The World According to Fannie Davis

by Bridgett M. Davis

My first cogent memory is sitting beside my parents in the den on Broadstreet. We’re watching TV coverage of John F. Kennedy’s funeral. I remember snatches of images: little John-John saluting, Mama crying, horses drawing the hearse, Daddy comforting his wife.

  I was both parents’ child then, sleeping between them each night in their big bed, my small leg thrown across one of their bodies “making sure she stays the baby,” my father would jokingly say to his friends. And they were a unit. Mama took folks’ numbers, and Daddy collected their bets and their money from “out in the streets.” He once served brief time after he and Mama got stopped for a traffic violation and were caught with Numbers tickets on them. Daddy later told me he gladly took that rap, because “jail was no place for a woman.” He was charged, likely served mere hours, and was out after paying a fine, the custom back then. Law enforcement had its eyes instead on the big operations; Detroit’s Numbers racket was now an estimated $15-million-a-year enterprise. In fact the year before, 1962, just months into Mama’s efforts to work for herself, as she waited it out in that movie theater, authorities executed what became known as the infamous Gotham raid.

  Detroit’s Hotel Gotham had been internationally famous, and throughout most of its existence, blacks weren’t allowed there as guests. While Jim Crow is equated with the South, the North was no stranger to the same de facto racist policies, and the Hotel Gotham was one clear example. That is, until a man named John White bought it in 1943; the hotel suddenly became the place for African-American travelers denied accommodations in the downtown hotels, many of them entertainers. The ironically named White was a black man who could pass for white, which apparently helped him purchase the nine-story twin-towered hotel for a quarter million dollars; sellers thought they were selling to a Caucasian man. Also, John White and his partner had Numbers money.

  Located on the corner of John R Street and Orchestra Place—near Paradise Valley, the city’s black cultural hub—the top-notch 200-room hotel was known for its elegance and the comfort it provided. A key feature was the Ebony Room, the hotel’s restaurant, known for African carvings and a famous “high-class” chef. Its guests were a who’s who of black America, including civil rights lawyer Thurgood Marshall, Billie Holiday, Jackie Robinson, Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington. Langston Hughes once called the hotel “a kind of minor miracle” for being owned, managed, and staffed by blacks.

  The Gotham was also headquarters for White’s Numbers racket and that of Detroit’s other black Numbers operators. White had once worked for Roxborough, the city’s founding Numbers man, who set the bar high in smudging the lines between an informal and a formal economy: Roxborough was the first to use the wealth he amassed in Numbers to invest in legal businesses, everything from an insurance company to a country club to a weekly newspaper to a bowling alley—providing services to African-Americans that racism had denied them. White learned well from his mentor, not only taking over where Roxborough left off; he also bought the Hotel Gotham to give black folks a luxury service they sorely needed and deserved. And like Roxborough and other Numbers men before him, White was a staunch race man who supported black pride, requiring all his employees to be both registered voters and members of the NAACP. In fact, he single-handedly kept the city’s fledgling NAACP branch afloat and also gave generously to the Detroit Urban League. Both civil rights organizations would of course become critical to the fight for equality waged by blacks in the 1960s.

  It’s worth noting that by the time Roxborough and others began serving prison sentences for “conspiracy to protect the numbers racket” in 1944 (convicted by an all-white jury), blacks in Detroit controlled less than 50 percent of Numbers operations. That’s also the point at which Roxborough gave up control of the wire service to Detroit’s Mafia. Controlling the wire service essentially meant controlling the entire Numbers operation, because back then the wire service provided the daily numbers, and whoever controlled it decided from which racetracks winning numbers would be drawn.

  In 1951, the black-themed magazine Color reported a “War On Number Racket Kings” on its cover, claiming: “Huge profits lure organized crime bosses into the numbers game.” Peter Licavoli, a notorious Italian boss, was head of Detroit’s Mafia for many years and reportedly owned at least two Numbers businesses throughout the 1950s; he’s credited with helping to expand the Numbers game in the city and ensuring that more whites owned and controlled those operations. John White was one of a very few black men in the 1940s and 1950s who managed to hang on and compete as Numbers kings.

  By the time of the Gotham raid, the hotel was already targeted under eminent domain laws, to make room for a medical center as part of the city’s “urban renewal” plan, which cut right through traditional black neighborhoods. But some of the hotel’s full-time residents remained, many of them White’s friends and associates whom he claimed he kept on the premises to maintain insurance coverage, and protect against vandals. The hotel was clearly still operating as a Numbers factory; authorities knew this, claiming that the Gotham was the headquarters for a “gigantic numbers operation,” and they were determined to crack down.

  Dubbed “an unprecedented raid” in the history of the Detroit police department, the over-the-top ambush involved two busloads of Treasury agents, some brought from Chicago, busting into the hotel at 5 p.m. on a Friday, when numbers operators would allegedly be in their rooms counting their receipts. Men came in blazing, with hammers and axes, and ultimately hacked their way through every one of the hotel’s 174 rooms; White was irate and called the raid “a needless and uncalled for binge.”

  White accused the Feds and the local vice squad of breaking in “like members of the Notre Dame football team.” He further accused them of being there over an hour “smashing everything in sight” before they showed him a warrant. He was quoted in the Michigan Chronicle, the city’s black newspaper, pointing out the fact that “no one was caught in the actual operation of numbers.” Apparently, officials took possession of his hotel for twenty-four hours, and, according to White, drank up all his personal whisky, soda pop, and even some milk. He said they also drank “untold amounts of whisky” belonging to his permanent guests, and even took ten new, unused packs of pinochle cards. White was convinced that the raid, led by a member of the IRS Intelligence Division, was a ploy by Treasury agents “bucking for promotion.”

  Meanwhile, police found at least one Numbers office on every floor, each with its own adding machines and blacked-out windows. Linen closets contained boxes of coin wrappers. Raiding officers confiscated eleven safes, which contained $49,000 in cash, records, and other gambling paraphernalia. Even though no one was in fact caught in the act, forty-one people were arrested, including White himself and another well-known Numbers operator; some were charged with violation of the US gambling code, and others with violation of the state gambling law. Interestingly, Eddie Wingate, whom my mother had just disassociated herself from and whose Numbers headquarters was also located in the Gotham, wasn’t there that day, so he avoided arrest. By then, Wingate was considered one of the city’s top Numbers operators.

  Detroit’s police commissioner, George Edwards, who claimed to have confiscated 160,000 bet slips, proclaimed, “I am certain that quite a crimp was put into the business by this raid.”

  I imagine my mother spreading out the Detroit Free Press, which she read religiously every day from her bedroom perch, and seeing the coverage of the raid. Did it frighten her? Make her even more cautious? Or was she clear that the way to stay in the business was to do so under the radar on a small, mom-and-pop level? I suspect that the Gotham bust reinforced her determination to stay low-key; she had no desire to become “big-time,” à la the biggest woman Number runner in history: the notorious 1930s legend Stephanie St. Clair, known as Madame Queen, who dominated New York’s Numbers racket in her heyday. Greed and power were not my mother’s thing. Still, the raid had to be unnerving. She could not afford to get busted. Nor could she afford to leave the Numbers a
lone.

  “Fannie always was a hustler,” explains Aunt Florence. “I guess she got that honest from my daddy. She didn’t give up. And she kept going, kept pushing, pushing, pushing until she got what she wanted.”

  The raid apparently did put a chill on the entire Numbers community, but it never slowed down the Numbers business itself; hardly. In fact, many Numbers bankers began using their proceeds to aggressively fund Detroit’s growing civil rights movement, as they saw the bust as an attack on the Hotel Gotham specifically because it was black-owned, and because blacks were generating so much wealth within its walls. Eight months after the raid, the Gotham was demolished, a sight that brought White to tears—two of the city’s most successful black businesses, one legit, one illicit, both filling the needs of the black community in ways its government had neglected, were gone.

  A year later, while awaiting trial, John White died at age fifty-five from a heart ailment. It was the end of an era.

  With White and his Gotham Numbers factory no more, the structure of the city’s Numbers games changed. Displacement of concentrated black communities, thanks to the so-called urban renewal that sacrificed thousands of buildings, helped to decentralize the Numbers, which were no longer run out of large headquarters. This allowed for the creation and proliferation of small operations, modest enterprises like my mother’s. Whereas a major “house” employed numerous people to perform the jobs of door-to-door ticket writers, those taking numbers via phone, pickup men collecting bets and money, and a bevy of bookkeepers and tabulators, Fannie’s business was a one-woman microcosm of all that: she did every job.

  In addition to this new business model for the Numbers, by then black Detroiters were facing the hardship of high unemployment, with one in five adults without jobs, or working within the so-called informal economy. With the auto companies already outsourcing jobs, that number grew as the decade went on.

  These twin conditions at play, Mama’s fledgling business took hold. Along with millions of other blacks, my mother watched on TV as Dr. King delivered his speech at the March on Washington. She heard him clearly say, “We have come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness…America has given the Negro people a bad check.”

  More and more folks looked to the Numbers as a major source of hope, yes, but mostly as a right of survival, and Mama’s customer base began to grow. Here another memory asserts itself: being with my parents, together, for the last time. We are once again in the den as Mama and Daddy sit on its white leather love seat, watching me play. I am four, and holding a Squirt bottle, its green glass a rivulet of swirls that fascinates me; I run my small hands over its smooth curves. Suddenly I drop the bottle on the hardwood floor and it shatters. What I remember next is Daddy carrying me from his long silver car, up the walkway of our home, through the front door. My right foot is bandaged, as I’ve just received stitches across its instep. I can still detect the faintest, faintest trace of a scar there, reassuring me that the memory is real.

  Once we reenter the house, I am a daddy’s girl. Held safely in his arms, feeling the stubble from his beard tickle my face, crossing the threshold, I’m his child. Mama is there, for sure, running her business at the dining room table, taking customers’ numbers from bed, coming into the house from the outside world, going back out, cooking, talking on the phone—an ever-present life-force. She takes me shopping, combs my wild hair, lets me hang out beside her in the basement as she does laundry. But the day-to-day of my life is spent with Daddy, in the den. He now sleeps downstairs while she, Mama, sleeps upstairs. They are not together, in the same house. I never hear one argument between them, but barely any conversation either. And it’s Daddy I sleep with every night, literally curled atop his broad back. (I once awake to Mama and her good friend Miss Betty peering at us through the glass of the den’s French doors; Mama is pointing and smiling.)

  It’s Daddy who teaches me to tie my shoes, tell time, read. I start kindergarten and Daddy alone escorts me to my first day of school. When Malcolm X, whom my oldest sister, Deborah, would go to hear speak at Temple Number One on Linwood Avenue, is gunned down, only Daddy and I watch the coverage together on the den’s Magnavox TV.

  Age and distance now allow me to see what was happening. Daddy’s life, due largely to his poor health, was shrinking. His high blood pressure was consistently stroke-level, causing daily migraines, which he tried to mitigate with Stanback “headache powder” (crushed aspirin) poured onto his tongue and washed back with Pepsi-Colas. While still a little girl, I placed cool washcloths across his forehead to help alleviate the pain. His last day working at General Motors’ Pontiac Division was October 2, 1963, when he was injured at work; that coupled with his hypertension led to his being one of the youngest men at GM to receive disability. He was thirty-seven. It would take more than eight years for the auto company to settle his case. When I was a teenager, Daddy unfolded the settlement letter—worn and nearly tattered—and spread it out before me. “This is how they did me,” he said. It showed that GM’s entire liability had been “redeemed” by a single payment “in lieu of weekly payments and past, present, and future medical benefits” of $1,000. From that payment, $200 was deducted for attorneys’ fees, and another $90 for medical expenses. He received a total of $710 in disability payment. Interestingly, months before my father was injured and let go from the Pontiac plant, Dr. King led over 125,000 people through Detroit’s streets to protest just such discrimination in workplaces. There, he told the crowd, “I have a dream this afternoon that my four little children will not come up in the same young days that I came up within, but they will be judged on the basis of the content of their character, not the color of their skin,” a precursor to his famous March on Washington speech.

  Daddy, who was never to work again, had time on his hands, and he chose to largely spend that time with me. My parents had been childhood sweethearts, married as teens, had five children together, migrated north, launched a Numbers business, moved into a spacious family home. But the marriage was not holding up; who can say exactly why? “They just grew apart,” says Aunt Florence. “They just grew apart.”

  I do know this: I was the last vestige of what they’d once shared. I was their baby, and Daddy knew there’d be no more babies between him and Fannie. He clung to me and I happily clung back.

  Mama, now the sole breadwinner, didn’t have that kind of time on her hands. Everything was on her. It was on her to pay the house note and handle every leaky faucet and roof and furnace repair that came with home ownership; it was on her to pay the light and heat bills, keep the refrigerator full, buy her own car, and keep both hers and Daddy’s running; it was on her to furnish the house and pay medical expenses, insurance premiums, and credit card bills—never mind the meals in restaurants and excursions and well-made clothes and shelves full of books she was hell-bent on giving us. So inspired, Mama built her business. She did it by amassing steady, loyal customers who turned in their numbers only to her. Mama’s distinction was her reputation. She was known for being honest, reliable, fair, and tough—all very important qualities in an underground business with few checks and balances. People could lie, cheat, steal, and who would stop them? Folks knew that when it was time to turn in their numbers, Fannie would be there to take them; they knew that when they hit with her they’d get paid the next day. (“It’s not my money. What the hell does it need to hang around my house for?”) They knew that she wouldn’t discuss their business with other customers. They knew that she’d have clear records for every transaction. And they knew that if they didn’t pay their bills, she’d politely drop them.

  “You expect your money when you hit, don’t yo
u?” she’d say to a customer. “Well, I expect mine when you don’t.” She didn’t understand people’s “get-over” mentality. “What makes somebody think they can sit on their ass and play numbers all week, and then not pay for them?” she’d say, incredulous. “That don’t make no damn sense.”

  In fact, while most bookies accepted tips when their customers hit, Mama did not. “I get my tip when you pay me on time,” she’d say. Another cardinal rule that helped Mama’s business thrive: she didn’t believe in “playing up your profits.” To be sure, she still played her pet number, 788, regularly, and other numbers that she’d get hunches on too. But she ironically lacked a gambler’s mentality. To her, playing numbers was an investment in her business. So she placed a cap on what she herself played. And throughout the years, when she did hit—reaffirming her reputation as a lucky woman—she always put away a big portion of it. Having a stockpile of cash is vital to someone who banks the Numbers.

  What also aided the growth of my mother’s business was that her customers played heavy. Despite the fact that the city’s auto industry was on an overall downward spiral that had begun a decade before, thanks to a “cyclical boom”—a brief boom inside a broader downward trend—in the mid- and late-1960s, many had steady work; in fact, for those blacks who had been at the plants long enough to secure good jobs with benefits protected by the union, salaries were pretty good. That meant folks had more disposable income to play more numbers, more often, for higher amounts. That also meant Mama stayed busy.

  During that time, Mama expanded her operation by taking the numbers of those who themselves were taking others’ numbers. Each “book,” as it was known, was a customer who herself had a few customers. As Mama’s reputation for fairness and honesty grew, more people, bookies themselves, wanted to turn in their own business to her, and she eventually had several books, as many as ten at her height. This was small compared to a major numbers man like Wingate, who had numerous bookies working for him, turning in dozens of books; Wingate reportedly made millions a year in his heyday, with a business widely believed to be connected to Detroit’s Italian Mafia. Still, Mama had by any measure a robust roster of customers.