The World According to Fannie Davis Read online

  But while her big brother was telling her to go home, Fannie’s baby sister was encouraging her to stay. Aunt Florence would send her money every week. Sometimes it was ten dollars, sometimes fifteen or twenty. She was playing the Numbers herself in Nashville. “And if I hit the number, I’d sweeten the pot and maybe send thirty dollars,” recalls Aunt Florence. “I’d say, ‘I had a little luck.’” My aunt had her own migration plans and she didn’t want her favorite sister to return home, so sending money was a kind of insurance premium. “She wanted to go home,” says Aunt Florence. “She used to call me and say, ‘I wanna come back, I’m coming back.’ She would cry. I’d say, ‘Don’t come back, stay there,’ ’cause I knew I was on my way. I’d say, ‘Just stay there. Things gonna get better.’ And honey, I made sure I sent her that money every Friday.”

  But things weren’t getting better. My father, like most Negro men, was placed in one of the poorer-paying, less secure jobs at GM’s auto plant; listed in a 1950s city directory as a “heat treater,” he tended a furnace that heated and hardened metals for use in building the cars, often a dangerous and hard job. He was also part of a wave of black migrants last hired, first fired. Wages were good in the factories compared to what my father had left behind, working with my grandfather as a plasterer (Henry Ford initiated the trend of paying factory workers better wages to keep them at mind-numbing assembly-line work), but the fifties were a rough time for a black man in Detroit seeking an entry-level job. The auto industry had already begun reducing employment in the Rust Belt cities, replacing workers with automated technology and constructing new facilities in other areas of the country and abroad, all of which would devastate Detroit in the years to come. African-Americans had the least seniority on these jobs and so were often the first to be let go. And this occurred just when the city’s population of working-age black adults was on the rise.

  “Too many Negro families who have moved here to work in the auto plants are now unemployed,” the Detroit News proclaimed by 1959. “For most there are no prospects of jobs.” Indeed, Daddy got hired, laid off, rehired, and laid off repeatedly at the city’s GM plant, located on the border of Hamtramck. He later confessed to me that he hated factory work. I’m sure the racially hostile environment in the plants made it even worse.

  In the spring of 1956, my parents had another baby, their fourth, a girl they named Rita. She was born at Trumbull General Hospital, where my mother delivered her breech in the communal maternity ward, an experience that she later attested “no woman deserves.”

  For the next two years, poverty gripped the family. Sadly, the Motor City was not the place to be.

  Thank God for the Drumwrights’ foothold in the world. What saved my parents from the catch-22 cycle of endless poverty that gripped so many African-Americans was my grandparents’ generosity. One desperate day in early 1958, my mother called her own mother in Nashville. “Kine, I need help,” she said, calling her mother by her nickname, a moniker that matched my grandmother’s kind nature. “How much, Fannie?” her mother asked. “As much as you can spare.” My grandparents sent their daughter $900, an astonishing amount of money at the time, and possibly their life savings. Fannie was their first daughter to leave home and migrate north. They wanted her to make it.

  When I learned this story, I wondered how my grandparents had that much money to loan their daughter. I’d been told the broad strokes about my grandfather, that he’d “run his own plastering business,” but little else. Inspired anew, I decided to visit Mama’s hometown and, with the help of my cousin Ava, find out more. What I discovered was that my mother’s father, Ezra Drumwright, born in 1885, just twenty years after slavery’s end and eight years after Reconstruction, became both a businessman and a property owner in the early decades of the twentieth century; this was at a time when most colored men in the South were sharecroppers, and those with land had their property routinely confiscated by whites.

  As a young man, my grandfather had myriad jobs; Nashville’s City Directory lists him as a “driver” in 1918, and a “laborer” in 1922; for some years he worked at a paper mill, but by the time he was in his thirties, he’d learned to plaster walls and do construction work on the advice of his brother, John Henry. (“You can’t raise no family working here at the mill,” his brother told him.) That not only got him out of doing menial labor, it gave him a skill that he could turn into a livelihood. He worked for his own uncle initially and later built government housing, going on to enlist other colored men to work under him, including his uncle. The story most told about my grandfather is that he was an exacting boss, very strict, and a perfectionist. He’d make his men tear down a wall and rebuild it if he thought it wasn’t plastered properly.

  My grandmother was his bookkeeper. My cousin Bill recalls that my grandfather often loaned his workers money. “He’d tell his wife, ‘Caroline, I lent such-and-such some money. Deduct that from what they get at the end of the week.’” Another anecdote that has traveled down through the years is that despite being self-employed, my grandfather wasn’t allowed to wear a white collar shirt to his white customers’ homes or businesses. White folks didn’t like what it implied. “He had to wear a simple shirt, like he didn’t have nothing,” explains Aunt Florence.

  He also hid the fact that he owned a new car. “He bought a car for the boys,” Aunt Florence tells me. The family lived near a hill, and over it was a white high school. My grandparents had two boys still living at home, including Uncle John. “Them white kids would walk up and down that hill all during the night,” Aunt Florence recalls. “And my daddy felt like if the boys would be coming home at night and meet them and one girl hollered rape, they’re gone. And he bought a car for that, to keep them safe.”

  Throughout his working life, my grandfather supported his wife and nine surviving children (one baby girl died after falling into a fireplace’s burning embers), and remained staunchly proud that my grandmother never had to clean white folks’ homes or, as she’d done before they married, wash white folks’ clothes. (The 1910 Census lists my grandmother’s occupation as “laundress.”) Pap, as they called him, was a smart, dark-skinned, no-nonsense man who was “damn good” at what he did, according to my aunt Florence; he had equal doses of drive, gravitas, and vision: exceptional among colored men of that era, he managed to save his hard-earned money, buy property, and hold on to it. African-Americans owned as much as 19 million acres of Southern land by 1910, according to the US Department of Agriculture, but the white backlash was so virulent that a decade later, those numbers had dropped precipitously. The backlash, often led by a newly resurgent Ku Klux Klan, was spawned by resentment that blacks were buying and profiting from land, and it led to “land takings” through exploitative so-called legal means, but also through intimidation, violent mob attacks, and murder. Of course, losing their land meant most blacks couldn’t transfer wealth from one generation to the next, which helps explain the hundred-year decline in black land ownership.

  Somehow my grandfather escaped that fate. Among my mother’s possessions I found original deeds and contracts, yellowed and falling apart, written in fountain-pen ink, for property my grandfather bought from an E. S. Newson and her husband, A. W. Newson, real estate agents based in Huntsville, Alabama. He bought the first parcel of land, “Lot 7,” on July 23, 1919, just months after the end of World War I, for $375 “cash in hand,” when he was thirty-four years old, with four children. What makes his purchase astonishing is that, that very same summer, African-American soldiers returning from fighting for freedom in Europe, and expecting the same freedoms back home, were met with anger over their supposed competition with whites for jobs, resulting in the worst-ever spate of lynching in US history. In states throughout the country, including Tennessee, at least twenty-six full-fledged racial massacres took place; the violence was so virulent that civil rights activist and author James Weldon Johnson dubbed it the Red Summer of 1919. Turns out, many of those lynched were property owners. Quoted in
2006 by the Associated Press, Ray Winbush, as director of Fisk University’s Race Relations Institute, said, “If you’re looking for stolen black land, just follow the lynching trail.”

  The deed my grandfather received reads like the launch of matrimonial vows: “TO HAVE AND TO HOLD said Tract or Parcel of Land, with the appurtenances, estate, title and interest thereto belonging, to the said Ezra Drumwright and wife, Caroline Drumwright, their heirs and assigns, forever.” Part of that land adjoined the Tennessee State Fair Grounds, and that’s where my grandfather built the family home. That same home, 410 Wingrove, is where my own parents lived when they were a young married couple with children of their own in the late forties and early fifties. The family home on Wingrove is also where I’d later join my mother on visits back to Nashville. I’d sit on my grandmother’s front porch, watching the lights glow on the State Fairgrounds’ white wooden roller coaster and listening to the riders’ delighted screams as they plunged downward. That same house is where Kine, my pretty, soft-spoken and gentle grandmother, was laid out for viewing after her death in 1970, at age eighty-one.

  In 1925, my grandfather bought the land next door to his family home, Lot 6, for $150 cash, and it became 412 Wingrove; he later purchased another tract beside that, Lot 5, which became 414 Wingrove and is now part of a family compound. By 1999, those three lots were appraised at a total of $51,000.

  The documents show that my grandfather bought a fourth tract of land on November 5,1927, when his wife was pregnant with their ninth child, my mother. That property, 1005 First Avenue South, eventually became a boardinghouse where my aunt Ella, or Big Sis as everyone called her, lived and rented out rooms. She was, like her father, entrepreneurial. That boardinghouse, which I visited many times, with its linoleum floors and gigantic, king-sized bed in Big Sis’s room, gave her a livelihood until her death in 1987. It remains in the family.

  Yet another property that my grandfather purchased was 1267 Lewis Street. My grandmother “sold” that property to my mother in 1968 for ten dollars. I inherited that same property after my mother’s death, and eventually sold it, investing most of the money for my children’s college education. I also shared some of the proceeds with my nephew, Tony, who later told me that he’d been broke and that windfall allowed him to attend a weekend “singles’ retreat” sponsored by his church; he was able not only to pay the retreat fees but to buy new outfits for the weekend as well. He said he felt good about himself that weekend, confident. The retreat is where he met his wife, Angelita. He’s convinced that his great-grandfather’s vision, alongside his grandmother’s foresight, led to the life he lives now. I could say the same for myself.

  “We have all been used to plenty,” explains Aunt Florence. “People used to call us Drumwrights the rich kids, but we wasn’t. We just lived very well. We were the only ones in the neighborhood that had a phone; and when it was zero weather we could walk around butt naked ’cause we had a furnace in our basement.” She goes on: “We had running water. We had a toilet on the inside…we had plenty of food, all kinds of lunchmeat in our refrigerator, like bologna, hog-head cheese. And Honey, plenty of fruit. When Fannie was pregnant, my papa made sure watermelon was at the house at all times ’cause she craved it.” Aunt Florence shrugs. “We just had a good living.”

  My grandfather’s decision not to migrate north and his good fortune not to have his land seized by white men—a fate hundreds of Southern blacks suffered as far back as the antebellum period—enabled his descendants to do better than they might have otherwise, have a step up in life. Indeed, most of his children’s children went to college, own property themselves; all live middle-class lives. My grandfather died at age seventy-five the year I was born—most likely from prostate cancer, although no doctor diagnosed his condition. Strangely, no one seems to have a photograph of him but everyone tells me he was a handsome man; at his death, he still had thick wavy black hair with just a bit of gray around his temples. “My daddy was jazzy,” says Aunt Florence. “But he took care of home.”

  I can see Pap clearly in my mind’s eye: black, beautiful, and proud.

  By the time my mother was born on May 9, 1928 (known as Christian Feast Day, which I find fitting), it was two months after Virginia became the first state to pass an antilynching law, something the US Congress never did. She was seventeen months old when the stock market crashed in 1929. But based on the stories handed down, there’s no indication that her father lost work during those years. The 1930 census lists my grandfather as a forty-four-year-old man (he was actually forty-five) who can read and write, has a wife and seven children still living at home, and is by profession a “plasterer” for the city. The value of his home is listed as $2,000. You have to wonder how its value was determined. Regardless, by then, my grandfather owned five properties.

  When she was a girl of just two or three, growing up in Nashville, my mother had such long, sandy-red hair that a doctor told my grandmother it was sapping the child’s energy; and so her mother cut it all off. Left behind were short ringlets that covered her head, causing people to mistake her for a boy.

  From that day forward, they say, Fannie Mae’s energy was boundless; I like to think that she was left alone until her hair grew back, to have the freedom usually afforded boys to explore, and to daydream. In any event, something instilled in her a desire for more. As she grew, she became a voracious learner, an avid reader and a lover of history. She was smart and honest, so people were drawn to her. Often folks came to Fannie for advice, ideas, tips, and ways to help them out of precarious situations. She just seemed to know things. She was already honing what would become her twin passions: helping others to improve their station in life, and figuring out ways to improve her own. This combination of charisma, generosity, and drive distinguished my mother from her siblings. Other qualities distinguished her: she loved books, liked expanding her vocabulary, was the prettiest of the Drumwright girls, had impeccable taste, and dressed stylishly. My most treasured photograph captures her at eighteen, in her prom dress, an elegant, scooped-neck frock trimmed in crinoline that shows off her tiny waist and womanly cleavage. She wears a jeweled bracelet with a delicate handkerchief attached to it, and gloves that travel from her wrists to above her elbows. She looks into the camera with dark intelligent eyes.

  She also loved beautiful things, and seems to have embraced early a philosophy penned by the writer Toni Cade Bambara: “Beauty is care, just as ugly is carelessness.”

  My uncle John says another thing distinguished my mother:

  “I never seen Fannie drink a bottle of beer in my life,” he confesses. “I never seen Fannie with a cigarette in her mouth either. That’s two things I can say for sure about her; she did not smoke, and she did not drink.”

  She wasn’t particularly fond of partying either. When she was a teenager, her older brother Napoleon, whom everyone called Flapper, owned a nightclub called Club Zombie, where she worked as a hatcheck girl. Even though her baby sister Florence and their cousin Annie Pearl loved to hang out at the club dancing and socializing, even selling liquor, Fannie did not. It wasn’t her scene. She was the quiet one.

  “Fannie was sidity,” my aunt Florence tells me, shaking her head and laughing. “Honey, she acted like she was too good for everybody. Me and Annie Pearl used to call her Miss Lady.”

  It was as though she already knew she had plans to “make something” of herself. I suspect a confluence of circumstances led to my mother’s ambition. Although she was a child during the early, harsh 1930s, by the time Mama was a young teen the country had plunged itself into World War II. With the economic boom that sprang from that, black men and women had jobs that would’ve gone to white men had they not been serving in the war. As the second-youngest child of her parents, my mother experienced, if not prosperity, then certainly creature comforts. She already understood the rewards of upward mobility. Plus, she had an ideal role model right there in the home.

  As the historian Herbert G. Gutman has
proven, African-American families were, contrary to popular belief, intact supportive units in the first decades of the twentieth century, and my mother’s home life was no exception. My grandfather, as a self-employed businessman and a property owner, was a powerful force in her life. Because of her birth order as his ninth of ten children, she only knew him as a self-made man (this is not unlike my own life: as my mother’s fifth and last child, I only knew her as a thriving, entrepreneurial, and independent woman), and so the idea of working for yourself, creating your own path, was normal to her. Indeed, witnessing her father’s livelihood, and the self-respect that came with it, was most likely the major factor in her own life choices. I only heard her speak of my grandfather in glowing, respectful ways; I’m sure that’s why even in her most impoverished days in Detroit, she refused to work a menial job for low pay. To be clear, she always admired hard workers; she just didn’t see the point of laboring to benefit someone else. “If you’re going to work that hard,” she used to say, “you might as well work hard for yourself.”

  Meanwhile, throughout the 1930s, the Numbers were all the rage in Harlem, and gaining a foothold in other Northern cities like Detroit. According to the authors of Playing the Numbers, the gangster Dutch Schultz’s personal attorney testified that in 1931 the Numbers were “played only by the colored people” and the daily gross was $300,000, or $80 million a year. With that kind of money being generated by the business, of course whites wanted in. Schultz briefly took control of the lucrative enterprise in Harlem, and in Detroit, on the eve of the Great Depression, Jewish gangsters tried unsuccessfully to wrench the business away from blacks. Even still, whites were by then fully involved alongside blacks in running the Numbers in Detroit. Italian gangsters looking to diversify during the Prohibition era had moved from bootlegging to Numbers gambling operations, drawn by the huge profits. (This while whites already controlled policy, the illegal precursor to the Numbers.)