. I went home to Philadelphia for the funeral. His death came as a terrible shock because he hadn’t been sick. He just fell down dead. I thank God he didn’t suffer. He had a smile on his face as he lay in the coffin. And he had a head full of beautiful hair.
     My father played such a big part in my life. I loved him, I admired him, and I wanted to be like him. When I was growing up people didn’t talk about role models. That terminology is recent. But Pop was my role model. I wanted nothing in life so much as to please him. The college degree I finally got, all the awards I won over my lifetime, they were all for him. None of it was for me. It was all for him.

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