The World According to Fannie Davis Read online

  Holstein, born in the Danish West Indies, was a Brooklyn high school graduate who, like the majority of colored men and women in America, was barred from using his talents in a chosen field, so he worked as a porter for a Fifth Avenue store. As the legend goes, in 1920 or 1921, he was sitting in a janitor’s room for hours, deeply studying the “Clearing House” totals printed each day in a year’s worth of newspapers that he’d saved. The Clearing House was a financial institution that facilitated the daily exchanges and settlements of money among New York City’s banks. It occurred to Holstein that the numbers printed in the paper were different every day. Within months he came up with his scheme—he’d take the first two digits from the first total published by the Clearing House and one digit from the second total and create a daily three-digit winning number. If a player hit, he or she would be paid 600 to 1. It was an elegant system for many reasons. It didn’t rely on dubious drawings in other states, or on complicated calculations; everyone could have access to the winning numbers at the same time, and the source was unimpeachable. But the most important reason for its beauty was this: unlike the policy, Numbers was a black-owned and black-controlled business.

  The Numbers blossomed into a lucrative shadow economy in the early 1920s, and moved into black communities across America, thanks in large part to the Great Migration. From 1915 to 1930, well over a million black Southerners moved to the North. Given its role as a viable economic base—in Harlem alone the New York Age estimated that in 1926 the daily turnover on numbers was $75,000, with an annual turnover of $20 million—many saw it as black folks’ own stock market. While some still referred to the business as “policy” for a few years, it was the newer, wondrous system known as the Numbers that had free rein over the lottery-playing market for seventy years—until the first legal state lottery was reintroduced in 1964.

  Once the game as we know it today was introduced to Detroit, it quickly became a de facto informal economy, filling the void left by a formal economy that largely excluded African-Americans. Pushing against rampant discrimination, local Numbers operators used their profits to found legitimate businesses, providing migrant blacks with all kinds of access they wouldn’t otherwise have had. They launched insurance companies, newspapers, loan offices, real estate firms, scholarships for college, and more. As such, these big Numbers men used their own wealth not only to enrich themselves, but also to combat racism and uplift the race. The Numbers quickly morphed into a thriving, sprawling underground enterprise, so intertwined with the city’s lifeblood that it helped shape Detroit’s twentieth-century identity. No better example exists than that of John Roxborough, the educated, upper-class black man who brought the Numbers to Detroit; as the city’s biggest Numbers man in the 1930s, he used his largesse and business acumen to manage and invest heavily in boxer Joe Louis. Nicknamed the Brown Bomber, Louis became heavyweight champion of the world, knocking down racial stereotypes as both a hometown champ and an American hero. Today, the iconic memorial sculpture of the Brown Bomber’s fist is what greets you at the epicenter of downtown Detroit. The Fist represents his punch against Jim Crow laws as well as his opponents, and has become synonymous with black Detroiters’ fight for racial justice. And the Numbers made it all possible.

  The Numbers also became inextricably tied to the auto industry. In fact, the plants unwittingly abetted the Numbers’ rise. Factory workers functioned as runners, collecting bets and money from other workers, then turning it all in to bookies and bankers. Ford Motor Co.’s River Rouge plant, one of the largest industrial complexes in the world, which employed 85,000 workers by the end of World War II, had for decades a flourishing Numbers business. Between 1947 and 1951, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times all reported on this phenomenon as national news. One report claimed that the Numbers were a $15,000-a-day business within the Rouge plant, while another estimated them to be a $5-million-a-year enterprise. The Times lamented in an editorial that Detroit’s “numbers game” threatened plant discipline and claimed that “this evil has been linked to underworld elements that permeate the workplace.” My parents weren’t part of that so-called underworld, but they were well aware of it. Mama and Daddy had both played numbers for a few coins and had seen their neighbors and friends play them too, regularly. Mama took notice.

  On a frigid winter night, my mother showed up at her brother’s home and banged on his door. “Woke me up and everything,” Uncle John recalls. She stepped inside and stood before him, not even bothering to take off her coat.

  “I want to try to bank the Numbers,” she announced.

  She knew the allure of playing the Numbers, and she also knew real money could be made.

  “All I need is a hundred dollars to get started,” she told John.

  My mother was hoping that her big brother could loan her the money. He was an exercise “boy” for Detroit’s racetrack, a gifted horseman who’d go on to be one of the first African-American horse trainers in the country. He’d been on his own since he was fourteen, working at racetracks, and had been in Detroit for several years longer than Fannie. His work was steady, and he made a decent living. “She explained it to me and everything,” he recalls.

  She told him her plan was to start taking the neighborhood’s “penny” bets, collecting coins from folks playing an array of three-digit combinations for small amounts. She figured that modest money would add up over the weeks and months as long as no one hit. And if someone did hit, she’d have the hundred dollars in reserve for payouts. Uncle John thought it made sense.

  “I can make it with one hundred dollars,” she repeated. “Do you have it?”

  “I said, ‘Yeah Fannie, I got it.’” (That same year, 1958, Berry Gordy borrowed $800 from his family’s “credit fund” to launch Motown Records.)

  With the loan money, she got started right way. Week after week, Mama took in those pennies and dimes and nickels and quarters from customers playing an array of combinations, every day except Sunday. People could bet on “the Detroit race” or “the Pontiac race” or both. Each had two winning three-digit numbers, hence Mama asking all her customers: “You want this number played both races, Detroit and Pontiac?” as she recorded the letters D&P beside their bets. Cutoff time was late afternoon, early evening. By dusk, the “first race” digits hit the streets, and by dinnertime, word had spread and everyone knew both sets of winning numbers in both races.

  The winning numbers came from two different sources. The Pontiac number came from actual racing forms based on results from preselected racetracks—from the Fair Grounds at New Orleans to Aqueduct in New York to Washington Park outside Chicago—and bettors could compute it themselves: All the racetrack payoffs for win, place, and show in the first four races were added up. The first number at the left of the decimal point became the first of the three winning digits. This process was repeated to get a total of the pari-mutuel winning payoffs for the first five races, and the number to the left of the decimal point became the second winning number; the process was carried out a third time for the winning payoff’s total in the first six races, again using the number to the left of the decimal. Those three tabulated digits became the first Pontiac winning number. The second three-digit winner was compiled similarly: the winning digit for the sixth race was always used as the first digit; the race payoffs for the seventh race were totaled, and the digit to the left of the decimal point became the second winning digit. This formula was repeated for the eighth race, and Numbers operators had their second three-digit winning number. On a given day, for example, 692 and 281 or 784 and 431 could be the winning numbers for Pontiac.

  Aunt Florence says Fannie could do those calculations herself, using the requisite Daily Racing Form. And she had some access to those forms, thanks to my uncle John, given that he was a horseman at the local racetrack (when he was working the New Orleans racetrack, he’d call long-distance to give her the winning races), so she often knew the winning number before most. But like a lo
t of people, Florence didn’t understand the formula. “I never did figure out how they chose the numbers,” she admits. “I never did know how you did that shit.”

  Meanwhile, the Detroit number was more mysteriously derived, so that no one knew exactly where it came from. Over the years the widely held belief was that it was fixed, completely made up by the Number-service bosses. The Detroit number, they say, was based on the least heavily played combinations for a given day. They called it “hit protection” as a way to prevent huge payouts. It’s unclear when this became widely known, as folks did still play the Detroit number, which at least looked legit, its winning combinations mimicking the Pontiac number by using the last digit of one three-digit combination as the first digit for the second (e.g., 809 and 973). And some people did hit.

  Following all these convoluted calculations, someone high up in Detroit’s racket received all four winning three-digit numbers via a long-distance phone call from a Number-service boss in, they say, Chicago. And thus the day’s numbers hit the streets.

  Anyone who has bought a daily lottery ticket in recent years will recognize the game’s potential reward: If a customer played one of the winning combinations, with its 500-to-1 payout, a 25-cent bet on 973, for example, garnered $125. If that customer played the same number “boxed”—a way to bet on all possible combinations—she’d win a payout of 80-to-1, or $20. That payout is based on the fact that there are six different ways the number 973 can fall, so it’s a six-way box. A number with two of the same digits, like 977, garners more money when boxed for the same twenty-five cents—$40—because there are only three ways the combinations can fall. Higher odds equal a handsomer payout.

  Because Mama’s initial reserve, or “bank,” was $100, she had to make the daily calculation to determine how much to allow each customer to play, or to “cap” their bets, to ensure that she could pay out all potential hits. My aunt and uncle both say that from the beginning, Fannie could do that math in her head; I’m guessing she didn’t accept any bets on a single number that totaled more than a $90 payout. Luckily the combination of three digits is seemingly infinite but actually has 600 different possibilities; folks played a variety of them, and as long as no one hit for too much, the coins added up to a small profit. Numbers is a gamble for both the player and the banker. But it favors the house. The odds of winning with a three-digit number are 1,000 to 1.

  As Aunt Florence notes, “It’s hard to hit them numbers.”

  Even in her conservatism, my mother would’ve made profits of roughly $25 a week, which certainly was much-needed household income. And once the Numbers provided her with a little extra money, her giving to others stepped up.

  “I remember she would often share whatever food she had from the grocery store,” recalls Elaine, whose family moved into the same four-flat house on Clarendon back in 1958. “She would say, ‘I bought a couple extra chickens, I bought some extra greens, I bought’ whatever it was; but you could tell it was a little bit beyond what she would normally buy; it would be a variety of food and it would be in several bags; and so she would just freely give it to you; and if you tried to offer her money, she would not take it; she would refuse and throw her hand up and say, ‘Oh no, that’s not necessary. That’s not what I did that for and don’t worry about it.’ And that was the way that she was with not only our family, but other people on the street.”

  It was then too that a pattern in my mother’s life first emerged in Detroit: helping to shape the life of a teenage girl. “God sent her to me at the right time in my life,” admits Elaine. “When I got about thirteen or fourteen, talking back and getting a beating, getting in trouble often, I’d run away from home, straight to Fannie’s. And she’d hear my side of the story and then she’d give me food for thought. ‘Maybe you could have done it this way’ or ‘You could have done it that way.’ And she was very confidential. If I did something I had no business doing, I could tell her and she wouldn’t tell on me. I’d never hear it again unless I told it.”

  Throughout that time, Elaine says she and her family, who became so close to us the children called each other cousins, weren’t aware that Fannie ran the Numbers. “I don’t remember seeing her do that at all,” she insists.

  This is a recurring theme, my mother’s secrecy about her line of work. Apart from her customers, people in her life had no idea she was “in Numbers.” I marvel at this because Cousin Elaine, for instance, was an integral part of our lives, in and out of our home daily. In fact, she and others only learned the full story when I told them a few years ago. My mother was the embodiment of discretion.

  Florence and her husband, Uncle Gene, soon came to visit. “They wasn’t doing they best then, but they was doing a little better,” recalls Aunt Florence. “We went to Belle Isle and Fannie say, ‘Y’all ought to move here.’ We went back and I worked and I was saving my little change every week, ’cause I knew I was on my way.”

  That fall, my parents’ landlord, a black man named Mr. Saddlewhite, saw my mother planting bulbs in the front yard of the four-family house and confessed to her that he also owned the two-family house across the street. He told her he liked how she took care of his property and that if she could swing the $75-a-month rent, the better place was hers. The address was 8878. They couldn’t afford it per se, even though my father had begun moonlighting as a house painter to supplement his unsteady factory work and she was making some money from her penny Numbers business. She took the place anyway. It was bigger, and the family of six could use the space. Also, Mama was pregnant again.

  For the next couple months, they barely got by. They needed more steady money, and that was when my mother turned to Wingate and began working for him as a bookie—handing over her customers and using Wingate’s hefty bank to accept larger bets from more people. The percentage he gave her helped create a striking contrast to how the Davis family had lived just a year before.

  Meanwhile, Florence did migrate to Detroit, along with her young son (her husband joined them later), moving into the available flat above Fannie and John T.’s place. “When I came here, I had twenty-five hundred dollars in my brassiere I had saved up,” recalls my aunt. Her dream always had been to come to the North and be with her big sister Fannie. And she did it. “I came here, Honey, and hell, I was happy.”

  That May, I was born two months premature at Henry Ford Hospital, where my mother paid for the dignity of a private room. At birth, I weighed 4 pounds and 11 ounces; it turns out that 411 was a popular number to play, and seen as a good-luck combination. Maybe that’s why Mama once told me: “You were born lucky.” Or maybe it’s because I was the first of her children born in comfort.

  While she waited for me to come home from the hospital, where I remained in an incubator for weeks, Mama bought an entire suite of French Provincial baby furniture. The cream-colored crib with ruffled canopy, matching dresser, and child’s armoire paired with a white layette trimmed in lace were so exquisite that people streamed into the house to ooh and aah over “the baby’s room” before I came home. (I can still conjure that suite with its little-girl armoire, as it remained in my bedroom for several years.) For my mother, the purchase was a way to celebrate my healthy arrival in the world. It was still risky for a baby to be born at thirty-two weeks back then. In fact, just before my birth, doctors discovered why premature babies were developing a disorder known as gray baby syndrome and dying. The usual doses of an antibiotic known as chloramphenicol, routinely given to preemies as a prophylactic, turned out to be at toxic levels. By the time I came along in 1960, some babies were still receiving the drug, but doctors at renowned hospitals like Henry Ford knew better than to administer it, luckily for me. The high-end baby furniture also symbolized my mother’s achievement: five years after arriving as a migrant, Fannie had climbed her family out of the poorhouse, and that indulgent splurge punctuated the fact.

  Now, in 1962, she’d decided to stop working for Wingate, taking a chance on herself as her own boss. Th
e risk, she knew, could plunge us backward. But risk is the linchpin of success in the Numbers: The only ways to make any real money are either to go long enough without anyone hitting, which eventually is bad for business since folks want to feel they have good luck with you, or to gamble with the odds while your customers are gambling against them. The hope is to go long enough “holding tickets” without getting hit hard, while you build up your cash reserve. If someone does hit big too soon, you lose. And my mother had a lot to lose: our beloved Broadstreet.

  Mama was a nervous wreck each day as she waited for the winning number to come out. To alleviate stress, she created a daily ritual. With her older children at school, she’d carry me in her arms to the movies at the Mercury Theater on Schaefer Highway. “She’d just set up there in the dark, and wait it out,” says Uncle John. The moving pictures calmed Mama, and each week that went by without a big payout allowed her to build up her reserve.

  As she sat in that darkened theater watching Natalie Wood in Splendor in the Grass and Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Diahann Carroll in Paris Blues with me cuddled in her arms, a quiet baby, she held fast to her belief that God helps those who help themselves.

  Three

  Fannie at the Fountainebleau, Miami Beach, December 1968