The World According to Fannie Davis Read online

  “You can’t make it off of no two or three books,” explains Aunt Florence. “You got to have a volume of business to really make it.” And by the mid-1960s Mama had volume.

  As my cousin Bill puts it: “Fannie came up in the world, she did.”

  Toni Morrison once said of Muhammad Ali’s upbringing, “It was middle class, but black middle class, black Southern middle class, which is not white middle class at all.” Our lives were the Northern equivalent of that, with a twist. Numbers provided the twist, allowing Mama to become a lucrative small business owner in the city’s hierarchical Numbers racket.

  To punctuate her early success, and for me a reminder of its fragility, Mama finally had her own name placed on the land contract for our home—three and a half years after Mr. Colvin “purchased” it for her. That’s how long it took Mr. Prince, the seller, to trust my mother enough—was he waiting to see if she’d miss a payment?—and officially enter into a legal arrangement with her as the actual buyer. Now at least Mr. Colvin couldn’t take Broadstreet from us. The transaction was recorded with the Register of Deeds on October 6, 1964:

  For a valuable consideration, receipt of which is acknowledged, the undersigned assignor hereby assign to Fannie Drumright (sic) Davis the assignee a certain land contract dated April 15, 1961, executed between Torkom Prince and Beatrice Prince, his wife as Seller, and Wallace Colvin as Purchaser, for the sale of land situated in the city of Detroit, Wayne County, Michigan described as Lot 427 Russell Woods Subdivision of part of ¼ section 11 and 12, 10,000 acre Tract, Liber 34, Plats, Page 3, Wayne County Records, Commonly known as 12836 Broadstreet.

  Throughout her first decade in the business, Mama took bets from customers on numbers for higher and higher amounts, which provided more revenue, which came with more risk. If a customer hit big, it could potentially wipe her out. A number played for $5, after all, could bring its winner $2,500, and if several customers bet on the same number and hit, Mama would have to come up with several thousand dollars on one day. Cash flow was the key. That’s where Len Taylor came in. He too was one of the biggest Numbers men in the city, but a low-key contrast to the notorious Wingate, whom Mama had scarily owed all that money to. Mr. Taylor was benevolent and kind, and when he befriended my mother, she knew she could trust him.

  “Taylor was nice,” says Aunt Florence. “When Fannie was getting hit heavy, he would take the business from her and he would give her so much money, a percentage each week, off of what she turned in to him until she could get her nest egg built back up.”

  Once Mama got that nest egg rebuilt, Mr. Taylor would return her business—all her books—to her. In this way, Mama went back and forth between being a bookie and a banker. And she never had to worry about him taking her customers away from her. She turned over and reclaimed her business from Taylor a few times over the course of the three decades she was in the Numbers. Another way Mr. Taylor was helpful was to act as an insurance policy. If she noticed on a given day that a number was being “played heavy” by several customers, she’d “relay” that same number to Mr. Taylor for enough money to cover the cost if it came out. Only the handful of big Number men like Taylor could afford to take a bet on a number played for several dollars, and depending on who it was and whether they liked the person, those big bankers might choose not to do it. So Mama benefited greatly from her relationship with Mr. Taylor, able to grow her business and make a good living thanks to an occasional safety net.

  What this meant for my family was that we stayed intact. Unlike so many African-Americans in precarious living situations, Mama wasn’t forced to leave her children at home with just each other, while she went to work for low pay. Every day when we came home from school, my mother was there. In fact, my siblings and I never had babysitters. My mother didn’t believe in them. My father, facing debilitating health problems, didn’t have to face an impoverished life alongside them. And we, their children, could reasonably expect to someday do better than our parents.

  Looking back, the 1960s were Mama’s best decade as a number runner, an enterprise she’d only begun in 1958. Certainly from my perspective, it was a heyday. My childhood memories are awash in the sights and sounds of Mama running her business, the rhythm of her days: early hours on the phone, taking customers’ numbers, a lull in late afternoon, when she’d hide the business in places she felt enhanced her own luck—under her mattress, in the freezer so as to take the “heat” off, or in her bedroom closet. At dusk a phone call announcing the day’s numbers, and the flurry of activity that ensued. Hers was a photographic memory when it came to numbers, so she often knew before confirming whether any customers had hit, and if so, who’d hit for what. I still see Mama checking her business: First, she’d go over the numbers taken via phone and recorded in her notebook, red pen in hand. If she found a hit, she’d circle it. Next, she went to the “stuff” as she called it that had been collected “out in the streets,” i.e., picked up from customers by a runner—usually a friend’s son or family friend she’d employed. Those bets were written on small slips of paper known as tickets. For those, she’d wet her finger and go through each ticket one by one. All my siblings helped at different times with this task. Going through the business to spot hits was a serious undertaking, because to miss a hit was called an overlook, a major faux pas. (Of course, customers who’d hit often started the phone ringing minutes after the number came out.) If a ticket had a hit on it, she’d pull it out and circle the three-digit number. Eventually that ticket would get stapled to the customer’s end-of-the-week tally, or “tape.”

  Mama ran customers’ tapes once a week. I still conjure the rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat of the adding machine, and the trill every time she hit the Total button. She provided a breakdown for each customer of what was played for the week, minus both the customer’s percentage and what numbers were hit, totaling the final bill—money owed to her (the payout), or a break-even amount if the customer “hit out,” or money owed the customer if the hits totaled more than the customer’s ticket (week’s worth of numbers played). Customers who had hits from business taken over the phone got a “fly sheet,” a piece of scratch-pad paper listing the winning numbers, how much they were played for, and how much money was won. This fly sheet got stapled to the tape. I can see her now, holding those white sheets in her hand, hear her say, “I got your tape right here, Cecil. I can tell you exactly what you owe.”

  One of my most cogent memories is watching Mama count money. Whether she was double-checking what she’d collected from a customer while he or she was standing there, or gathering money for a payout, she always counted the same way: She’d spread out the bills in her hands like they were cards, or place them before her on the table, and rearrange them in order of descending denominations. Then she’d gather them up and count the money, hands a blur as she did so with speed; best of all, she’d pause to turn bills around, so that every president’s face looked in the same direction. She was like a bank teller, but more so. I always marveled at her skill, and watching her count cash is an image that freeze-frames in my mind.

  Nothing captures my wondrous childhood of abundance more than memories of Christmas morning. I’d wake to find a plethora of toys and presents tumbled out from under the all-white tree with gold ornaments (because Mama loved monochromatic Christmas decorations), so much so that there was nowhere to walk. “Christmas is for children,” Mama declared. “The rest of us just need to understand that.”

  We all had the latest fashions. I can often remember a specific time by what my siblings wore: Deborah in stylish shifts and vests from Lane Bryant; Dianne in her myriad colorful mohair sweaters with matching pumps; Anthony in his head-to-toe red or purple or blue or green outfits, down to the matching shoes; Rita and her array of knee-high boots showing off her big, pretty legs. I think of my own favorite outfits: the sky-blue brocade ensemble worn for Easter; the red-and-white polka-dot dress with the white smock that held the matching polka-dot handkerchief, worn with my
black-and-white polka-dot patent leather shoes; the orange plaid skirt and navy Nehru jacket worn with orange fishnet stockings, the white go-go boots. And my all-time favorite: a reversible leopard-print velour coat Mama purchased for me while in New York for its 1964–1965 World’s Fair.

  Mama was hands down the best dressed in our family. She had a thing for lush baby-leather purses, furs, and stylish shoes. A soft white-and-gray mink cape, with thin gray vertical leather strips running through it, still hangs in my bedroom closet. She sometimes wore it with a matching mink muffler. Her initials, FDR, are inscribed on the silk lining. She also loved jewelry and had a collection of gold chains and thin-banded, elegant watches and bracelets, many of them diamond-encrusted. My favorite was a necklace with a pot of shaved gold dangling from it. And for as long as I can remember, she wore a 1.75-carat diamond solitaire on her ring finger. That diamond now hangs from a necklace I often wear.

  Also, Mama always drove a new car, in custom colors like powder blue and pearl white. She made it clear she didn’t believe in sacrificing and doing without as a martyr for her children. She was not what writer Hilton Als has dubbed a “Negress,” a black woman who has no life beyond others’ needs. She believed in self-care—long baths, naps, vacations, spending money on herself. “If I don’t have shoes on my feet, that’s a problem for you,” she’d tell us. Those shoes might as well be high-quality and fashionable.

  When I close my eyes and envision my mother, I see her wearing her signature style accessory—an Hermès scarf, one of those colorful and intricately designed squares of silk made exclusively in France. She had a collection of them, used to protect her hair from rain, to cover fresh curls as she left the beauty shop, and as an option for days when she didn’t feel like styling her hair. She was never precious with these scarves, which sometimes had pomade on them, or got slightly tattered, and were often strewn across a chair or on the bathroom vanity. I didn’t even know the distinction of Hermès scarves until I was an adult. I just knew they were pretty, and my mother had a lot of them.

  “Fannie bought whatever she wanted,” proclaims Aunt Florence. “Wasn’t nothing she did want that she didn’t get; if she could see it, she went and got it; she wasn’t like a lot of people, have that money and too stingy to buy the things that you want. She lived.”

  Doing well also put Mama’s giving on steroids. She had a soft spot for motherless children in particular. “Nobody replaces a mother’s love,” she’d often say. I will always remember Spook, a quiet, gentle teenage boy in our neighborhood. Kids called him Spook because he was very dark-skinned. Once, in the basement, I sat beside him as he sewed up a busted seam in his winter coat. I watched him, fascinated, as he pulled the heavy black thread through the thick fabric. “My mother taught me to sew,” he told me. His mother had recently died, and he was headed somewhere far away to live with a relative, because his own father made a difference between him and his lighter-skinned brother. Spook had little to take with him. Mama went shopping and bought him new underwear and shirts and pants and socks to send him on his way. “A fresh start requires fresh clothes,” she said.

  Some comments I never heard from my mother: Do you think money grows on trees? That’s too expensive. We can’t afford that. It’s not worth it, you’ll just outgrow it. That’s a waste of money.

  What she did say: “Each child has his or her day. When I’m shopping for one, I’m just shopping for one. So when you see me come in the house with a big bag, if it’s not your day, don’t ask, ‘What’d you get me?’”

  One of her pet peeves was seeing parents buy too-big clothes for their children so they could grow into them. “Just buy the child clothes in her size,” she’d say. “Who wants to wear something that doesn’t fit?”

  Our family might’ve fully entered the world of the city’s black bourgeoisie—or even its progressive black activist intelligentsia counterpart—if Mama’s had been a legal enterprise like a funeral parlor or dry cleaner’s or restaurant, if she’d been a self-made woman in a more legitimate way. We might’ve elevated ourselves to the status of the Talented Tenth, as W. E. B. Dubois famously dubbed educated and privileged blacks, as so many African-Americans before and after have done. But the Numbers were illegal, so that was not an option. (One striking exception to this status-conscious rule was Roxborough, who as the founding father of Detroit’s Numbers racket was from one of the city’s privileged African-American families. Already part of the black upper class, he remained within that elite milieu even though people knew exactly how he made his money.)

  Basically, because my parents weren’t college-educated professionals with fair skin and an air of entitlement, we were exempt from what critic Margo Jefferson calls Negroland, “a small region of Negro America where residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty.” We were not that group of black folks, which ironically meant we didn’t have the same constraints on us to uplift the race through respectability. Funny thing, without those strictures, my mother was able to create generational wealth in ways that more so-called respectable blacks were not. To be sure, Mama did demand we follow certain dictates to avoid what she called “low-class” behavior, like being loud in public or going barefoot outside or having discarded objects on the front lawn. As a migrant from the South, she didn’t want to be seen as “country.”

  We didn’t “summer” at Idlewild resort (the “Black Eden”) in Michigan’s rural Lake County alongside Detroit’s black upper class, but we did go places. We drove across the Ambassador Bridge to Windsor, Ontario, to have Chinese food dinners. In the winter we took day trips north to Frankenmuth, Michigan, home of “the world’s largest Christmas store,” where Mama bought pretty ornaments for the tree. And I found myself alone on a plane for the first time, age eight, headed to a tiny town in Ohio to visit my mother’s childhood friend, Aunt Maria, for a summer week because Mama overheard me saying I wondered what it felt like to fly.

  We may not have attended performances at the Detroit Opera House or by the city’s symphony orchestra, nor visited the Detroit Institute of Arts regularly, but we had our own cultural outings. “It’s good to expose kids to things,” Mama would say, and expose us she did. Memories tumble forward: me, my cousins, and neighborhood friends at the Barnum & Bailey Circus at Cobo Hall, our little hands filled with caramel popcorn; at the Ice Capades, transfixed by the skaters’ amazing pirouettes; wrapped warm in a blanket during languid nights at the drive-in theater, Daddy’s silver Buick deuce-and-a-quarter filled with hot dogs and other goodies from the concession stand; riding in Mama’s Riviera, headed to dinner at upscale places like Sindbad’s Restaurant and Marina with its view of the Detroit River, and Joe Muer Seafood Restaurant, where I learned both to place a cloth napkin in my lap and to eat fresh oyster soup with little circles of oyster crackers. And we rode to Belle Isle just “to be by some water” as Mama put it, and throw coins into its changing-colors fountain, a good-luck ritual my mother believed in.

  Another highlight was trips to the Hazel Park Raceway to see my uncle John’s racehorses run. Because John was that rarity, an African-American horse trainer, watching his Thoroughbreds—with names like Bitter Blue, Copper Quest, Nice & Playful, and his prized Michigan Mile winner, Thumbsucker—perform was our version of the Royal Ascot. I loved all of it, from the starting shot, to the crowds’ yells during the adrenaline-fueled races, to the photographers’ blinding flash inside the winner’s circle, where discarded tickets scattered across the ground like oversized confetti.

  My brother and sisters and I didn’t attend private school on the campus of Cranbrook, the sprawling center designed in part by architect Eliel Saarinen, nor at University Liggett School in Grosse Pointe Woods; but Mama did believe in supporting our intellectual and creative interests. There were French lessons for Deborah; a personal hi-fi for Anthony, along with a stack of Motown albums and a microphone, so he could work out his dance routines (“I brushed my teeth every morning to the Temptations’ ‘My Girl�
�� for a whole year,” Mama later reflected); a subscription to World Book Encyclopedia for Rita’s book reports; and for me stacks of Dr. Seuss books piled onto the wide built-in shelf in my room, alongside my own portable record player with LPs of recorded fairy tales; I spent whole afternoons listening to Peter and the Wolf and dramatic readings of “Pinocchio” and “Little Red Riding Hood.” As I grew older, my mother, knowing how much I loved to read, subscribed to Readers’ Digest Condensed Books, tossing a brown package on my bed every couple of weeks; I began devouring abridged versions of classic novels, from Wuthering Heights to The Call of the Wild to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

  There were no debutante “coming out” balls, no membership in Jack and Jill, the invitation-only group for upper-middle-class African-American youth, no sorority-based affairs. I knew nothing about these things, didn’t have friends who were part of that world. Society validation didn’t interest Mama. I suspect she understood that she wouldn’t have fit in, wouldn’t have been welcomed anyway. That didn’t stop her from celebrating our big moments with grand gestures. When my sister Dianne married, my mother planned an elaborate engagement party for her at the Hotel St. Regis. And years later, I’d have my own Sweet Sixteen party at a downtown hotel.

  We were our own social class, what I’ve dubbed blue-collar black bourgeoisie, part of that subset of black culture, so invisible to the mainstream, folks whose livelihood came from jobs at the post office and as city workers and sales clerks on commission in department stores, or as number runners. Folks who didn’t go to college yet were smart, industrious, and, yes, educated about and by the world around us. Detroit itself gave us the bourgeois part: We lived in a very nice house—one of many left behind by all those fleeing whites—on the west side of town, dubbed the “best side”; like my friends’ families, we defined our middle-class status largely by the upscale homes we inhabited. Thanks again to Detroit’s uniqueness, we had family members and friends, and in Mama’s case customers, who were making decent money in the plants, wages that could bring you a good living even before you added overtime. Mama’s customers played heavy, keeping her cash flowing, and so our family benefited. As my high school friend Elliott said about us, we were “living your west-side bougie lives.”