In 1961, I befriended a family living in a slum on Detroit’s west side. The mother, Della Slayton, had fled Hazard, Kentucky with her five children a few years earlier after her husband tried to stab her. She landed in Detroit and settled into a large run down Victorian house and a life on welfare.
The oldest child Asbel about 14, could not read or write.
The youngest boy, Homer, was a streetwise kid who brought money home by shining shoes on street corners. Della’s other children were Larny, an attractive 19 year old girl, Clarence, a brooding teen-ager, Sis, and Mary Lu. Della picked up odd jobs wherever she could and worked hard to keep her children under one roof. The first time I knocked on her door she was certain I was either a cop or a social worker since no one else had ever visited. But as the weeks passed and I came by regularly we worked through the mistrust and became friends.
Because the family were “Hillbillies” They were the brunt of neighborhood hostility.
But when people on the block saw me pull up in a shiny new car every week, and then the bright lights from the photos, they had no idea what was going on but were sufficiently impressed snd the hostility stopped.
When I told Della, in the fall of 1962 that I was leaving, going to Paris, she said, “Is that a movie star?”
