My memories of Granddad DuBois are few. I’m sure he was a great man, worthy of a better biography, and I depend upon all my older cousins to fill me in.
What I remember of him before he died when I was seven:
· At their home in Fulton, playing pickup stix or looking at the Viewmaster.
· Granddad, if I played on the floor, liked poking me in the ribs with his cane. He thought he was tickling me and would laugh jovially.
· Granddad asked me to spell M-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P-I. Dad did that, too. I never missed that in any spelling bee or quiz. I also knew it was next to Alabama and was where some relatives lived and where he grew up.
· Granddad repeating the nursery rhyme: Eenie-Meenie-Miny-Moe, with the next line being something I will never fully repeat. It was Grandmother’s gentle correction that endeared me to her. “Catch a N----r by the Toe,” said Slaton. Grandmother intervened with “Catch a Tiger by the Toe. That’s what you say.” I could see by his expression any lack of derision and only a playfulness. Dad said once, “That’s his Alabama upbringing for you.”
· He and Grandmother lived in the little house next door to us at 516 E. Rea Street in Marshall. He would put on his hat and take a walk with his cane. I think I always saw him wearing white shirts, nicely ironed, and I remember Grandmother ironing them.
· Grandfather said his bed and his desk came from his mother’s house which he said was nicely furnished. He said he financed his education in part through selling some family antiques he inherited. My son Andrew now has the single bed which came down through the DuBois family.
From records and memoirs we know Henry Harris Slaton DuBois, or “Slaton,” “HHS”, or “Rev. HHS,” was born in Greensboro, AL, to Rufus DuBois, DDS, and Martha Jane (Slaton) DuBois. He was the youngest of eight children. The three oldest of these were born before or during the Civil War, and there is a 21-year gap between HHS and his brother John Walton DuBois.
I once saw the house Granddad grew up in and was unimpressed by what was once “the plantation house.” It had some great architectural details, but of course, I was expecting the white-columned structure like I saw in “Gone With The Wind.” The house was built on brick piers, and underneath were chickens running about. I understand pigs used to be under there, too.
No one answered the door when Mom and I knocked in 1999, but through the screen door I could see a long, wide hallway with polished wood floors. The house stood for about 150 years, and without renovation, it was in pretty good shape. The house was later torn down to make way for affordable housing.
My father wrote in his memoirs, “Dad was the ideal loving and affectionate father who loved all humanity.” He went on to compare his two parents: “Mom was intellectual, ambitious and extremely proud of her children. My love of people I absorbed from my Dad.”
The idea for fashioning the protagonist Louisa in my novels—and her relationship with her preacher-inventor husband—comes in part from this short description. I think I’ll even have Louisa ghost-writing some of her husband’s sermons, because I imagine my grandmother might have made some suggestions to Granddad. The implication that Grandmother was smarter than Granddad comes through Dad’s memoirs, but there is also the inference that Granddad was a kind and generous person who viewed the world optimistically.
From my father’s memoirs:
Dad left at 18 to go to Birmingham Southern College and began a short career with Western Union. [The 1900 census lists him living in Greensboro as a telegrapher operator.] His work took him to Chattanooga and St. Louis where after a year in medical school at Washington University he decided to be a preacher and continued his education at Vanderbilt where he graduated from seminary. His first churches were in the St. Louis area, later to St. James, and then to Warsaw where he met Mom, the high school teacher.
Public records reflect that Slaton was in St. Louis as a telegraph operator by 1903 and was there during the 1904 World’s Fair. He was at Vanderbilt during the years 1909-1911. In 1913, possibly awaiting ordination and an appointment to a church, Slaton was again a telegraph operator. During his years as an operator for Western Union in St. Louis, Slaton reported on St. Louis Cardinal baseball games, reporting concurrent with the game. Such reporting was set in place decades earlier with the first reporting via telegraph of a game in 1844 in St. Louis. Love of Cardinal baseball was carried down through the decades in our family, from both Grandfather DuBois and Grandfather Warford.
Sometime in 1912 or 1913, Slaton married Susie Henderson. Though the Henderson family was connected with Glasgow, MO, they lived in St. Louis in 1910. Susie, then 34, was a stenographer for the Methodist bishop based in St. Louis, and it is possible that through such connection, Slaton met Susie.
The couple were living in Advance, MO, 139 miles south of St. Louis in 1914 when Susie, 38 soon after Martha Katherine’s birth (she was named after her two grandmothers), was hospitalized in St. Louis with puerperal infection, or “blood poisoning.” Less than two weeks after the birth, Susie died. Susie’s family undoubtedly helped care for the infant Martha Katherine until such time as Slaton could manage his daughter on his own.
By 1918, Slaton was posted to the Methodist Church in Warsaw, MO, where he met high school teacher Jennie May Stark, nearly 13 years his junior. When his daughter Martha was five, her half-brother Bill was born in 1919 to Slaton and Jennie, and a year later, Hubert Lee followed. Dad’s recollections of his childhood, though of an impoverished country preacher’s kid, are optimistic and full of events about which he laughed on into adulthood. His siblings, however, may have had a different take.
In those days, Methodist ministers moved every 1-2 years. Among the towns Slaton served in the 1920s were Fort Osage (1920 census), Malta Bend (where Dad was born), and Blackwater, Garden City, Peculiar and Houstonia which were mentioned in Dad’s memoirs. In traveling through Missouri with us kids, Dad used to say he had lived in nearly every small town in the state.
In the 1930s, Dad reports in his memoirs that the family moved from Peculiar to Linn, MO, their Model T Ford running out of gas several miles out. A man driving a truck with the sign “DANGER!! High Explosives” towed the car and family to town. No doubt, some praying occurred along the way.
Linn is in the foothills of the Ozarks, and there, Granddad taught his sons to fish in the Gasconade River. Love of fishing is a pastime still alive in the generations afterward. Dad had many fond memories of Linn, including playing baseball and basketball, listening to the 1932 World Series with the Cards and Yankees; swimming; and ice-skating.
During the Depression years, Dad said it was not uncommon to have modest Christmas gifts, including the 15 cent rubber ball he received one year.
Of Linn and similar small towns, Dad said they were “two miles long, and two yards wide—a yard on either side of the road.”
Other notable towns Slaton was posted to in the 1930s were Pilot Grove, Higginsville, Dalton (from which the kids were bussed for school into Keytesville and Brunswick), Triplett, and Chillicothe (a relative “big city” of 8,000). Between those years and Granddad’s retirement, he and Grandmother DuBois lived in Smithville, Mexico, Auxvasse, Shelbina, Center, Mexico, and Fulton before finally moving to Marshall to live next to us.
Granddad outlived his siblings by several decades except his brother Joe who died about ten years prior. Joe, and his sisters Mattie and Nannie, were those closest to Slaton in age and affection.
Mattie’s story can be seen as both romantic and tragic and worthy of a novel. Slaton’s devotion to his sister was such that, when she was institutionalized in a hospital for the mentally ill, he rode the train from Missouri to Alabama to visit her. According to asylum records, he provided his sister with nightgowns, lingerie, and dresses. When you consider his own frugal existence as a country preacher, this largesse is notable. Of Mattie’s other siblings, only Joe also visited even though all the lived substantially closer than did Slaton.
Like his grandfather John DuBois before him, Slaton lived into his ninth decade, continuing to occasionally perform weddings or other functions expected of a retired preacher. In those days, neither John DuBois nor grandson Slaton DuBois drew any pension from the Methodist Church. One was expected to live on the sums given them when weddings and funerals called them into service. Also like his grandfather, Slaton lived to see or know of all of his grandchildren. Contented and fruitful and simple were their lives at the end, such as they no doubt wished.
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