The World According to Fannie Davis Read online

  Besides, another seismic event had just hit Detroit, one that had an equally reverberating impact on the city, and eventually our family: Michigan’s legislature passed a proposal allowing voters to decide whether they wanted a state lottery.

  This referendum had history. As far back as 1937, the question of legalization had been raised, and across the next three decades bills were introduced, the issue debated in the black press, polls taken, letters to editors written, and persuasive arguments made both for and against. I suspect that the 1970 raid led by Hoover had a lot to do with swaying elected representatives’ decision, as that bust revealed just how lucrative the city’s Numbers racket was, with its estimated $94-million-per-year revenue—money all taken in by local Mafia and black Numbers bankers. By that point, police estimated that a hundred thousand people, or one in every fifteen Detroiters, played the Numbers daily. Legislators surely reasoned that the state should capture all that money wagered, rather than leave it in the coffers of two of society’s most despised groups.

  No surprise that once legalization was on the table, law enforcement staged more raids on illegal Numbers, arresting more operators, but curiously not any Mafia-related ones. The highly respected African-American judge George Crockett Jr. released twenty-seven black defendants, declaring later in an interview with Jet magazine, “There seems to be a tendency for the law to work one way for the poor and the Black and another for the wealthy and the white.”

  Two months before the vote, the Detroit Free Press ran a three-day series on the Numbers, its front-page headlines capturing the accepted narrative of what the Numbers was: NUMBERS RUNNERS SELL DREAMS TO POOR; THE SYNDICATE, DISHONESTY REPLACE GOLDEN ERA OF NUMBERS; and NUMBERS TODAY: A TOUGH JOB, i.e., asserting that Numbers players were impoverished victims of a massive scam, made worse by Mafia control, all for a game that had already experienced its heyday. In truth, many people hit the number every day; and my mother and other bankers on her level—those with several books in their business, and all men except for one other woman—were at that moment maintaining a brisk livelihood as number runners. The big bankers were millionaires.

  The staff writer of the Free Press stories, Tom Ricke, showed his take on Numbers in an early paragraph:

  Since the early 1900s, numbers men have been making billions of dollars selling people the chance to dream of having money.

  The writer went on to patronizingly make a claim that has no statistical basis:

  Most of the people who play numbers are black. It’s always been that way. It started in the ghetto and is still there. It’s the only way for many to get a sum of money and it is a habit for many others that started when they bought dreams to help them through empty days.

  The price? Whatever a person can scrape together each day. For that money, he buys a thousand-to-one chance of getting 500 times the amount he bet. But it’s more than that. He has purchased a thought—the right to think all day long about what he is going to do with the money if he wins. And that makes it easier to get through each day. Just the thought of it.

  Ricke’s point was a deceptively clever one: Playing the Numbers was understandable—who doesn’t dream of striking it rich?—but doing so illegally, where the Mafia controlled the three-digit winners, was a fool’s errand. Those thousands of blacks who played the Numbers were, effectively, dupes in need of protection from their own poor choices. His series of articles included anecdote after anecdote about black men and women who’d lost all their money playing, or had blown their winnings on foolishness, had been lured by preachers who promised, for a hefty donation, “blessed over” winning numbers. According to Ricke, number runners’ primary customers were allegedly mothers on welfare, boosters (professional shoplifters), and “high” dope dealers.

  “Numbers is a terrible thing for a lot of people,” a man named “James,” who’d been collecting numbers for thirty years, was quoted as saying. “The more they bet and lose, the longer they bet. They think each day is the day they will hit.…A numbers player is a fool.”

  Mama took offense at those claims. “I don’t have no customers like that, who bet up what they can’t afford to lose,” she said. “And no damn way would I let somebody gambling up their rent and food money play numbers with me. Not if I knew about it.”

  Research done by the scholar Felicia George has since proven Mama’s experience to be the norm. Most black people who played Numbers weren’t spending money they couldn’t afford to lose; many of them were not poor, rather working and middle-class folks with disposable income, a piece of which they chose to spend on playing the Numbers the way others spent extra money on eating out or buying cigarettes or going to the movies or betting on horses. And people often hit just enough to make it worth their while to gamble. More to the point, numbers players enjoyed it.

  Never mind that whites played the Numbers too. According to the Detroit News, an estimated thirty thousand Detroiters played the numbers in 1970, but when the (largely white) suburbs were included, that number rose to a hundred fifty thousand—a stat omitted from Ricke’s story. To Mama, the only “fools” were those who didn’t see that with this referendum, Michigan legislators were trying to wipe out the largely black-run Numbers and replace them with a fully state-controlled numbers operation. “Sometimes, it’s hard to get black folks to see the truth,” she’d say.

  But the argument that the Numbers preyed on poor blacks, that the game was by and large exploitative, was a strong one and didn’t need to be rooted in truth. It was rooted in a racist narrative that had long cast African-Americans’ gambling habits as morally deficient, a belief shared by a significant number of upper- and middle-class blacks. Legalizing lotteries would supposedly root out the criminal element of number running, making it legitimate and, by extension, respectable.

  Cue the state’s lottery game.

  Even Judge Crockett, who’d released all those black defendants, was pleased that voters might decide to legalize the Numbers. “Maybe this will get rid of the numbers business and make gambling a state monopoly,” he said. “Then the proceeds, hopefully, will be used to underwrite projects for social change, such as hospitals, schools, and recreational facilities.”

  What an ironic rationale, given that Numbers men were historically the very ones who provided the black community with programs and facilities and resources that the state neglected to provide. By the late 1960s and 1970s, these men (and yes, women) directed their largesse toward black organizations like the NAACP, funded black political candidates’ campaigns, and sustained vulnerable social programs, all to further African-American progress. My mother contributed to these very causes, while she also regularly sent money to upstate prisoners, hired out-of-work young black men, and donated to the beloved but beleaguered college for low-income blacks, Shaw College at Detroit. Moreover, she patronized black businesses almost exclusively. These contributions add up, have a cumulative effect; how naïve to believe that once the profits made by informal Numbers were taken out of the hands of black operators and turned over to the state’s coffers, Michigan’s elected officials would miraculously start meeting African-American residents’ needs.

  “The Numbers man is no longer a community leader,” proclaimed Ricke, who went on to quote “Sam,” who had grown up in a number-running household which he described as a friendly gathering place. “But that’s over now,” Sam lamented. “The dope houses have taken over the neighborhoods and the people aren’t as friendly as they used to be, and neither are the numbers.” (There has, by the way, never been any association between Detroit’s drug trade and the Numbers.)

  The strategy worked. With a steady drumbeat of negative press about the Numbers—Ricke’s series chief among them—coupled with city and state officials’ demonization of number runners, public perception against this decades-old underground lottery coalesced, alongside the desire to usurp it. No surprise that on May 16, 1972, voters chose by a three-to-one margin to amend Michigan’s constitution and end the 137
-year ban on lotteries. Turns out, nearly 80 percent of blue-collar suburban whites voted for the lottery, as did those in rural counties, as well as large numbers of both white and black Detroiters—proving that gambling itself was not what the majority of Michiganders opposed. The option to bet on numbers out in the open was the real lure.

  Michigan was, it turns out, part of a wave of states that promoted legal lotteries as a form of “tax rebellion,” an easy way to raise revenue without imposing additional taxes on residents. This too was rooted in race-based policy, as states’ conservative Republican legislators and governors fueled resentment in their white suburban and rural constituents, who didn’t want their tax dollars going toward “inner-city” schools for public education, nor urban social programs. Nine states legalized lotteries from 1967 to 1974, with the obvious intent of capturing some of that Numbers money for their own coffers.

  “Even if you lose, your money is going for a good purpose rather than an evil purpose,” proclaimed William T. Cahill, then governor of New Jersey.

  After the vote, how did Mama feel, she who had doggedly built her business, risked arrest, paid out large sums to winners, kept money circulating in the community, used her proceeds as a consumer, lender, employer, and philanthropist? Maybe she felt some vindication, since the decision to legalize lotteries proved that the Numbers had, all along, been a legitimate business that just happened to be illegal. This I do know: she believed her livelihood was not under threat. Everyone in the business was confident that the Numbers would continue running, right alongside the legal lottery, and that plenty of black folks would stay loyal to them. Mama felt certain her own customers would stay loyal to her. She seemed, more than anything else, resigned after the vote. I heard her say, “Well, we already know that when white folks want to do something bad enough, they can just create a law to get away with it.”

  That August, Governor William Milliken signed Act 239, the Lottery Act, into law. I was an oblivious twelve-year-old focused instead on my sister Rita going off to Fisk University in Nashville, where she got to be around our kin from both sides of the family. I was a little jealous about all the fanfare of her departure. And then I missed her. Yet, Rita’s leaving home totally shifted the dynamic in the household in a surprising new way: Mama and I grew closer.

  As much as I’d loved being a daddy’s girl, once we moved, he wasn’t around for me to spend my free time with, and with Rita gone, I naturally found myself spending more time with Mama. As a preteen girl, I wanted to be around my mother more. Besides, the new house was designed in a way that made it easier for us to interact, none of the upstairs vs. downstairs living that took place on Broadstreet. Mama and I would go clothes shopping together at Southfield’s Northland Mall, spending most of our time in the gigantic four-story Hudson’s department store, where we always had lunch. We’d both order Hudson’s famous Maurice Salad, with its strips of ham, turkey, and Swiss cheese atop iceberg lettuce, covered in the yummiest lemony mayo and Dijon dressing I’ve ever tasted in my life. Some evenings, I’d stand over Mama as she sat on her bedroom’s chaise lounge, part her hair with a fine-toothed comb and scratch her dandruff, then oil her scalp with DuSharme hair cream. She liked that.

  By far, one of my favorite rituals we shared was watching classic films together. Every weekday afternoon the local Channel 7 station, WXYZ, showed The 4:30 Movie, and I looked forward to it as an after-school treat. Each week focused on a different actor’s or actress’s movies, and I’d sit next to Mama in the den with its red and black decor, the phone ringing intermittently as she took folks’ numbers, and hungrily watch those old movies, many in black-and-white. I seldom had to fill in Mama on what she missed during a call, because she’d seen most of them already. I wonder now, did Mama first see Back Street with Susan Hayward, and A Raisin in the Sun with Sidney Poitier, and The Misfits, Marilyn Monroe’s last film, while sitting in that movie theater back in the day, me in her arms, girding herself against bad luck? Once, the late, late show aired a double feature—1934’s Imitation of Life, starring Louise Beavers, which Mama had seen as a child, and 1949’s Pinky, starring Ethel Waters. “You need to see these films,” Mama said, emphatic, and so I stayed up into the early morning hours watching them back to back. These were “race dramas” about a light-skinned black woman passing as white, with disastrous consequences. In Imitation of Life, the daughter even disowns her mother. I understood the twin messages I was expected to take away: Be who you are. Honor your mother.

  As the last one of her five children still at home, I was also more attuned to Mama’s professional concerns; at some point that fall, I could feel a shift. It’s not that I actually knew that soon these new lottery tickets would go on sale; but I felt something, maybe even felt Mama’s growing anxiousness, because I took a newfound interest in the family business. I started helping to spot hits, Mama showing me how to refer to that day’s four different winning three-digits and carefully check to see if I found those exact combinations, straight or boxed, in customers’ plays. If I did so, I’d circle the hit in red ink. She explained how important it was that I not miss a hit, because an overlook was bad for business, as it cut into her reputation for running an operation “on the up and up,” as she put it. She never wanted to appear begrudging of customers’ good luck.

  I took the job of looking for hits seriously. In fact, it was a task suited for me, a bit like the puzzles and board games I enjoyed. Also, if Mama was busy, I sometimes took customers’ numbers over the phone, repeating each back to them as I’d heard her do for years. I also started calling customers each evening to give them the day’s winners: Hi, Miss White, this is Fannie’s daughter, Bridget. I’m calling to give you the number. For this task, Mama paid me twenty dollars a week.

  Two weeks before the first lottery ticket went on sale, authorities went hard after the Numbers. State and local police raided the Twenty Grand Motel, owned by Eddie Wingate. Police arrested twelve people, and alleged that the Twenty Grand—a favorite lounge for my adult sisters and their friends—was the headquarters for a $9-million-a-year operation.

  That chill in place, the first green lottery tickets went on sale to the general public for fifty cents each on November thirteenth. Even an oblivious seventh grader couldn’t miss all the hype over the new state lottery. The daily newspapers and newscasts reported “the richest state lottery in the nation” heavily and positively, and my mother watched all the coverage. Here’s what she did: she bought several tickets, becoming one of a stampede of Michiganders who purchased over five million tickets in that first week. “Might as well,” she said. “Might as well.”

  Eleven days later the Michigan state lottery, with extraordinary fanfare, held its first drawing at Cobo Arena in conjunction with the venerable Detroit Auto Show, complete with Governor Milliken’s attendance and “lottery ladies” in elegant dresses selecting the winning numbers.

  Mama got lucky. Her ticket was a winner, allowing her to enter the state’s “supersize” drawing: first prize was $200,000, second prize was $50,000, and third prize was $10,000. The entire family was anxious and excited as Burt drove Mama to the secretary of state’s office, where she had to place her winning ticket in an envelope and drop it into a clear globe alongside ten other semifinalists. I distinctly remember the feeling that our lives could really change if she won, that she’d never again have to worry about getting hit hard, because the money always would be there, endless. When the winners’ envelopes were drawn, Mama had won $10,000, not enough to change our lives, but clearly enough to pad her reserve for those large payouts when customers hit—and enough to keep intact her reputation as a lucky woman.

  Michigan’s lottery pulled in over $135 million in gross sales in its first year. Yet it was a game most black folks played as an extra treat, the way people today buy a Mega Millions lottery ticket when the jackpot climbs into the stratosphere. Meanwhile, the day-to-day operations of the Numbers continued in full force. For those who collected and booked
the Numbers regularly, and those who banked them, it wasn’t a game at all, but rather a daily business. Besides, the state lottery was just once a week, and you couldn’t pick your own numbers. That was the Numbers’ edge.

  Still, another series of Numbers raids and arrests by local police soon followed. Around this same time I became friends with another seventh grader, Sarita Williams, whose father, Paul, was one of Motown’s original Temptations. By then, Paul’s downward spiral was in rapid spin, mere months before he apparently committed suicide. I visited Sarita in their sprawling upscale house in Palmer Woods. What I saw was a home in disrepair. The toilet wouldn’t flush, the carpet was soiled and peppered with cigarette burns, the automatic garage door wouldn’t open, and the hot tub in the back was filled with algae and small dead animals. I felt a kind of vertigo, witnessing the decay of prosperity. I thought of what my father had once said to me: You can survive a fall from the basement. Falling from on top is what kills you. Later, in our kitchen, I recounted everything I’d seen in vivid detail to my mother, who clearly heard the anxiety in my voice.

  “They’ve just had some really bad luck lately,” I explained to her.

  Mama, who was frying catfish, said, “That’s not bad luck. That’s a squandered opportunity.” She turned to me, eyes boring into mine, spatula aloft, and said, “I would never let that happen. I would never go backwards.”