The World According to Fannie Davis Read online

  Also, while I knew to preserve our secret, I didn’t fully appreciate what could happen if it got out. Yes, Mama could get busted, but I didn’t process what that meant: that our good life would end. No one in our family ever talked about it, but we knew. Mama’s was a cash business and plenty of money was always literally in our midst, yet my siblings and I understood viscerally that our middle-class prosperity was tenuous, always under threat, because Mama’s livelihood was based on a win-or-lose daily gamble. Nowhere was that threat more evident than in our household’s nightly ritual: as dusk fell and we all waited for the day’s winning numbers to come out, a tense silence moved through our home like a nervous prayer. And once it was past 7 p.m. and we knew those three-digit combinations, we took our cues from Mama. Either she looked relieved, or she looked worried. Either she’d been lucky that day, or her customers had been. If she found a big hit by one of her customers, the energy in our household shifted to the solemn yet brisk activity of gathering and counting money, oftentimes large sums of it. Yet Mama never resented her customers’ wins. “People play numbers to hit,” she used to say. “So you can’t be mad when they do. Business is business.”

  Each time my mother had a large payout, I didn’t realize she could be wiped out. Despite the “good spell” versus “rough patch” nature of her work, Mama never conveyed a sense of fear or instability. She was a domestic magician with incredible sleight of hand. She made our family’s life appear stable and secure. And so I might’ve been anxious beyond my own understanding, but in my day-to-day world, I believed there was nothing to worry about.

  I now know that risks were everywhere, coming from different sources, reverberating inward. How hard it must have been to shield us from the vagaries of the business, all run from our home, in full view, where the phones and the doorbell rang constantly and the work of running the Numbers sometimes continued until bedtime. It was risky for Mama to send that “how dare you” message to my first-grade teacher. Doing so could’ve invited Miss Miller’s wrath and retaliation. The year was 1967, mere weeks before Detroit’s uprising, its infamous “race riot.” Racial tensions ran high. Miss Miller could’ve reported to authorities her suspicions about our family’s income. I now think of the risk Mama took that day as a small revolutionary act, just one of many.

  My mother gave us a good life at great expense. I thought I knew her skills as a number runner, that she used her facility with numbers, good judge of character, winning personality, and dose of good luck to build and maintain her business for three decades. But I had no idea just how much of a gambler she was, or the kind of psychological work it took to keep our world afloat.

  Scariest of all is this: the only way for me to tell Mama’s story is to defy her, by running my mouth.

  Part I

  Hitsville, USA

  Fannie, her brother John, and her sister Florence,

  Detroit, 1970s

  One

  Broadstreet

  The address listed on my birth certificate is 8878 North Clarendon. That two-family flat must’ve felt like a lucky place for my mother, her nicest home yet in Detroit. It’s easy to see why, as soon as we moved in, she got a hunch to play the first three digits of our address and adopted a version of that combination as her “pet” number. Soon enough, Mama hit on 788. I like that word hit, its imagery of striking back against a formidable force, of swinging bat against ball for the win, of landing on a great idea. It conjures up a hero’s triumph, and my mother is the hero of this story. Her win is mythic in our family lore.

  “How much did she hit for?” I once asked Aunt Florence.

  “Hell, Fannie hit for big money!” said Florence. “She had fifty dollars or something on that number!”

  I marvel at the grandeur of my aunt’s claim, that with a 500-to-1 payout, Mama hit for $25,000 or more. This she did in the city already known as Hitsville, USA, thanks to Berry Gordy and his winning Motown Records. That amount was easily more than a decade’s salary for my father, a factory worker.

  “Fannie was just lucky,” says Aunt Florence. And then she explains her sister’s big hit this way: “It was because she gave so freely. That’s why Fannie had such good luck.”

  I’d heard this about my mother my entire life, that she was a lucky woman, and that her luck was a direct consequence of her generosity. The two are entwined in her sister’s and others’ minds, one explaining the other. I’ve come to believe my mom’s luck was in fact preparation meeting opportunity. As for her big hit, no one is certain exactly how much money my mother played on 788 that day, because she never told anyone. I’m sure she was happy to let everyone believe she won many, many thousands of dollars, neither confirming nor denying the story. She would love that her good fortune all those years ago has now become a legend, one made more engaging because she hit with a man whose name was Wingate.

  This I do know: She did give freely, and she did win big; and whatever the amount, it was enough to change the trajectory of our family’s fortunes. With her winnings, Mama decided to buy a house.

  She considered buying a home in Conant Gardens, the all-black, exclusive enclave of doctors, ministers, funeral parlor owners, and lawyers, i.e., the black bourgeoisie; but that wasn’t her crowd. Besides, she had little use for separate but so-called equal. My mother understood from her Southern roots a basic principle that still holds true: where there’s a white presence, there will be amenities. She wanted grocery stores with quality produce and roads that got repaired and streetlights that came on magically at dusk and garbage that got collected on time. She believed that as long as her children sat beside white classmates in a public school, we’d all receive a decent education. “I pay the same taxes,” she used to say. “I should have the same benefits.”

  The year was 1961, and because a sweet irony was occurring, she had options: Detroit’s black residents were finally winning their legal fight to live where they wanted, thanks to the efforts of the Detroit chapter of the NAACP, which was the largest in the nation, and interestingly, believed to be funded heavily by the city’s number runners. Rather than live beside black neighbors, upper-middle-class residents who could afford to fled the city for the suburbs; that flutter of white flight meant they had to sell their houses to black buyers.

  My mother fell in love with one of those houses, a three-story, four-bedroom New England–style Colonial red brick with a big backyard, on a tree-lined wide avenue appropriately named Broadstreet. The house was in an area on the city’s west side called Russell Woods, where white clerks, engineers, accountants, midlevel white-collar workers, and businessmen all once lived. Other houses on the block were in a variety of architectural types, one a mock French château, another a Tudor style, and others replicas of formal Georgian estates. All of them were designed to be small-scale versions of the more elaborate houses of the auto execs and bankers and doctors and lawyers who lived in the tonier neighborhoods throughout the city. A pretty park was nearby. Winterhalter, a good elementary and junior high school, was just four blocks up the same street. Mackenzie High was not much farther.

  The curb appeal was irresistible: The house’s front porch was wide and generous, beneath a striped awning. Its front door was spectacularly curved at the top, with a heavy brass circular knocker, a molded animal head at its center. It could’ve been the door of a small castle. The tall, rectangular leaded-pane windows were each adorned with stained-glass designs etched across the top, and the front porch’s iron balustrade had curving balusters both decorative and protective. Even its address was appealing, five whimsical dark digits tumbling across a white plaque: 12836.

  On April fifteenth, tax day, my mother carried me on her hip as she strode up the curvy walkway of our new home, crossing the threshold and stepping us into the middle class. She was just shy of thirty-three and had migrated north with my father six years before. I’d soon celebrate my first birthday. My sister Rita was days away from turning five, my brother, Anthony, was eight, my sister Selena Dian
ne was twelve, and my oldest sister, Deborah, was fourteen. Mama paid $16,700 for the house. The average cost of a home that year was $12,500. The sellers were a white businessman named Torkom Prince and his wife, Beatrice.

  Here’s what I didn’t know until I was good and grown: Mama couldn’t buy the house the way most people buy homes, because banks and other lenders wouldn’t give her a mortgage. My mother was forced to enter into a deal with the seller and buy the house via a shaky type of land contract. But the seller, Mr. Prince, wouldn’t sell the house directly to her, despite the fact that this land contract, which was essentially an installment plan, ensured no risk for him. He told my mother that since her husband’s work wasn’t steady—my father worked on-again off-again for General Motors—and with her being a Negro woman, he couldn’t take the risk; this despite her hefty down payment.

  Mama quickly landed on an idea: she asked an older family friend, a black man with good credit and a long work history in the auto plants, to “buy” her dream house for her. He agreed. When I recently found the original documents, I was taken aback to see it in black and white: Wallace Colvin’s name on the contract as purchaser, not my mother’s.

  She had to trust the integrity of Mr. Colvin, a man whom I only once heard about and never met in subsequent years, so he couldn’t have been a close friend. Turns out, many African-Americans in the same predicament got swindled out of their life savings, and their homes, by third-party, so-called friends. I found out that the use of these land contracts, known as buying on contract, was by its nature predatory. It meant that the buyer entered into an agreement “that combined all the responsibilities of homeownership with all the disadvantages of renting, while offering the benefits of neither,” as Ta-Nehisi Coates put it in his seminal Atlantic article, “The Case for Reparations.” The seller essentially remained its owner until the house was fully paid for. The buyer built no equity in the property. The seller carried the homeowner’s insurance. Not only that, my mother had to trust that Mr. Prince was paying the property taxes out of the money she paid him every month. If he opted not to pay those taxes (or claimed he hadn’t), she had little recourse but to come up with the “owed” taxes; if she didn’t, the house remained his. Everything about it was so risky that while Mr. Colvin could have initially cheated her out of the house, Mr. Prince had long-term chances to do so. What laws would’ve protected her? None. My mother knew this, and had to rely on Mr. Prince’s so-called decency.

  I somehow sensed this, even as a little girl. Every time Mr. Prince came to our house from his new suburban home in Orchard Lake to collect his money, in cash, I felt a twinge of fear. I’d sit on the steps and eye him through the banister; he was scary, so foreign, practically the only white person ever to enter our home, and I thought he was there to check up on us, deciding whether or not to let us stay in the house.

  I now know that my child’s worry wasn’t completely unfounded: under the terms of the contract, Mr. Prince could’ve taken back the house if Mama missed one payment. I imagine that as my mother decorated rooms, as I played in the backyard, as my siblings invited their friends over to hang out in the basement lounge, as kin from down South came to visit, her awareness of this possibility, of losing our home, was right there, ever-present. I imagine too how much harder that made her work.

  I came to learn that my mother was by no means alone in having to buy her house “on contract.” Even African-Americans with stable employment and good, verifiable income couldn’t get traditional financing. I was stunned to learn this fact: federal policy ensured that banks denied loans to black home buyers. I thought my mother’s unorthodox vocation as a number runner prevented her from getting a traditional mortgage and that at least other working-class and professional blacks could acquire bank credit. Turns out, it didn’t matter who those black home buyers were: Red lines were drawn around all black communities, or wherever a black family lived—even neighborhoods like Conant Gardens, the upscale African-American community of suburban-style ranch homes with manicured lawns—and they were deemed “high-risk”; thus the FHA refused to insure mortgages for those houses. That’s why lenders could so easily get away with refusing home loans to Negroes. Redlining, as it was known, proliferated unabated for many years.

  One month before my mother (via Mr. Colvin) purchased the house from Mr. Prince, President John F. Kennedy reduced the interest rate on FHA-insured home loans to 5.5 percent. Three months later, he lowered it again to 5.25 percent, because he felt the higher rate was “unrealistic.” The White House also encouraged savings and loans associations to follow suit with conventional loans. Those great government-backed, low-interest loans were unavailable to enterprising and aspiring black Americans like my mother; while whites were rushing into the middle class, purchasing new homes at great rates for little money down, the interest rate on Mama’s contract purchase, paid dutifully to Mr. Prince every month, was 13 percent.

  Why didn’t my mother just pay for the house in cash, since she had a lump sum thanks to her hit? First, Mr. Prince would’ve been suspicious, possibly resentful of that kind of money, and she couldn’t afford those suspicions. She had a secret to keep; paying in cash was way too risky. Besides, she needed to save as much of her windfall as possible for big payouts, which all number runners have to anticipate.

  So why didn’t she—and other blacks—buy more affordable homes in Detroit’s white, working-class areas, where appraisals were fair? Because in those neighborhoods, real estate agents enforced “covenants” to keep them “homogeneous,” as in all white. And according to historian Thomas Sugrue, whites in those neighborhoods fought bitter battles to keep “the first black family” out, mounting organized grassroots campaigns that relied on everything from hysteria to intimidation to violent harassment, even riots. Essentially, they practiced terrorism. And so black residents were all but shut out of the private real estate market. That meant most were trapped in the city’s poorer housing in strictly segregated areas, prey to unscrupulous white landlords. The most fundamental American hope, what Coates has called “that final badge of entry into the sacred order of the American middle class,” to buy a home that increases in value and becomes your biggest asset, was effectively unavailable to the majority of African-Americans nationwide. “The FHA adopted a racial policy that could well have been culled from the Nuremberg laws,” Charles Abrams, the urban studies expert, wrote in 1955, the year my parents arrived in Michigan from Tennessee.

  Those few blacks in the vanguard, like my mother, who in the early sixties could manage a land contract’s whopping 30 percent down payment and a high interest rate, could have nicer houses in better neighborhoods than the bigoted working-class whites who couldn’t afford to flee the city. Imagine the resentment. In fact, my mother remained grateful to Mr. Prince for selling his house to her. “He didn’t do me dirty,” she used to say. To her mind, he didn’t charge her an exorbitant price for the house, or use unscrupulous means to take it back, or tack on fake additional tax and insurance costs. Many black home buyers weren’t so lucky, falling prey to plunderers’ tactics and losing the homes they bought on contract, along with all the money they’d invested in them. “The seller could repossess the house as easily as a used car salesman repossessed a delinquent automobile,” writes Beryl Satter in Family Properties, her scathing account of this widespread practice in Chicago.

  On Broadstreet, white flight happened in stages. My first playmate was the little white girl next door named Suzy. I remember her, and I remember my mother later telling folks how “that child didn’t care about color, and for a hot minute, seem like her parents didn’t neither.” Our briefly mixed-race neighborhood was lovely by anyone’s measure. Four years after we moved there, Diana Ross and the Supremes, ascending to stardom, each chose to buy her own home around the corner from ours on a stately street with an enticing Spanish name: Buena Vista. Diana got the big corner house.

  Within a few years came the hard-won Fair Housing Act—the 1968 legisl
ation signed into law days after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination—legally ending redlining, and with it such a rush of white escape that block after block of the city’s best housing stock eventually became 90 percent black-owned, including our block and those surrounding it. In fact, huge swaths of the white population of Detroit, having lost the open housing battle and convinced that a black presence lowered property values—confirmed by the fact that the FHA devalued homes in any neighborhood where African-Americans lived—abandoned Detroit, unwilling to live beside its black citizens. People like my mother, my father, my siblings, and me.

  Yet when Mr. Prince bought the house in 1948, he paid one dollar. This I discovered after a title search. Who knows the backstory there? In 1948, Detroit’s Negro population was at its height; black folks migrated there in droves after World War II; the auto industry was booming, thanks to its production of war materials, and many blacks could’ve afforded decent homes had they been easily allowed to buy them. (Interestingly, a lucky few were extended personal loans by big-time number runners.)

  Meanwhile, Mr. Prince, by virtue of his white privilege, was amassing generational wealth, this one property paying off for him across decades. What kind of luck did he enjoy to buy a house for $1 and ultimately sell it, across time, for 39,000 times that? Not because he lived right or had great business acumen, but because the government set up everything in his favor? As Mama used to say, “Bootstraps? Hell, they do everything they can to keep us from having boots. Don’t tell me a damn thing about some bootstraps.”