The World According to Fannie Davis Page 3

  Before he left, Mr. Prince took the doorbell chimes. Who rips out the doorbell when they sell a house? Mama was unfazed and promptly bought her own chiming bells, and those three golden stair-step columns sang out in domestic harmony each time a visitor rang our doorbell. I can still hear those distinct, elongated notes: dingggg, dongggg, dingggg.

  To this day, I mentally walk through the interior of Broadstreet, what we lovingly called it, our Manderley, and remember everything about the house. The vestibule had tiled flooring and a hall closet with a full-length mirror on its door. “The first thing you saw when you entered was yourself, and the last thing you saw when you left was yourself,” says my cousin Jewell, Aunt Florence’s daughter. The house had what we now call original details: double French doors leading to the dining room (which Mama kept flung open), a single French door off the den, a working fireplace and mantel below a huge built-in mirror, stucco walls throughout the downstairs, waist-high built-in bookshelves with glass-fronted doors, windows that cranked outward and ran across the length of the living room and den, and cherubs and fruit molded into the plaster of the ceiling in the formal dining room. Meanwhile the eat-in kitchen with turquoise appliances had a newfangled dishwasher and a breakfast nook with its own sensuously curved turquoise leather banquette; the pink-and-black-tiled powder room with its black toilet is where I got my one and only spanking from my father—three slaps across my bottom for sneaking out of the yard and running across the back alley. The staircase leading to the second floor had both a wide landing and a swooping wooden banister with a thick, hand-carved curlicue post top; Jewell and I loved to slide down that banister. We also liked tossing clothes down the chute, ever marveling at how they tumbled through the walls of the house, landing in a pile on the basement’s laundry room floor.

  Upstairs were four bedrooms, each one shared except for my brother’s; he had his own room. My and Rita’s room had wide window seats and twin closets with those sloping shoe racks. Mama and Daddy’s room had much larger twin, walk-in closets, each little rooms themselves with windows that looked down onto the street below. I spent many hours playing inside one of those closets, filled with my mother’s myriad purses, hatboxes, shoe boxes, and hanging clothes, some still with price tags. That’s also where she kept her combination-lock safe, used to store cash, valuables, and that day’s “business”—slips with her customers’ bets. The creaky, cedar-smelling attic was where I spent rainy afternoons, peeking out its window like a fairy-tale princess in a tower, watching birds and studying treetops, and each year, joining Jewell in secretly opening our Christmas presents stored there.

  The basement, remodeled by Mama, was a world unto itself, with a bar that wrapped across the entire back wall, complete with swiveling barstools, built-in bookshelves, and a separate playroom for me behind the furnace. That playroom was my haven, furnished with a turquoise rocking chair and matching toy chest purchased by Mama from an F.A.O. Schwarz catalog, and a Suzy Homemaker toy dishwasher, washer, dryer, and vacuum cleaner. With my Easy-Bake Oven, I made little cakes for my father, cooked by a lightbulb inside, and then invited him to my playhouse for tea parties. In that playhouse, I began to craft my first short stories about imaginary people, written with crayon on construction paper. Across the raw-wood door, I scrawled the word Broadway, and beneath it drew a large star.

  But it was the backyard that I treasured most. From my child’s perspective it was so huge, divided by a walkway that led to the back gate, which opened onto that back alley. If you crossed the alley you were on Buena Vista. On one side, the yard was filled with rich, green, cushy grass. On the other was my swing set, with its sinewy metal slide and swings that allowed me to jump off, onto that soft grass. Behind the swing set were a peach tree and encroaching limbs from the neighbor’s apple tree. If I swung high enough, I could grab one of those apples, tart and delicious. Most of all, I remember my father watching me play in the yard from his perch on the back porch. He liked to lean on the back railing, arms folded as he looked out, his transistor radio tossing rhythm and blues into the air. I also spent hours in the garage, which had its panoply of tools and ornaments and discarded odds and ends. Inside, I played a solitary game I called Invention, making what seemed to me new and useful things. In bursts of artistic expression, I made junk sculptures. Sometimes Daddy would join me in the garage, but mostly he just liked knowing I was nearby.

  When I saw the artist Mickalene Thomas’s museum exhibition Origin of the Universe a few years ago, I immediately recognized the re-created living room of her childhood home, with its bold choices and pizazz. It reminded me of Mama’s decorating style, the combination of French Provincial and sixties modern. In our home, plush and daring red carpet snaked through the entire downstairs; crystal teardrop side lamps captured the light pouring through the custom drapes, a conservative paisley in the living and dining rooms and a mod geometric design in the den. Fine china from Bavaria (Briar Rose pattern on white) filled the dining room’s china cabinet. Mama’s bed stayed dressed in gorgeous linens trimmed in white eyelet. My bedroom and Rita’s was painted a shade of magenta that I’ve yet to see again, with coordinated pink-and-white-striped shades on the windows, and a double bed with an actual fluffy white canopy on top. Too, Mama liked unusual accent pieces, a playful disruption of the expected. My favorite was a three-piece coffee table with bronze legs and smoked-glass tops, each etched with a gold design, and fitting together like tic-tac-toe pieces—two Xs, one O.

  People who visited often oohed and aahed when they entered the house, reacting to its decidedly nonconservative, nonpractical décor. Many of those people did business with Mama, playing their numbers with her, and she understood what all entrepreneurs understand: customers want to do business with people who look prosperous. Especially in the world of the Numbers, where luck and superstition run side by side, customers believed that good luck rubbed off, so they wanted to play their numbers with my mother, who certainly appeared to be doing well. Fannie Davis looked like a lucky woman.

  Best of all, our chic home was child-friendly. Despite the upscale décor, there were no rooms we couldn’t enter. Mama also had a cardinal rule: use everything. The china got eaten on. We didn’t have “guest towels.” The off-white brocade sofa was briefly covered in fitted plastic, as was de rigueur, but Mama eventually removed it, deciding nothing was that precious. When the sofa got dingy, she had it professionally cleaned. When dishes got chipped or broken, she replaced them. When the walls got scuffed, Daddy, who had learned to paint like a pro from my grandfather, repainted them. The house could get messy too. After all, seven people lived in it. On Saturday mornings, everyone had a chore, and Mama would announce that when she returned from “my collecting,” as she called it, i.e., collecting money owed from customers, she wanted the house spotless. It was. (My job was to sweep my bedroom floor.) And then it got messy again. And then we all cleaned it again the following Saturday.

  In my memory the front, side and back doors of Broadstreet were always opening and closing. People were forever going into and coming out of our house. Those chiming bells rang out a lot. Some visitors were Mama’s customers, who preferred to pay their bills and collect their money in person. Some were family friends. Some were neighbors. Some were relatives from down South, who came to see for themselves how “Fannie and John T. had made it” up North. We used to call it Grand Central Station; it was years before I learned that was a real place in New York.

  The house also fulfilled one of my mother’s ardent desires: to have a regal place from which she could reign as a grande dame of benevolence. I’ve heard legions of stories about my mother’s generosity that go as far back as her youth in Nashville, but her reputation for helping others grew exponentially once the family moved to Broadstreet. The Numbers gave her the means to give, but our house gave her a headquarters from which to do it: Neighborhood kids who weren’t doing so well got new clothes alongside advice to stay in school. Teens whose home lives were chaotic got a pla
ce to crash for a few days, young women in troubled marriages got to sleep on the basement sofa until it was safe to go home. Mama had a standard, short response whenever someone thanked her for her generosity: “I’m just glad I have it to give,” she’d say.

  Everyone from her children’s friends to her own friends to her customers came through Broadstreet to seek my mother’s counsel. “Fannie knew what to do in any situation,” her best friend, Lula, once told me. “She was a wise woman, you know, she had a gift. And she wouldn’t tell you what you wanted to hear, nah. She’d just give it to you straight.”

  My mother, with my father’s support, even let others borrow the house for social events. “Somebody was always asking to have something over there,” recalls Elaine, a lifetime family friend. “I know our family had two baby showers on Broadstreet. Then there were people who had birthday parties, engagement parties, and graduation parties. Fannie and John T. always welcomed everybody that came through. They were both like, ‘Yeah, sure, have yourself a nice time, make yourself at home.’”

  Food was ubiquitous. “I remember you-all had one of those new refrigerators,” says Elaine. “We’d never seen one with doors side by side, so we were truly impressed. And it was just always full.” Whether it was a huge pot of spaghetti with ground beef or T-bone and Delmonico steaks or rump roast or fried catfish, something was always simmering on the stove or cooking in the oven. If you were at our house, whoever you were, you got fed. “If we wanted anything from hot sausages to egg salad sandwiches, we could have it,” recalls Elaine. “Fannie would offer you food and tell you, ‘You don’t have to say you’re not hungry if you’re hungry.’ She would always be matter-of-fact, so you never ever felt like you were imposing, or taking a handout.”

  The kitchen was the heart of the house. It was big enough for me to do cartwheels in, and the turquoise leather banquette, which Mama designed and had custom-made, could seat seven or eight people as they slid around the Formica-top table. That banquette stayed full with folks squished around it.

  Linda, who spent many school days coming over as my sister Rita’s elementary school buddy, explains: “Your mother just had that gift of hospitality. People were always there, so it was very lively, and so you wanted to be there too.”

  That was my mother’s policy: Feel free, feel welcome. Be happy.

  Because three of my siblings grew into their teenage years on Broadstreet, the lounge-style basement became the spot for them and their friends. Even though it couldn’t possibly have been the case, in my memory there were parties down there every night. Certainly I can remember folks coming through in a steady stream, lots of laughter and loud Motown music, the sounds of bid whist (that complex card game played passionately by black folks) and the smell of cigarette smoke. “Everybody who was anybody would come into your house because your brother, Anthony, had a lot of friends,” Linda tells me. “I used to see his girlfriend, Renita, pass by my house to go over there.”

  That girlfriend later became my brother’s wife, and she remembers good times in the basement. “Anthony would stuff so many people in there, all coming through that side door. We’d drink—maybe a little wine for me, that’s it—and laugh and play cards,” she tells me. “And he’d keep going upstairs and coming down with something for us to eat.” She smiles at the memory. “That was the place to be.”

  “I loved that house,” my cousin Jewell says simply. She voices this love while sitting in the dining room of her own three-story gray brick house in Oak Park, two miles from Detroit’s city limits. “Broadstreet was the ideal home; it was so huge, and it held so much love,” she explains. “In my quest for the perfect home, it had to have some elements of Broadstreet.”

  More than forty-five years later, when Jewell did finally buy her dream house, she kept her word and chose one that reminded her of our home, one that had a similar living room fireplace, window seat, and marble-floored vestibule. “Whenever I hear my front door close, I think of Broadstreet,” she says. “It has that same echoing slam.”

  It wasn’t just the comfort of the house, nor its open-door policy, nor the abundance that flowed within its walls that made 12836 so special. Broadstreet was our armor against a world designed to convince us, black working-class children of migrants, that we didn’t deserve a good life. Our nice big house made a lie of such claims, and even our extended family and friends felt its reverberating impact. Ours was a communal triumph. The pride my parents felt trickled out, and trickled down. Of course, I wasn’t consciously aware of these things as a little girl. I only knew that I had the freedom to lie on the backyard’s tickly grass, staring up at the sky, secure behind my family’s protective fence, and imagine myself going to faraway places in airplanes like those that roared over the clouds. (Eventually, I did.) I could afford the indulgence of daydreams. There was something about the physical space of the house—the different floors, the many rooms, the sprawling front and back yards, the secret nooks and crannies—that gave me, as a child, a sense of possibility. I know you can dream from small, crowded spaces. But it’s harder.

  The house’s spaciousness was also important to my mother’s Numbers. From the privacy of her own home, no longer living in a rented flat of a two-family house, she had a new, roomy base from which to run her business. Where before she’d kept her activity behind closed doors, she now expanded to taking numbers both in her upstairs bedroom and at the dining room table. Sitting beneath that crystal chandelier, Mama accepted customers’ bets—any three-digit combination from 000 to 999—and then turned those in to one of the biggest Numbers men in Detroit: Eddie Wingate, a larger-than-life figure who used his wealth to purchase racehorses, launch a record company that once rivaled Motown and open a hot-spot motel and nightclub called the Twenty Grand. Wingate, as everyone called him, was the very man with whom Mama had hit big; now he was her banker, paying off all hits and giving Mama, as a bookie who turned in all bets to him, a percentage of the weekly proceeds from her customers’ plays. It was a steady income, enough to pay the monthly mortgage and then some.

  As the ever-present possibility of Mr. Prince confiscating our home hummed beneath the surface of our good lives, Mama soon faced a new threat. One day, less than a year into life on Broadstreet, she somehow overlooked a customer’s number and forgot to turn it in to Wingate. That number came out, which meant she suddenly owed her boss a massive amount of cash to pay off the hit. Mama knew not to cross Wingate, who was notorious for being a cold, ruthless man. But she didn’t have it, even after including the money left from her big hit. And it wasn’t like she could use our house as collateral. Her name wasn’t on the deed.

  Two

  Fannie, age 18

  For as long as I can remember, my mother collected loose silver change in myriad vessels around the house, in mason jars and clear glass bowls and plastic jugs. I used to enjoy seeing those silver coins pile up, glittering from the china cabinet or her nightstand or the den shelf. Sometimes I’d dip my hand into one, scooping up enough quarters to treat myself to McDonald’s French fries after school.

  So I can imagine her back in 1962, working to pull together the money she owed Wingate, emptying out all those vessels as I lay napping in my new French Provincial baby bed, her first major purchase since arriving in Detroit. My older siblings would’ve sat cross-legged on the brand-new, plush red carpet surrounded by multicolored coin wrappers, helping Mama wrap piles of quarters and dimes and nickels to take to the bank to exchange for dollars. To that, Mama scrambled to add whatever money she’d saved, whatever money she could borrow, and somehow she pulled together the cash.

  “She had to really scuffle to pay that money,” recalls my aunt Florence.

  The effort to pay off that hit left Mama broke but empowered. She decided that since she had to start over anyway, this time she’d hold her customers’ bets herself, be no one’s bookie, be her own banker. “She said, ‘If I could pay out all that, I can hold the rest of this shit,’” says Aunt Florence. />
  It was a big risk. With Mr. Prince’s house note to pay every month, and Daddy’s work unsteady, the last thing Mama wanted was for us to fall back into the poverty she and the family had faced in their early years in Detroit. By then, in 1955, the Motor City was the fourth-largest US city and everyone had said it was “the place to be.” But my mother, father, sisters and brother, having traveled north from Nashville by train, ended up living on a mean, narrow street called Delaware. Throughout the rest of her life, Mama refused to even drive past Delaware, let alone down the street itself. “The memories are too painful” was all she’d say to me about that street, but really about life in the city before I was born.

  It was my uncle John, Mama’s brother, who later provided the details. “They were catching hell,” he says. The apartment on Delaware was in a rough colored section of the city, just off Twelfth, a street that would become infamous a decade later. Back then in the fifties, according to the historian Thomas Sugrue, my parents were like most blacks, relegated to just a few areas in the city with old, ramshackle tenements owned by absentee landlords, complete with rashes of crime and rampant disease. Fire was an ever-present danger.

  “I went by to bring them some coal to heat the furnace, and I was shocked,” says Uncle John. He found them living in a cold-water flat in an overcrowded building. There were rats and roaches. “I told her to go back home; she didn’t have to live like that,” he recalls. “Our people had property.”

  No one would have blamed my parents for returning to Nashville. They rented from a white-flight landlord who took advantage of the shortage of available housing for newly arrived Negroes and charged them an exorbitant rent, causing my parents to spend most of their meager income on housing. Eviction was a constant threat.