The World According to Fannie Davis Read online

  Only Rita and I moved to the new house with Mama and my new stepfather, Burt. Each of my older siblings chose a new path for himself or herself, marking the moment when we ceased forever to all live together as a family, under the same roof. Twenty-two-year-old Deborah, who’d recently seen Jimi Hendrix perform at Cobo Hall and was fully absorbed in the psychedelic, free-love moment, went to live with her boyfriend (Mama called it “shacking up”); twenty-year-old Dianne, newly married, moved into my stepfather’s former home. And seventeen-year-old Anthony stayed on Broadstreet, where Daddy moved back in to live with him. Daddy later told me about their winter together that year, how the heat was turned off, and how cold the house was, how they stayed warm by burning a fire in the fireplace. It touched my father’s heart that his son didn’t abandon him. “He coulda gone on over to the new house with y’all,” said Daddy. “But he chose to tough it out with me.”

  Why didn’t Mama, who was living well in a new house with a new husband, give her son and ex-husband money to pay the heating bill? This from the same woman who used to joke that she was the only ex-wife she knew ordered by a judge to pay her husband alimony. I don’t know if that decree really came down, only that in the years that followed, Daddy knew he could turn to Fannie repeatedly for help. And over the years, he did.

  “Honey, she was good to John T.,” says Aunt Florence, setting the record straight. “John T. himself would tell you if he could; Fannie was nice to him, all through his life, she was nice to him.”

  I think it was pride that forced my father and brother to suffer through that cold winter. My father was so upset that we’d moved out and on, away from him, and that hurt didn’t allow him to ask for help. And my brother? He was a loyal son. And Mama? Maybe she didn’t know. Maybe she was distracted by her new life.

  Luckily, my stepfather, Burt, a handsome, jocular, gray-eyed man, was good to me from the start; he affectionately called me Chicken, taught me how to bowl, chauffeured me around to my childhood activities. And he never tried to usurp my father, which made living with Burt stress-free. He reminded me of the affable, kind Uncle Bill on the popular sixties sitcom Family Affair. Having been a crane operator for Ford Motor Company, Burt was working in the decidedly unglamorous job of garbage collector by the time he entered our lives. Soon after, he retired. I recall no sense of frustrated ambition in Burt, although he did like to read get-rich-quick books. He happily helped out Mama with her business, mainly as a pickup man. Financially, he brought not only his regular paycheck and then his pension to the marriage, but also health insurance. No question, though, that marrying my mother raised his standard of living.

  Our new house was vastly different from the old, a stylish gray brick modern two-family built in 1956, thirty years after Broadstreet, a classic Colonial built in 1926. The house we quickly dubbed Seven Mile appeared roomy, with its wide open living/dining area, its den with wraparound built-ins, and a picture window that nearly covered an entire front wall; but it was a two-story duplex with a replica apartment above, for renting out, and it was actually much smaller than Broadstreet. In this new house, with its two-bedroom, ranch-style layout, we’d all live as a family on one level. It was a challenging place for Mama to run her business. She had to do so either in the kitchen, which was itself small and the first place people entered from the side door, or in her bedroom, which was a short distance down the hall. Voices carried. On Broadstreet, we’d had three different floors, which meant what took place upstairs couldn’t be heard downstairs. On Seven Mile, the sound of ringing phones was ubiquitous. I worried that my friends could easily detect that something was going on, and so began an anxious ritual of closing doors and drawers, hiding Numbers paraphernalia, quickly answering the phone to hush its mouth. For me, keeping our secret was tough on Seven Mile, especially when I learned that the police department’s Twelfth Precinct station was less than a mile from our home.

  Meanwhile, I was the new girl in fourth grade at Hampton Elementary. For my first day, Burt had presented me with a set of multicolored pencils that he’d special-ordered, each with my name printed on it. On that day, the table captain in science class, a girl named Diane, sharpened all my pencils so short that my name disappeared on every one. Diane and I went on to become best friends—still are—but that moment of seeing my name gone stays with me, as I didn’t know who I was in this new place, with a new configuration of parents, so far away from Broadstreet, yet with the same family secret. That fall is forever captured for me by the Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back.” I played the 45 of the hit single on my portable Tele-Tone record player over and over. I wanted my old life, where men didn’t bowl, and we didn’t eat strange new food like chocolate Cream of Wheat on yellow china dishes, and I didn’t sleep in a new twin bed beside my sister’s twin bed, instead of beside my father. Spare me of this cause, sang Michael. Give me back what I lost.

  Shortly after we moved, Daddy came to visit us. Mama wasn’t home. He discovered she’d remarried only when he spotted Burt’s clothes in the bedroom closet. I will never forget the shocked and hurt look on his face. “Somebody could’ve told me,” he said. “Somebody could’ve at least done that.”

  After he left, my sisters tried to comfort me as I bawled, surrounding me as I sat in my and Rita’s new bedroom, crying nonstop, inconsolable. I knew in my heart that I was the one who should’ve told him. “What if he tries to hurt himself?” I asked.

  “He won’t,” said Dianne, the sister who mothered me most. “He loves you too much. He won’t.”

  But I was rattled, wasn’t sure where my loyalties should lie. Yes, Mama helped me pack my bags every weekend to spend with Daddy, but did she feel I betrayed her? And was I betraying Daddy by living with her?

  Mama calmed my fears the next day when she gathered all five children, aged nine to twenty-two, and sat us down in the big new living room. She stood before us and announced: “I am not related to John T., so I don’t have to love and respect him forever. But he’s your father, and you do.” She paused. “Don’t let me catch you forgetting that.”

  Then she turned and walked away, leaving my siblings and me sitting on the sofa in silence.

  Bridgett and Daddy, May 1968

  Part II

  Hey, You Never Know

  Fannie taking numbers, 1980s

  Five

  Fountainebleau Hotel Room, December 1968

  The permeating smell of sage, frankincense, or sandalwood often wafted through our home, emanating from Mama’s bedroom. There burned special incense molded into small charcoal-briquette cones, which she’d placed in a brass burner shaped like Aladdin’s lamp. Mama would then brush away the ash to find, magically revealed at the bottom of the burner, a “lucky” three-digit number. Candles also burned seductively in our bathrooms. They were tall, thick and encased in glass, the kind found in botánicas, flames’ shadows dancing across ceilings. Mama burned these long-lasting candles, always green, the color of money, for two days straight; when they’d finally burned down, a number to play awaited her at the bottom of the glass.

  I liked both the incense and the candles, liked the act of conjuring up good via ritual. Also, I found comfort in the idea that our mystical household provided an extra layer of protection from the forces outside our door. The fact that Mama was the one performing the rituals added to her allure. To me, she was magic.

  Of course, Mama also had more straightforward means of finding a number to “back,” or play. She could, for example, buy a “tip sheet” sold at the city’s party stores and novelty shops. These one-page printed circulars listed various three-digits posing as zodiac-sign or monthly or birthday “specials”; or as “long-overdue” or “gold pot” numbers—numbers anyone could ascribe personal meaning to, the way you might find meaning in your weekly horoscope in the Sunday paper. The outside world provided myriad numbers too. Every city, Detroit included, is a city of numbers. Mama could find a three-digit in a home address, as she’d done when she played ours and hit,
buying our family home with the proceeds. But she also got numbers from the street addresses of businesses she patronized, dry cleaner’s or shoe shop tickets, utility bills, traffic tickets, telephone numbers, and cars’ license plates. Whenever we went to a Chinese restaurant, my mother read her fortune cookie not for the pithy advice, but for the so-called lucky numbers that always appeared on those little rectangles of paper. Travel itself brought several possible numbers for her to play: flight numbers, hotel room numbers, taxicab numbers, restaurant check amounts…Inspiration was everywhere.

  Better yet were personal numbers, i.e., special numbers like family members’ birthdays, anniversaries, death dates, birth times, and birth weights, all providing potential winning combinations. Added to that were people’s pet numbers; Mama played her own personal pet number, 788, essentially every day. (She believed, along with most players, that the moment you “jump off a number,” it comes out.) Other people’s pet numbers were also possibilities. Mama might play a friend’s pet number on her birthday, or if she ran into that person, or if she simply thought about him “out of the blue.” And she often honored a deceased loved one’s memory by playing that person’s pet number on his or her birthday. Whatever numbers Mama herself played, she of course played with other bankers, otherwise she’d be betting against herself.

  Aunt Florence too has had a few pet numbers over the years. “Two-eight-one helped put Jewell through college,” she says about my cousin. “And three-three-nine? My kitchen was remodeled off of three-three-nine. Plus, that same number helped me buy two new cars.”

  Some numbers got played heavily once they appeared in the news or were associated with national events, such as the flight number of a crashed plane, or a famous historical date like November 22, 1963 (112) or December 7, 1941 (127). (A more recent example is September 11, i.e., 911, which is now popular with lottery players.) People also got numbers from films, the best-known being agent James Bond’s 007; songs like the Marvelettes’ sixties Motown hit, “Beechwood 4-5789,” with its two sets of three digits (457 and 789), were another source; and from sports, all kinds of numbers abounded, such as the final score of a championship basketball game. Back in the 1930s, Detroiters regularly played boxer Joe Louis’s weight. Mama would sometimes join the fray and play one of these pop-culture numbers, but rarely.

  Triple-digit numbers like 222 and 888 were equally attractive options, especially two in particular from the Bible: 666 (“the mark of the beast” in Revelation) and 333 (in Ezekiel 33:3, the prophet blows his trumpet to warn people of coming tribulation). Speaking of the Bible, another well-played number was 318 (in Genesis, Abraham took 318 men to attack those who had captured Lot, apparently the only other three-digit that appears in the Bible). Any numbers like these deemed perennially popular were called “fancies.” Some fancies had long histories, like 411 (my birth weight), first cited in an 1890 book as “the negro’s lucky numbers.” Players often knew by heart which numbers were fancies, and Aunt Florence can still rattle off several to me, including 110, 100, 310, and 313 (Detroit’s area code). Another is 697, known as “the death row.” Some bookies refused to accept a fancy because if it came out, too many customers would hit on it, creating massive payouts.

  “If they pull a fancy, and you ain’t big, it’ll knock you out,” Aunt Florence explains. “I remember once they pulled several fancies for a solid week, and them bookies, if they didn’t have the money, they had to go.”

  Still other numbers were favored if they were perceived to be good “follow-ups,” or numbers likely to fall soon after certain other numbers. Jewell told me that whenever the number for her mother’s name, Florence, came out, within a day or two the number for her favorite aunt’s name, Fannie, came out behind it—a guaranteed follow-up.

  Mama’s best way to “conjure up a number,” as she called it, was via hunches. Her hunches were everything. The candles and incense and tip sheets were a means of reinforcing what numbers she already had “a good feeling about”; ditto for numbers out in the world—seeing a certain combination reinforced a hunch, provided a sign that yes, she should play that particular number on that particular day. It was important to respect your hunches, not ignore them or get distracted and fail to act upon these gifts of intuition. Mama’s hunches were linked to, proof positive of, her good luck. People who are lucky have strong hunches, and win.

  Mama had myriad ways of cultivating and enhancing her luck. Candles and incense, for instance, didn’t always provide specific lucky numbers; rather, she burned them to generally attract luck. And I also sometimes found, tossed into one of our cluttered bathroom drawers, a bottle of “lucky oil” or “Chinese wash.” Horseshoes were prominently nailed to our entryways; Mama collected miniature elephant figurines; and she carried a rabbit’s foot on her keychain—all magnets for good fortune.

  The word luck apparently originated as a gambling term, according to scholar Felicia George, whose 2015 dissertation is on the world of Detroit’s Numbers. “Luck can be described as a power that brings good fortune or favor,” she writes, quoting others and further defining luck as “the force at the core of the cosmos that governs chance events, that can be sometimes conjured but never coerced…that operates to overcome the uncertainty of the gambling situation.”

  Growing up, attracting good luck was never far from my mind. As a girl, I’d crawl through the itchy grass on my hands and knees in Aunt Florence’s backyard, Jewell beside me, sun on our backs as we searched for four-leaf clovers to present to our mothers (it’s a nice coincidence that Jewell and her family lived on a street named Cloverlawn). I wanted to be the one who found a lucky clover in that lawn of dandelions and crabgrass, but it was usually Jewell who found one, sometimes two. I couldn’t stand that she was better at attracting a symbol of luck than me. I wanted to be seen as lucky by Mama, as I’d once been seen by Daddy, who’d sometimes take me to poker games, set me on his lap, and announce that “my baby right here is my good-luck charm.” One day, I tore a three-leaf clover’s petal in half and presented that to Mama. She made it clear she knew exactly what I’d done. “You can’t fake being lucky,” she said.

  While Mama understood you couldn’t coerce good luck, she did believe in rituals to thwart bad luck, which is why at the end of the business day she put customers’ business in the freezer to “cool it off” or under her bed or in my closet to “hide” it from the day’s winning numbers. Equally important to my mother was making sure people she perceived as unlucky kept their distance. She was suspicious of folks for whom nothing ever swung their way. Likewise, being around someone who was “always crying the blues” created unhealthy vibes and could make you miss a number, so had to be guarded against. “Too much hard luck rubs off,” she’d say. (As an aside, Mama wasn’t too particular about blues music either. The only blues song I ever heard her enjoy was a favorite by Dinah Washington, “This Bitter Earth,” a sorrowful song that ends upliftingly with the line I’m sure someone may answer my call and this bitter earth, ooh, may not be so bitter after all.)

  Cultivating good luck and avoiding bad was vital to Mama because luck was what sustained her livelihood. Just as comedy is serious business, Numbers playing is no game. She understood on a rational level that when she was a player, her odds of winning were long (“hard as it is to hit these damn numbers,” she’d often say), and the numbers that fell were technically random. Still, logic didn’t entirely rule, thus her efforts to enhance her odds by strengthening her luck—both in hitting a number herself and in not getting hit by customers. As someone who left little else in her life to “fate,” Mama saw no contradiction in refusing to leave this game of chance to chance. She felt she must do something to mitigate the randomness of it all.

  Even as she used luck enhancers, Mama didn’t lean on any given ritual or charm to guarantee our security. My mother was too much of a pragmatist to believe wholeheartedly in magic. She took pride in being a Taurus, the sign of the zodiac known for a steadfast, earthbound feet-plan
ted-on-the-ground approach to life. Common sense ruled. Likewise, she didn’t give any credence to those who believed in hoodoo, voodoo, or black magic; she found those practices backward, the opposite of modernity. Just as she didn’t believe putting a knife under your bed would “cut the pain” of an illness or that certain herbs could heal you (“Folks need to take their asses to a real doctor!”), neither did she believe someone could “work roots” on you to bring misfortune to your life. Only you controlled your own fate by your own actions because, as she saw it, God gave us free will. Luck to her was an offshoot of her disciplined and dynamic faith in herself, buttressed by her belief that if you do good, you attract good. Her rituals were backup efforts.

  I find Mama represents a perfect blend of what Felicia George, the Numbers scholar, observes is the friction between two very different narratives that America tells about itself: The first is that this country was founded by “speculative men” who took chances to establish America, i.e., luck matters and “net worth” has nothing to do with “moral worth.” In the second narrative, American heroes are self-made men and women who become successful through hard work and discipline, where “earthly rewards match ethical merits,” leaving no place for luck. My mother was both speculative and self-made, combining her work ethic with her chance-taking; she embodied both values of a quintessential American.

  Interestingly, I never heard my mother claim that winning numbers “come from God” (despite the fact that my sister used to write letters to Him, asking that certain numbers not come out). I think this is largely because my mother identified as a Christian, occasionally attending Unity Baptist Church, led by Reverend Stotts, a devout and truly devoted pastor whom she greatly admired. She respected the black church tradition—was in fact well versed in the Bible—and didn’t like the implication that God was in the business of helping folks win numbers; Mama also disapproved of people who prayed for certain numbers to come out, or “fall,” as they say, because she saw it as a reduction of God’s role in our lives. Just as she pushed against the Christian tenets that suffering was holy, and that you must “stay on your knees praying to God” in hopes that he would answer your pleas, she felt you were a partner in your own good fortune.