The World According to Fannie Davis Read online

  In response to King’s death, Congress would finally pass the Fair Housing Act, which he and others had fought so very hard for—a triumph my mother understood firsthand, having been denied a mortgage for our home because of federal law. Barely a month after Mama’s birthday party, Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, and the toll of the dead, missing, and wounded in Vietnam reached over 100,000. By that summer, Olympic medalists Tommie Smith and John Carlos would each raise a black-gloved fist during “The Star-Spangled Banner” as a sign of black power. In Detroit, the black labor movement was gaining steam as four thousand racially integrated autoworkers staged a wildcat strike at Chrysler’s Dodge plant over assembly-line speedups and other grievances; meanwhile, Motown Records was mired in legal battles with its premier songwriting team, Holland-Dozier-Holland, over unfair royalty contracts. Richard Nixon was elected president.

  And it turns out, I hadn’t been holding on to Daddy’s leg for naught. That November, while I made my way through third grade, my father moved out. I’d slept atop his back or beside him every night, in the den where he stayed, for as long as I could remember, and I deeply felt his absence. Mama had just given me a fuzzy stuffed tiger she’d bought at Tiger Stadium, where she’d treated friends to see the Detroit Tigers play and actually win the World Series. I wasn’t a child who cared for stuffed animals, but I clung to my soft gold-and-black-striped tiger every night, cradling it in lieu of Daddy. When I went to visit my father in his new flat, he sat me on his lap and explained the meaning of the word divorce, a word so scary that I cried into my Wonder Bread bologna sandwich. When I asked if I could live with him, he said quietly, “No. I can’t take care of you the way your mama can.”

  Because my mother was in charge, because she made her own money, I suspect she could more easily make a tough decision that most women couldn’t. The family Numbers operation had been built by Mama—she controlled it. Or, as Aunt Florence puts it to me: “It wasn’t so much your daddy that was doing it. It was her that carried the load. She carried that load.”

  While visiting Daddy, the scary word still in my head, I sat at his table and wrote him a letter on notebook paper, in block letters colored with Crayola crayons. Atop the letter I wrote: I love my Daddy. Then I wrote:

  Dear Daddy, I don’t want to leave you. But I won’t worry. Can I call you when I get home? Are you going to come over for Thanksgiving? If you can’t come, I’ll send you a plate of food. Good-by. Love always, Bridgit.

  In December, Mama gave herself an early Christmas present: she took a much-anticipated trip to Miami Beach, Florida, for a winter holiday at the popular beachfront resort, the Fontainebleau.

  When Mama went on vacation at the end of 1968, she had a lot to celebrate, and a lot to escape: Across a decade, she’d established and maintained her reputation as a woman who banked the Numbers, a rarity in a man’s world. And she was newly separated. So what a big trip! Three girlfriends each without their men, all fortyish, traveled together to stay at the iconic, world-renowned, oceanfront hotel. My mother got the idea for herself and Lula and Mildred to stay at America’s Riviera, its French name pronounced the Anglicized way, as the “Fountain Blue.” She must’ve gotten more and more excited when she read the hotel’s brochure, which gushed: All our resources and efforts have been channeled to creating a resort designed to fulfill your every desire.…We have tried to anticipate your needs, and as proof of our sincerity, we will continue to improve and add features to enhance your stay and to stimulate your vacation. Mama loved to travel, and not in long car trips down South to visit family like so many migrated blacks. She preferred to fly.

  Who knows where Mama got the idea to vacation at the Fontainebleau? Maybe she’d dreamed of staying there ever since seeing Frank Sinatra welcome Elvis back home from the army, on the TV special broadcast from the hotel’s famed La Ronde Supper Club just ten days before I was born. Maybe she’d read that Sammy Davis Jr. and the Will Mastin Trio had performed there in 1961. Perhaps she’d seen it featured in James Bond’s 1964 classic Goldfinger, in a sweeping aerial shot that follows the opening credits. In fact, the month before Mama’s visit, Lady in Cement, filmed at the hotel and starring Frank Sinatra and Raquel Welch, opened in movie theaters.

  The Fountainebleau also had its notoriety. Rumors abounded of the hotel’s ties to and possible ownership by the Mafia. That link was never proven, though, and in an April 1968 article the Miami Herald retracted its claim, stating in part that after an intensive investigation, “We are of the opinion that the Fontainebleau Hotel is not owned or controlled by any gangsters or underworld characters.” As a result of that statement, the hotel’s owner, Ben Novack, withdrew his defamation suit against the newspaper. Mama was certainly no stranger to the Mafia. While she never had direct contact with organized crime, I often heard her refer with disdain to “the Dagos”—the Italian Mafia—as the ones who actually controlled the Numbers in the black community.

  My mother could afford the trip, and maybe that’s the simple reason she decided to vacation in Miami. And if you were with Fannie, your own experience got elevated alongside hers. She liked sharing the good life. Both Mildred and Lula were thrilled to be joining their best friend for a holiday during the high season. That trip was the biggest one Mama had taken to date, and it has stood tall in family lore, giving my mother’s life another layer of distinction: on a vacation. To a resort. For the wealthy. Where it’s warm in winter.

  A few photos from that trip remain, taken with my mother’s brand-new Polaroid camera. My favorite was snapped in front of the hotel. My mother stands in the middle, flanked by her girlfriends: three black women, none of them entertainers nor entertainers’ wives nor employees of the hotel. All of them heavyset and working-class. Wearing dark sunglasses. Looking good. Divas. When I look closely at the photograph, I see shimmering details: While Lula wears a practical, inexpensive top and skirt, and Mildred wears a simple shift, Mama wears a crisp cotton wrap dress in soft pink, with a ruffled collar. The dress’s cinched waist flatters her figure, as does the flowing, loose skirt. Her sunglasses stand out, as the others wear oval ones in white and hot pink, respectively, chosen from a rack in a drugstore. Mama’s are a soft shade of pink, rectangular, mother-of-pearl. They complement her face. She has on the faintest hint of lipstick, and stands more sexily than the other women, chest out, shoulders back. She’s definitely wearing a better bra.

  In another iconic photo, my mother and her girlfriend are still in their pajamas, having breakfast in their room. Knowing that the scene evoked the epitome of luxury and indulgence, they happily captured it for posterity. The room’s décor is cream-colored French Provincial, one of my mother’s favorite styles. The linen-clothed table has atop it a breakfast served on china, actual silverware, water in crystal wineglasses, flowers in a bud vase, and a basket of fresh bread at its center. Mama always loved room service, and maybe this trip was the genesis of that love affair. Mildred is dressed in functional man-style pajamas, but Mama is wearing one of her pretty signature robes, this one short and white, its cuffs and collar trimmed in satin. Beneath, she wears a turquoise nightgown. The diamond ring on her finger sparkles.

  Later, dressed in a stylish black bathing suit, she lounged by the elevated outdoor pool at the Cabana Club, overlooking the Atlantic. Another vacationing woman came up to her and asked, “How in the world did you get such a beautiful tan?” My mother lifted her mother-of-pearl sunglasses to look at the white woman and said, “I was born with mine.” Then she lowered her sunglasses.

  This was classic Fannie. Of course my mother was acutely aware that she was in Florida, and that the South was still the South. But she also knew that being in that particular place was an equalizing force, and as such she could speak her mind. She could declare her pride in being black by noting its built-in advantages. Besides, she welcomed the chance to make fun of the ironic quest by whites to darken their skins even as they shunned the actual Negroes whom they were desperately lying in the sun to resemb
le. Mama was the first person I ever heard say, “They want everything we got but the burden.”

  On a spring morning weeks before my ninth birthday, Mama summoned me to her room, where she was sitting up in bed, propped against big fluffy pillows. As I stood before her, she announced that she was getting married. She explained that I would have a stepfather, and I asked if he’d be mean like the stepmother in “Cinderella.” She assured me he would not. I think she asked me if I was okay with this. I think I said yes.

  I’d never met this man who was to become my stepfather until moments before he and Mama said “I do.” I was too young to fully process what was happening, but I remember how I felt: deeply conflicted. I was a daddy’s girl, and I wanted to remain loyal to my father. But I also wanted to please my mother. That very same evening, surrounded by her friends and family, Mama married this new man in a ceremony held in the living room of his modest home. She was nearly the same age as Jackie O, and he was fifty-three, the same age as Sinatra. To me, they couldn’t have been more glamorous: She wore an off-white two-piece suit, its jacket collar in soft white mink, and a chic short wig that made her resemble Diahann Carroll in Julia, the popular TV show. On her delicate wrist Mama wore a thin-band, diamond-encrusted watch that I would later wear on my own wedding day. The new man wore a sharp, shimmery gray suit with a colorful tie and coordinated aqua shirt. No one would ever guess that he was color-blind. The date was April 10, 1969 (as it turns out, my future husband’s second birthday), and the new man was Burtran A. Robinson. Burt, as he was known, later told me when I most needed to hear it that he’d waited a decade to marry my mother, the love of his life.

  I don’t doubt that. In one of my all-time favorite photographs, she sits beside Burt wearing a dark mink-collared jacket, and with it a white mink hat, her long black hair flowing beneath. She has on lightly frosted lipstick and a slight smile as she stares into the camera, her fingers around a champagne glass. Two bottles of bubbly are on the table. “Who goes on a date wearing a mink hat?” my sister Rita once quipped as we scrutinized the photo, by then adults ourselves. “Mama was so straitlaced! She looks like she’s on her way to church.” I thought she looked like a woman who knew happiness.

  For the rest of his life with her, that photo stayed atop my stepfather’s giant floor-model TV, prominently on display in his basement office. He outlived my mother, and after Burt became ill with Alzheimer’s, Rita surprised me on my birthday with the photo, which she’d had to go through some effort to retrieve from his current wife. Only then did I bother to take the photo out of its frame and flip it over. There, written in Burt’s handwriting: Phelps Cocktail Lounge, April 1965. Three years before Mama’s divorce from Daddy, and four years before she and Burt married.

  My father once saw that photograph during a visit to our new home, grabbed it, and slammed it facedown with fury. “Your mama and I were still married when they took that picture,” he told me. Why didn’t I take him seriously? Maybe because I was still so young? Maybe because I didn’t want to do the math, believe its implications? Now I can’t help but wonder if that math better explains why my mother slept a lot during my early childhood? Was she not only tired from running the Numbers, but depressed? Did she take a Valium before crawling into bed some nights? Because she was in love with one man but stuck in a dead-end marriage to another?

  Mama should’ve felt she was starting over after her wedding, but she and Burt didn’t live together as husband and wife for another six months. I don’t know exactly why. She hadn’t told her ex-husband, John T., that she’d remarried, and she apparently insisted that no one else tell him. I’ve turned this fact over myriad times across the distance of many years, and I still don’t know exactly why she didn’t tell Daddy. I wish I could ask her, but it never occurred to me to do so while she was alive. I doubt I would’ve had the courage to, anyway. The question itself suggests judgment, and who was I to judge? Last thing I ever wanted was to hurt Mama’s feelings, in any way.

  I do know that she was terrible at giving anyone bad news. Some people have a knack for it, a relish even. Not her. She hated it, actually seemed incapable of it; and so I can imagine that even though she didn’t want to be married to Daddy anymore, even though he couldn’t be the husband she needed, she didn’t want to hurt him. But after more than two decades of marriage, she knew it would. And this was not the kind of news you pass off for someone else to tell. Sometimes my mother kept secrets not out of necessity but rather out of protectiveness, and I believe this was one of those times. She also didn’t know how my father would react. Would he try to stop the wedding? Threaten to hurt himself? Make her feel wracked with guilt? Who could know? So she avoided telling him. Of course, that ended up hurting Daddy more when he eventually found out.

  Looking back, I realize Mama had to first extricate herself and her younger children from Broadstreet, because there was no way in hell that she’d move her new husband into our beloved family home. She needed time to find a new place for us. As the weeks passed and we remained on Broadstreet, I saw Daddy every weekend; yet I didn’t tell him that Mama had remarried. I later learned that Mama and my siblings were all terrified that I would tell him, because they knew my allegiance was to him. This is why my mother told me of her remarriage at the last possible moment, on the morning of her wedding. Funny thing, I don’t remember Mama telling me not to tell Daddy. Did she suspect I would, and figured Daddy would then confront her about it, and she’d be forced to get the painful mess out of the way? I don’t know. But I never did tell him. I could be relied upon not to reveal the biggest secret of all, our number-running lives. I understood secrets and I valued them all equally. But I didn’t tell Daddy mostly because I was fiercely protective of him, and I knew he still loved Mama. Besides, for months after the wedding ceremony, I never saw my new stepfather anyway. Out of sight, out of mind.

  With a big secret in my belly, I spent much of that summer at my cousin Jewell’s house at endless sleepovers, riding my bike, hanging with the neighborhood kids, away from my family’s holding pattern. Together, Jewell and I played jacks and hula-hooped and jumped rope and even watched men land on the moon. One day I noticed a lump on the back of my knee. Aunt Florence thought it was a giant mosquito bite, and I recall her spraying antihistamine on it, to relieve the swelling. But the lump grew and grew until it was hard to bend my leg. A doctor’s visit followed, and I was soon admitted to Henry Ford Hospital for surgery. My father later told me that the surgeon wouldn’t know until he “went in” whether the cyst was malignant or not, and that he and Mama had given the hospital permission to amputate my leg if need be. “Those were the longest damn hours of my life,” he said. “I aged something mighty that day.”

  When I woke up, my left leg was bandaged but still there. The cyst had been benign, and doctors had easily removed it. Lucky me, again. I recall Daddy sitting with me in the hospital room, and I recall Mama sitting with me too; was Burt beside her? I don’t recall, just that my parents were both there, but never at the same time. I remember taking note of that fact, finding it odd. Maybe it made me sad.

  That was also the summer Mama purchased a gun, a Smith & Wesson .38 special revolver. I only know this because I recently found the receipt. She bought it on July 3, 1969, and it cost $71.50 plus some kind of tax called OTGS for $4.85. I don’t know why she bought a gun that particular day but I do know she wasn’t afraid to use it. Maybe this was the one she kept in her purse, as the other pistol would soon be kept in the new home’s linen closet, underneath the eyelet-trimmed sheets, lace tablecloth, and linen napkins. This fact gave me a bit of comfort, made me feel she’d be safer out there in the streets, and that we’d be safer at home. “Let somebody break into my house,” Mama used to say. “I’ll blow their ass away, then call the police and tell them to come clean my damn carpet.” I loved hearing her say that, loved believing she was that fearless, and that clear about her rights.

  Our family’s second secret, which was in place for six
months, affected Rita the most, as a young teen all too aware that her mother had remarried, her father couldn’t know, and the secret had to be maintained until we moved. Rita desperately wanted us to start our new, less stealthily lived lives. In one letter she stuffed into the family Bible dated September 26, 1969, my thirteen-year-old sister wrote:

  Dear God, I know you are saying that I am changing. I curse and smoke. But I have stopped because I know it isn’t right. Bless all my friends and enemies and forgive me for my wrong. Please let us hurry up and move in the new house.

  Thank you, Rita

  As the moving date loomed, I wasn’t like Rita, aware of what I’d be leaving behind and going toward. I didn’t know enough to worry about leaving my bedroom’s beloved window seat, my basement playroom, my hiding spot in the attic, and the unfinished tree house Daddy was building for me in the backyard.

  Weeks after the school year began, we finally did move, to a house farther west in the city with the improbable address 3456 West Seven Mile Road. It was one mile from the road that divided Detroit from its neighboring suburb, Southfield, the street made famous by the film about rapper Eminen’s life, 8 Mile. The house sat on the edge of Sherwood Forest, a privately patrolled district known for its architecturally distinct houses and quiet, winding streets. A few blocks away stood a Frank Lloyd Wright–designed house in the city’s tony Palmer Woods section. On moving day, Mama sat cross-legged on the gold-colored carpet of our new, spacious living room, unpacking yellow china, looked over at me, and said: “We’re gonna be happy now.” I wanted nothing more than for my mother to be happy. I knew enough to know that she hadn’t been. As for the rest of us, we all knew that a life in which one parent lived upstairs and one lived downstairs, barely speaking, wasn’t normal. I hadn’t been unhappy on Broadstreet, but I understood why things needed to change.