The World According to Fannie Davis Page 5

  In fact, a scandalous and wide-reaching event that best illustrates how heavily involved whites were in Detroit’s Numbers occurred in 1939, when my mother was eleven, long before her own migration to the Motor City. In August of that year, a typist for a major Numbers operation known as the Great Lakes Policy House, Janet McDonald, murdered her daughter Pearl and committed suicide when her boyfriend, a Numbers man, ended their affair. They were found in her car in a garage, dead from carbon monoxide poisoning. Found near her body were six letters she’d written and addressed to local newspapers, the governor, and the FBI, charging that her former boyfriend collected graft money for police protection. The one addressed to the Detroit Free Press read: Dear Sirs: On this night a girl has ended her life because of the mental cruelty caused by Racketeer William McBride, ex-Great Lakes Numbers House operator. She then provided McBride’s address and added: He glories in telling lies, so don’t believe everything he tells you, as I did. She also implicated law enforcement. In a blaring headline that read DEATH NOTES CHARGE POLICE BRIBERY, the Free Press described the spurned white woman as a thirty-three-year-old “comely” divorcée.

  When it was all over in June 1942, Mayor Richard Reading, a former sheriff, the police superintendent, twenty police officers (eight of them black), and several “policy operators,” who included boxer Joe Louis’s manager, John Roxborough, were convicted of graft conspiracy in a numbers racket estimated at $10 million a year—the equivalent of $151 million today.

  From their inception in Harlem, the Numbers made their way not just to Northern cities but to Southern cities too, including Nashville; and so by the 1940s, my mother and her siblings were familiar with the Numbers. Surely, Mama occasionally played some numbers as a young woman, even as she soaked up can-do lessons from her father. Family members recall that her older brother Napoleon was briefly a runner. But no one remembers my mother taking any keen interest in the business back then. “I don’t think Fannie fooled with the Numbers down South,” recalls Aunt Florence. “She got in it here, in Detroit.”

  That makes sense. Fannie was a colored girl from a good, working-class family of brown-skinned folks, coming of age in the thirties and forties. As was the norm, she married her childhood sweetheart, John Thomas Mathew Davis, when she was eighteen, and within seven months, their first child, a girl, was born. I wonder what my mother’s life choices might have been had she not gotten pregnant, had held off marriage, had been able to do the thing she’d desperately longed to do—attend Vanderbilt University, major in history. Anyway, two years later, another daughter was born, and four years after that, on their sixth anniversary in 1952, my parents had a son. Fannie was twenty-four, with three children under the age of six. John T., as everyone called him, was twenty-six. Given that my grandfather had taught his son-in-law how to plaster and paint, he had decent, honest work that mostly sustained the young family for several years; but my father wasn’t entrepreneurial, and working for my grandfather didn’t allow him to fully support his own growing family. Nor could he count on the low-paying, menial work available to a black man in the South with no more than a high school education.

  Besides, Fannie wanted more. When exactly did the idea to migrate north first take hold in her? Maybe it came shortly after Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, when the Supreme Court got rid of separate but equal education. Maybe that spurred Mama to aspire to more, to trust that certain parts of this country were inching toward making good on its Constitutional promise. Interestingly, the Confederate flag started popping up everywhere in the South after that landmark decision, and schools remained stubbornly segregated in Nashville despite the Supreme Court ruling. I found online a photo of a woman, Grace McKinley, holding her young daughter’s hand as she walked her to Nashville’s newly desegregated Fehr Elementary School in 1957; she was followed by a white mob, one member holding a sign that read GOD IS THE AUTHOR OF SEGREGATION. A look of terror is frozen on the face of that little girl, a fate wished upon no child. She appears to be about the same age as my sister Selena Dianne was at that time.

  Maybe the idea to leave home came as word spread about good-paying jobs on the assembly lines in Michigan’s auto plants. And the North appeared to be a little bit better, a place where you weren’t forced to live under the mean vestige of “Southern ways” designed to strip you of your humanity. My parents, in their lives in Tennessee, had to speak to all white folks with “yes ma’am” and “yes sir,” and had to withstand being called “gal” and “boy” even as adults. (When we were growing up, one of my mother’s cardinal rules was that we should not call adults “ma’am” or “sir.” “Call folks by their God-given name,” she’d snap. “This ain’t the South.”)

  I wonder too if they migrated in part because of incidents of violence against blacks attempting to vote, like that of Rev. George Lee, co-founder of Belzoni, Mississippi’s NAACP chapter, who was murdered by whites in May 1955 for registering African-American voters; Lee was the first martyr of the Civil Rights Movement and my mother and father surely read about his murder in the newspaper, heard about it on the radio, joined in conversations about it with family and neighbors. Did it make them speed up their migration plans, or confirm the rightness of their choice to leave their birthplace, to join others and get the hell out of the South?

  As Isabel Wilkerson lays out evocatively in her extraordinary book The Warmth of Other Suns, millions of Southern blacks (my parents among them) were subjected to the indignity of Jim Crow’s “colored only” facilities: elevators; train platforms; ambulances; hearses; waiting rooms in everything from bus depots to doctors’ offices; bathrooms; post office windows; telephone booths; bank tellers’ windows; taxicabs; even betting windows at the racetrack. Colored drivers had to let a white person go first at an intersection, could not pass a white motorist on the road, were always at fault in an accident; my mother and father could not speak to a white person unless spoken to, or attempt to shake a white person’s hand. Indeed, my parents understood that “the consequences for the slightest misstep were swift and brutal,” as Wilkerson writes.

  Given the micro- and macro-aggressions of Southern life, coupled with their own aspirations, they saved hard, and Fannie and John T. left the only home they’d known, the place both their families had lived for generations—my maternal great-grandfather Phile Thompson was born into slavery in Nashville in 1861—and became the first ones to migrate north, after my uncle John. They boarded a train and went where the Tennessee Valley Railroad line took them, more than 560 miles away, to Michigan.

  My parents were, as Wilkerson eloquently notes, part of “a human rivulet, and then a flood of six million black refugees fleeing the terrors of the Jim Crow South…to an uncertain existence in the North” in what became known as the second, postwar wave of the Great Migration.

  Mama and Daddy came to Michigan without the children, whom they left with my mother’s parents in Nashville. They initially migrated to Pontiac, where my father worked on the assembly line for General Motors’ Pontiac Metal Center. Once they had a place to live, my father went back to Nashville to get the children, deciding to leave their second-oldest, six-year-old daughter, Selena Dianne—everyone just called her Dianne—with my aunt Florence. My mother was upset when she arrived at the train station to pick up her family and her baby girl wasn’t there. But she also knew that her daughter would be well cared for by her own sister. After escaping the racist South, they were totally unprepared for the racist life awaiting them in the North. That life would be hard enough with two children, the oldest just eight and the boy still a toddler. And by that summer, Mama was pregnant again.

  Before the baby was born they moved to Detroit, whose population of nearly two million was at its peak. Yet, while I suspect housing conditions for African-Americans in Pontiac were abysmal, finding a decent place to live in Detroit proved to be its own challenge. Few options existed: you could choose between a small Lower East Side neighborhood just east of downtown called Black Bottom,
or the Bottom, where blacks had lived since the turn of the century; or, just to the north, a densely populated area which migrants optimistically named Paradise Valley. It was anything but. My parents opted to forgo both the Bottom and Paradise Valley, and found the meager place on Delaware.

  I wonder what that must’ve felt like for Mama and Daddy, to have essentially fled a terrorist state, escaping what Wilkerson calls “a man-made pestilence,” to have endured hardship, risked their lives, and stared down poverty in an unsafe, unknown world simply so they could give their children greater opportunity, a little dignity. And would the risk be worth it? Fannie’s own father’s example of enterprising uplift wasn’t much help in the unfamiliar North, with its own kind of pestilence. Indeed, my parents’ migration all but nixed the secure family life they’d known back home.

  And yet, who could think of returning to the South? In August of 1955, a fourteen-year-old black boy’s badly mutilated body was found in the Tallahatchie River in Money, Mississippi. After his mother bravely insisted that he be buried in an open casket, black America saw how white men had shot, beaten, and tortured him for allegedly whistling at a white woman. (That woman admitted decades later that she’d lied.) “There was no way I could describe what was in that box,” said the boy’s mother, Mamie Till Bradley. “No way. And I just wanted the world to see.” My mother told us that when she saw the photo of Emmett Till’s mutilated corpse in Jet magazine, she almost had a miscarriage.

  Luckily, the hundreds of dollars my grandparents sent helped my parents “get on their feet,” as they say, and after two long years they moved away from the destitution of Delaware to a flat in a four-family house on North Clarendon Avenue, in a cleaner working-class colored neighborhood. That infusion of cash also gave Mama the resources to go back to Nashville and retrieve my nine-year-old sister, Dianne, where she’d lived with my aunt Florence and my uncle Gene for what was only supposed to be one year but stretched to three, so she could finally join the rest of the family. What was left of the money was likely the equivalent of several months’ earnings for my father, as the average yearly salary for white Americans that year was under $3,000, much less for Negroes. Most of all, the financial gift was a godsend because it gave my mother what poverty did not: time to think. She knew that given my father’s unstable job, exacerbated by his chronic hypertension, the money would quickly evaporate. And it did.

  That summer, my cousin Bill came up North. He was fifteen and spent those three months working with my father, repairing and painting the interiors of private businesses. “Fannie just treated me like I was one of her kids,” he recalls. “I loved being there. I really hated to go back to Nashville. And when I did, I told everybody the family was doing all right.” But the truth was no secret to Bill: “They were struggling a little bit.”

  Fannie and John T. now had four children between the ages of two and twelve. She figured she had to do something. What she refused to do was one of the three jobs employing 75 percent of Detroit’s black women at the time: “day work” as a maid in white homes, cleaning offices, or low-rung factory work. All those would require her to leave her children to raise one another while she did menial labor for too little money. Mama was clear that the only way she’d have more than what this country intended for her was to work for herself in a business she controlled that depended on a black clientele. Determined to find a better way, she didn’t have to look that far.

  The Numbers business in Detroit was still thriving in the 1950s. In fact, the Numbers were by then ubiquitous in black communities throughout the country. I’d venture to say that nearly every black person over forty is familiar with the Numbers—played them, knows people who played them, and knows about someone who ran them. Or still runs them. It is impossible to overstate the role of the Numbers in black culture. Just as Aunt Florence was playing numbers back in Nashville and sending “a little piece of change” to her sister up North, black folks in cities across the country were doing likewise. August Wilson’s play Fences, set in 1950s Pittsburgh, includes an exchange between Rose and Troy about the Numbers: “That 651 hit yesterday,” says Rose. “That’s the second time this month. Miss Pearl hit for a dollar…seem like those that need the least always get lucky. Poor folks can’t get nothing.” Troy retorts: “Them numbers don’t know nobody. I don’t know why you fool with them.” Rose reminds Troy, “Now I hit sometimes.…It always comes in handy.…I don’t hear you complaining then.”

  Lotteries date back to the beginning of this country. All thirteen original colonies operated legal lottery businesses that were precursors to the country’s stock market and thrived well into the nineteenth century; they soon became a huge, professional business, in fact the “genesis of American big business,” according to the authors of Playing the Numbers. Indeed, proceeds from lotteries were used to finance all kinds of capital improvements, like roads and bridges, for the cash-starved Colonies.

  At the same time, it’s part of the African-American tradition to use lottery playing to better one’s conditions in a society that has systematically subjugated its black population. That tradition includes Denmark Vesey, a Charleston slave, who later was executed for planning a revolt against slave owners. Vesey used $1500 he won from the city lottery in 1799 to buy his freedom. Vesey also helped found the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, where over two hundred years later a white supremacist shot dead nine African-Americans during a Bible class.

  From the early days, African-Americans didn’t just wager as part of the legal lottery system. Rather, they engaged—along with poorer whites—in an ingenious game played alongside these legal lotteries. For a fraction of the cost of a lottery ticket, a person could “insure” or “take a policy on” a number with an agent, effectively betting that a particular number would be drawn in a lottery on a given day. This game was called “insuring the lottery,” or “policy,” and was a way to make a side wager on the official state lotteries.

  Antilottery laws were enacted in all but three states by 1860, similar in large measure to so many laws in America that were designed to thwart the efforts of free blacks to acquire wealth-based equality. The abolition of lotteries had the unintended but unsurprising consequence of huge increases in the amount of money gambled on policy. Winning numbers apparently came from drawings in the states that still had legal lotteries (Kentucky, Missouri, and Delaware), and those winning digits were chosen via a large barrel with slips of paper in it, each with a number from one to 78; twelve numbers were drawn in the morning, and thirteen numbers were drawn at night. The winning numbers were then telegraphed “in cipher” to the policy headquarters in other states. One press report claims the winning numbers were picked out of a barrel in Louisville, Kentucky, by a blind Negro. Policy kings most certainly fixed numbers and made it even harder for folks to win. If the policy game was played fairly, the estimated odds of winning were a staggering one in 70,000. Still, people played policy in droves. And from the start, blacks indulged disproportionately. Indeed, in those early decades of freedom from slavery, during Reconstruction, many blacks were free in theory only, facing such grim financial lives that it’s easy to see the lure of indulging in a practice that could transform small amounts of money into large sums.

  Policy shops, as they were called, were run almost exclusively by whites and proliferated throughout the country. These big businesses were run in full view of and with the cooperation of police. Their owners often employed black men as agents in order to lure black customers. Unsurprisingly, the business was rife with cheating and exploitation, as well as payoffs to police and politicians. So too began the denigration of lottery players, and the correlation among bettors, African-Americans, the poor, and fools. The press especially equated a defective character with betting on numbers. As early as 1887, two years after my mother’s father was born, a Detroit Free Press headline blared: THE DEADLY POLICY SHOP AND ITS “COON ROW” GIG. The story’s lede proclaimed, “Policy is generally the poor man�
�s game and is played mostly by colored men, cheap waiters and ‘tin-horn’ gamblers.”

  In 1890 Congress passed an antilottery bill, and by 1894 all states had abolished lotteries. But that stopped nothing. Apparently still using numbers based on surreptitious drawings in Kentucky, the illegal lottery business thrived. At the outset of the twentieth century, the Detroit Free Press was hysterically and repeatedly reporting on the ways in which policy was ruining Detroit society, noting that the police force accepted bribes and payoffs so gambling could flourish.

  In an article in the Detroit Free Press on March 30, 1903, the reporter made clear the disdain with which the newspaper viewed policy players:

  It is largely the gambling field of the ignorant, superstitious and poor, though more than one man having a prosperous little business has lost his all because infatuated with this lightly veneered form of robbery. It is responsible for no end of suffering, promotes crime and adds to the public expense in the support of the dependent.…The main thing is to have the evil eternally wiped out, which the police authorities can do if they want to.

  According to the newspaper, by 1906, policy had been “stamped out” by police. But by 1908 a brief resurgence occurred, as “energetic colored agents” apparently attempted to revive the “industry” and “policy bids fair again to monopolize much of the attention, as well as the money of the colored gamesters.” And as late as 1915, the paper reported on a police raid of “Negro gambling houses” on St. Antoine Street and Hastings Street on the city’s east side, resulting in “10 Negroes being locked up”; on the same day, police raided a pool hall on Grand River, where twelve more men were locked up, along with four Negro women, for larceny.

  Policy seems to have died down considerably, if not completely, by the onset of World War I; yet its negative association with African-Americans was solidified, no matter that whites bet heavily alongside them. Numbers gambling as we know it today—the mother of today’s state lotteries—was invented in Harlem in the early 1920s. And while there’s speculation that versions of the Numbers game were introduced in the first decades of the 1900s, brought to Harlem by migrants from Cuba, the British West Indies, and Puerto Rico, historians say the widely held belief is that a black man named Casper Holstein invented the scheme as it is still played today.