The World According to Fannie Davis Read online

  That same year, my mother bought another diamond ring. My brother, Anthony, told her that his girlfriend, Renita, was pregnant. They were both eighteen years old, and Mama had asked him what were his intentions. “I want to marry her,” he said. On Christmas day, he proposed.

  “There was a box under the tree,” Renita recalls. “Anthony handed it to me and I opened up this big box, and there was another small box inside. I opened up that box and there was another really little one, and that one had my engagement ring.” She goes on: “I knew it was really from her.” She pauses. “That’s my favorite memory of your mother, the Christmas when she gave me my ring. She was so happy for me, you know?”

  On New Year’s Day 1971, Rita wrote a new letter:

  Dear God,

  Please help me and do a favor for me and my family. I, Rita Davis, will not worry have positive thinking and have faith in you. My mother Fannie Robinson will be in good health and not worrying about things she have no control over.…Jesus thanks a lot for letting me leave my prayers to the throne of grace.

  This can be a year of happiness. If everyone tries.

  Thank you,

  Rita

  My sister knew. I didn’t exactly know what was going on, but already could feel that this new year wasn’t like the old one. Mama had recently been in the hospital, admitted to control the blood clots that often formed in her leg and were for her a chronic condition, one she treated more like a nuisance. “I suffer from blood clots,” she’d tell people in an offhanded way; she sometimes wore compression stockings to help with circulation and prevent swelling, and was prescribed Coumadin, the blood thinner. She felt the medication kept her perpetually cold, and so our house was always blasting with heat. Now I know how potentially dangerous a blood clot can be, but back then Mama never showed much concern. She’d say that short stays in the hospital—to “break up” a clot or prevent it from traveling to her lungs—gave her a chance for some much-needed rest, and when I visited her she never looked sick; there she’d be sitting up in bed in a pretty-colored nightgown and matching robe, sometimes wearing reddish-pink lipstick. Apparently, a doctor had told her years before that whatever she eventually died from, it wouldn’t be those blood clots.

  The city itself was tense too. To kick off the new year, Detroit’s police commissioner formed a new elite undercover police operation called STRESS, which stood for Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets. Nearly all the officers of STRESS were white, and of course they targeted “high-crime” black neighborhoods. We saw a steady stream of black “perps” on the news, as well as regular reports of black men killed by police. (By the end of that year, Detroit’s police department led the nation in civilian killings, one-third of them committed by STRESS.) I had an eighteen-year-old brother. We were all on edge.

  Somewhere in there, I found myself in the car with Mama, her friend Lula, and Jewell. My mother had found out that Anthony was inside a “shooting gallery,” and she’d decided to go get him. Why were we girls in the car? I can only assume that there was no one else at home and she didn’t want to leave us in the house by ourselves. So there we girls were, in the backseat.

  When Mama pulled up to the actual house, Lula kept saying, “Don’t go in, Fannie. Don’t go in!”

  “I got my pistol right here,” said Mama. “I’m not worried.”

  She got out of the car. I watched in terror as she entered through the front door, wearing her soft blue leather coat with the mink collar, hands in her pockets, finger, I was sure, on the trigger; I waited to hear gunshots. Jewell and I began crying, and Lula began praying out loud. Finally Mama burst back out through the door, dragging my brother, Anthony, by the arm to the car, where he slid into the backseat with us. “Fannie, you shouldn’t have done that,” said Lula.

  “The way I see it, I didn’t have a choice,” said Mama as she took off from the curb.

  Here, a soundtrack asserts itself in my memory: Marvin Gaye’s haunting concept album, What’s Going On, climbed so fast up the charts that year that you couldn’t avoid those spiritually soulful songs if you wanted to, their pensive, yearning lyrics and lush orchestration spewing from hi-fis, radios, and our car’s eight-track. I was a fifth grader walking three blocks up Margareta to school every day, with Mercy, mercy me, things ain’t what they used to be. Nah, nah, nah…playing on a loop in my head.

  And then a bizarre thing happened to me. I got into a fight at school. With a boy, named Peter Golightly. (And yes, he had a sister named Holly.)

  We were in the same grade at Hampton Elementary, shared the same homeroom. Hampton was still in its brief period of integration, as we now lived farther northwest in the city in a more upscale area and whites hadn’t fully fled the neighborhood yet. In fact, the elementary school was diverse enough to host a yearly Heritage Day, when we students came to school in ethnic attire that reflected our ancestry. Mama said that her own grandmother had “some Indian blood in her,” and dressed me one year in an American Indian outfit she’d rented from a suburban costume shop. The dress was rich brown suede, with fringes along its hemline falling below my knees. Multicolored beads wove throughout its bodice, ropes of chunkier beads hung from my neck, and I wore soft, fringed moccasins on my feet. I liked the way my long, sandy-red hair, parted down the middle, lay snug inside the matching feather headband. I’d just seen Love Story and thought of myself as a Native American Ali McGraw. Other classmates dressed in Irish kilts, Dutch embroidered dresses with clogs, and Jewish yarmulkes and prayer shawls. My best friend, Diane, wore a bold-print head wrap with a coordinating skirt, an African princess. I won the school award that year for best heritage costume.

  On this day, Peter and I had puppets on sticks that we’d created in art class, made, I seem to recall, of papier-mâché. Peter was really into his puppet, moving it up and down in animated and sweeping gestures. More than once, he put that puppet in my face, playing around. I didn’t like that and told him to stop. He didn’t, so I smacked the puppet away from my face and it flew across the room. Of course, the entire classroom of fifth graders broke into laughter. Embarrassed, Peter got angry and vowed payback. The rest of the day, word spread about an after-school fight between Peter and me. Fast-forward to school dismissal. I was terrified. My strategy was to just walk home as fast as I could. But Peter was there, taunting me, and an entire gang of kids was following behind us, egging us on. Fight! Fight! Fight! Peter yelled things at me, but I just kept walking. He called me a chicken. I kept walking. Then he pushed me in the back. I stumbled but kept walking. He pushed me again and I knew the way you know something with dread that I had to act. I turned around and flailed my arms in his direction. Fight! Fight! Fight! roared the crowd. I think Peter was stunned, actually, that the quiet brown-skinned girl actually fought back. I only remember swinging my arms wildly and fearfully. I wasn’t even sure I’d managed to hit him at all. I just wanted him off me, and my windmill approach kept him at bay until someone, I don’t remember who, broke up the fight.

  Heart pounding, I told Mama everything when I got home. I was terrified that I’d be suspended from school, but she said not to worry, she’d go talk to the principal. Then I told her the boy’s name.

  “Did you say Golightly?” she asked.

  Mama knew what I didn’t: Peter was the son of Cornelius Golightly, a prominent member of the Detroit school board. (He’d go on to become board president two years later.) That was when our phone rang. Not our regular phone, but the extra line, the unlisted, private one Mama had gotten specifically for her Numbers business, the one she was trying to keep hidden from the Feds’ wiretapping frenzy.

  Peter’s mother was on the other end. She wanted to talk about the fight between her boy and me, but Mama had a more urgent concern: “How did you get this number?” She listened, repeated herself. “I said I want to know how you got this number.”

  Mama told Mrs. Golightly she had no right to use her influence to get access to our unlisted number, that it was a violation. �
��I’m a private citizen!” said Mama, adding that she didn’t give a damn who Peter’s father was. They exchanged more heated words. Mama said, “I’ll see you in the principal’s office tomorrow,” and all I could think was Fight, fight, fight!

  Then Mrs. Golightly asked, “You’re a big woman, aren’t you?”

  “What of it?” said Mama.

  “Because I’m not. I’m small.”

  “Well, for a small woman you sure do have a big mouth!” said Mama before she slammed down the phone.

  My mother knew the implication: that she, with her girth, was somehow not the same caliber as the Golightly family, with their classic black bourgeoisie pedigree. Mr. Golightly was a philosophy professor and associate dean at Wayne State University. Mrs. Golightly was a “homemaker,” an active member of the NAACP as well as a prominent member of the neighborhood association. And this woman had, by dialing the secret number, encroached upon our family’s safety zone of protection.

  The next day, we walked into the principal’s office, and there sat Leslie Golightly and her son. I was stunned. Peter’s light-skinned face was covered in red scratches and welts. He looked bad, and I was unnerved, completely unaware that I’d done that kind of damage. I was unscathed.

  Percy Porter, the principal, invited us to sit in the two empty chairs that formed a semicircle in front of her desk. I idolized Mrs. Porter. She was tall, pretty, and so kind to us students. First, she apologized to Mama for the school giving out our phone number. That had been a mistake, she said. Then she asked Peter and me to each tell our side of the story; we did, as the adults listened. I think of that scene now, of the three women in the room that day, all African-American, each in her early forties, two of them migrants from the South, the other from Ohio; one a professional working mom, another a pillar of black society, the other a number runner. I seem to recall Mrs. Golightly implying that her son would never start a fight, that I was the troublemaker, because at one point Mama said to Mrs. Porter: “I tell you what. Pull out their school records and lay them side by side.”

  My transcript was filled with As and 1s for “citizenship.” Turns out, Peter didn’t have quite the same stellar track record for behavior. All the students and teachers knew he liked to talk in class. A lot.

  What buttressed my self-defense was that our fight took place on Birchcrest, the street I walked down each day to get home from school. Peter lived on Muirland, only five minutes from my house. But that day he’d passed by Clarita, the street he should’ve turned down toward his own home, and stayed on Birchcrest. This was proof that I was trying to avoid a fight while he was inciting one, by following me home. My fondness for Mrs. Porter leapt to a new height when she said, “I think it’s clear you initiated this altercation, Peter, and I believe you should apologize.” He did.

  When I think about the courage it took for the principal of our elementary school to admonish a school board member’s son for starting a fight with me, a working-class girl whose parents had no real influence, I’m awed anew.

  Meanwhile, I recall my father’s delight that I’d “whupped that high-yellow boy’s butt”; Daddy was convinced that the playful shadowboxing I used to do with him as he taught me to make a fist, jab at the air, do some fancy footwork had paid off. Honestly, I wasn’t even sure I’d thrown a punch, let alone landed one, but I reveled in Daddy’s praise.

  There were no more busts by the Feds that year, and I remained oblivious to potential risks our family faced. I was fixated on becoming an auntie. That spring, Mama threw Renita an elaborate baby shower, which produced mounds and mounds of impractical, exquisite gifts.

  “Girl, too much of everything,” recalls Renita. Mama’s friends went all out for Fannie’s first grandchild, giving her daughter-in-law exquisite blankets and pillows and silver rattles and hand-knit booties and linen baby gowns. “Everybody was trying to outdo everybody else,” says Renita. “But that’s how much they all loved her. You could see that they showed their love for her through all those beautiful gifts to me.”

  I was the one who told Mama that Renita’s water had broken. As Renita stepped out of the car on a hot July night and waddled toward the hospital doors, she turned back to us and said, “I hope it’s a boy”; it was. Given that she and Anthony were both so young, Mama stepped in to help care for Anthony II, or Tony as we called him, while paying for Renita to attend college in Texas. Meanwhile, Anthony worked for Mama, as he’d done since we moved from Broadstreet, helping out with the business. He and Renita lived in a small flat nearby.

  Dominant among my memories of that time is the layering of sounds: Mama’s voice as she greeted a customer on the phone: Morning, Miss White, you ready for me to take your numbers for the day? followed by her repeating numbers as she recorded bets in her spiral notebook; or her warmer, relaxed tone as she chatted with a friend, troubleshooting or debating or discussing a good number to play. In between, the ringing phone, loud and incessant like high-pitched cicadas in season. Sometimes it was two phones from our two different lines, ringing in unison. Always in the background, TV voices talking at us in ongoing one-way conversations, from morning newscasters to the ads’ announcers to midday game show hosts: The Price Is Right’s Bob Barker, Let’s Make a Deal’s Monty Hall, and eventually, Wheel of Fortune’s Pat Sajak, their deep male voices luring jubilant contestants with chances to win refrigerators and vacations and oh my God, a new car! (Mama never watched the soap operas that dominated major networks during daytime programming. They bored her.) Punctuating the TV sounds and those ever-ringing telephones, and Mama’s constant phone talk, were Tony’s cries and coos adding a layer of daycare chaos as he banged pots, broke things, played with annoyingly loud educational toys.

  On the weekend, another group of sounds—different ones coming from the always-on TV with its programming of cartoons, Jeopardy!, The Newlywed Game and the never-to-be-missed Soul Train; this accompanied by the squeals and laughter of three new children in our house, ages two, four and seven, cousins by marriage now spending every weekend with us: my stepfather’s nieces and nephew cared for by Mama because their own mother was in need of relief, her nerves bad. And with my oldest sister, Deborah, now helping to run the tapes, the rat-a-tat-tat of the adding machine punctuated by a trill every time she hit the Total button. In all this cacophony, the doorbell would inevitably ring, with either a sibling or relative or customer dropping by, a delivery made or a family friend paying a visit, often poised to ask for a favor. And amid these competing noises, Mama’s confident voice, wrapping up a week’s worth of business with customers:

  Listen, Miss White, Burt will be around to collect later today. You know what your bill is, don’t you? Oh, I can tell you. Wait, hold on a minute. Grabbing a loose-leaf binder lying nearby, she’d open it, go to a divider tab marked with the customer’s code name, flip to that page, figures moving down the loose-leaf paper, inside vertical columns Mama had created with a wooden ruler. End-of-the-week totals would be written in green or, if money was owed, red ink.

  Okay. I got your credit page from my record book right here, she’d say into the phone. Your total was six hundred fifty dollars high, minus your thirty-five percent, which brings it to four twenty-two fifty low. And you had a hit on four-six-nine for fifty cents, so that leaves you owing a hundred seventy-two fifty. You got that? Now, what’s the best time to come around? ’Cause you know Burt can’t be coming out too late, bad as it’s getting out here.

  I often heard this symphony of competing sounds through my bedroom door, plopped on my bed reading Jonathan Livingston Seagull or my sister Dianne’s copy of I Never Promised You a Rose Garden or Go Ask Alice; or writing in my new diary as I hid out, seeking solitude.

  Amid the busyness of her daily life, turns out Mama sought something too. I found a GED test she’d taken on July 26, 1971, just a week after becoming a grandmother at forty-three. This test confuses me slightly, because Aunt Florence says Fannie definitely graduated from Pearl High School back in Nashville,
but nevertheless there it is, scores and all. She passed easily. She ranked in the eighty-seventh percentile for reading and the seventy-third percentile for math, which doesn’t surprise me. She lists her age as ten years younger than she actually was, something Mama often did. I used to think it was vanity, and there was certainly that, but I now believe she feared aging, as if she knew that time was running out to live the fuller life she’d once envisioned for herself, rather than just the one she found herself living.

  In summer of 1972, as I graduated from Hampton Elementary and Rita from Mumford High, Motown graduated to another level of success: the homegrown record company synonymous with Detroit and “the sound of young America” announced plans to move its headquarters to Los Angeles. Even though the Michigan Chronicle’s front-page story quoted the company’s general manager as saying the move was “simply a matter of sound business judgment, economics and logistics,” it was a major blow to black Detroiters. A rumor began that Berry Gordy had been “run out of town” by the Mafia. This claim was never proven and isn’t really rational (why wouldn’t the local syndicate keep Gordy and his lucrative business in Detroit, making money for them?), but the rumor gained traction because it was easier to believe that story than the harsher, simple fact that Detroit’s crown jewel had been snatched away by a sexier, richer, sunnier place. Emotions ran so high after the announcement that black disc jockeys boycotted Motown music on the radio (except for Stevie Wonder’s) for months. I didn’t notice, as I was listening to soft rock on Q-93, my friend Diane and I obsessed with Chicago’s “Saturday in the Park.”

  Yet in October of that same year, Berry Gordy’s movie division released an homage to Billie Holiday, Lady Sings the Blues. The film was the first of its kind, an extraordinary experience for black Americans and black Detroit specifically. Yes, folks were upset about Motown’s move west, but that was our hometown girl up there on the big screen, in all her black-diva glamour, and with her stellar acting chops and pretty singing voice. I was twelve and so loved that film that I convinced Mama to take me to see it, then convinced Daddy to take me to see it again. When she received an Oscar nomination, Diana Ross still belonged to us. And now that folks could see what its film division was pulling off in Hollywood, how mad could you be at Motown?