No other American city had quite that complement of twin conditions: good-paying jobs and affordable, available housing stock for the city’s black population; meanwhile, black businesses provided many of the services we needed and craved. For some, that included a thriving industry of “boosters,” who shoplifted clothing and accessories from department stores and sold them to customers in makeshift stores set up in their basements on weekends. In a city of hustlers, where the lines of legality and illegality stayed smudged, these boosters—all women—made good livings, with Numbers folks as their key clients. (One booster named her store Jackie’s Finer Designs, and she had guards watching customers, to make sure no one stole the merchandise that she had stolen.) I visited a booster’s shop with Mama at least once, but she preferred store-bought clothes.
Indeed, by then Detroit City was the place to be for blacks, had hit its sweet spot. It would be years before the encroaching effects of white flight and a downsized auto industry unleashed their massive destabilizing forces upon the city. The US economy was still in its so-called golden age of high economic growth coupled with low unemployment and inflation. Unions were strong.
Still, maintaining our blue-collar bourgeois status took its toll on my mother. I remember across those same years that Mama sometimes slept for hours after taking customers’ numbers, and before she closed the door on her bedroom, she gave strict orders not to disturb her. My sister Dianne would say to us younger children: “Whatever you do, try not to get on Fannie’s nerves.” And on Saturdays—the day we all had to clean the house—she’d go collecting, leaving in a bad mood, coming home exhausted. Only later did I learn why: Dealing with folks when you needed to collect their money wasn’t easy. Some didn’t answer their door or asked you to come back later, or didn’t have it all, or wanted you to come in and visit…it was stressful. No numbers ran on Sunday, which was Mama’s day off, but portions of that day were often spent tallying customers’ weekly bills and collecting payments she hadn’t gotten before.
We all collectively and viscerally understood the need to protect Mama from any undue stress. This led to my siblings and me keeping certain upsetting news from her, because we all knew she “had enough on her.” We kept secrets from Mama to protect her.
I didn’t explicitly know the pressure my mother was under back then, but she was ever on my mind, just as she was on every family member’s mind. What will Fannie think? was an unspoken question for all situations, because it would affect what she did, and what she did affected all of us. It was as though we moved in a planetary orbit around her, the sun. As the baby, this meant I was both in thrall to and slightly intimidated by my mother. I thought of her as a queen with the bed as her throne, Mama ever on the phone or giving orders or disciplining us or saying, “Here, I bought this for you.” She was also the engine that kept our world humming. And no one, myself included, wanted to get on Mama’s bad side. Nothing angered her more than the perception that she wasn’t being respected, particularly by any of her children. “Respect is earned,” she’d say, and we wanted to earn hers. None of us ever talked back or “sassed” her, as she called it; that was not even an option. My mother did not play; she took a hard line on respecting your parents, with no ifs, ands, or buts. You just did, end of story. And if you didn’t, well, she had a belt waiting for you.
I was spending a lot of my time in the den with Daddy, but I could see that he wasn’t the one in charge. I got emotional nourishment from one parent, and a sense of security from the other. Daddy gave me lots of hugs, but I was clear that Mama was the one who knew how to defend me against outside forces, like my first-grade teacher. Mama once said to me, when I was a young woman: “I wish I’d had the time to hug my kids more, but I was busy trying to make a better life for you.”
Throughout the mid-to-late 1960s, all around us, Detroit was changing, becoming more radical, more aware of its role as a central locale of the civil rights movement. As a child, I didn’t know that the city had one of the country’s largest chapters of both the NAACP and the Urban League, thanks in large part to heavy contributions from local Numbers men and women, including my own mother. I didn’t know that Stokely Carmichael chose Detroit’s Cobo Hall to give a seminal speech, during which he shouted out to the crowd, which included my nineteen-year-old sister, Deborah: “It’s time to get some black power!” Nor did I know that Coleman Young, a firebrand spokesman for racial justice, was helping make Detroit a hotbed of labor activism, nor that black autoworkers were becoming more militant on shop floors to push back against factories’ discrimination.
But I did witness Detroit lifting black consciousness and becoming a symbol for the nation, when my mother took me to a church service at the Shrine of the Black Madonna, founded by Reverend Albert Cleage, Jr. I was seven years old, and will never forget the shock and thrill I felt inside that sacred place on Linwood Avenue, staring up at a painting of a blue-black Madonna holding a black baby Jesus, this eighteen-foot mural towering over us from the church’s sanctuary. That arresting image was unlike anything I’d witnessed in my young life, and the message it sent was clear: black people come from God. That meant everything to me.
Meanwhile, the country was deep in the Vietnam War, which Muhammad Ali had refused to fight, famously saying, “My conscience won’t let me go shoot my brother, or some darker people, or some poor hungry people in the mud for big powerful America. And shoot them for what? They never called me nigger, they never lynched me, they didn’t put no dogs on me, they didn’t rob me of my nationality, rape and kill my mother and father.…Just take me to jail.”
Because I was so young, when I think of the fraught sixties, I think of Motown music and their artists, our local royalty. I remember the up-tempo, happy songs blasting from our living room hi-fi, songs my siblings and I loved to dance to—Martha and the Vandellas’ “Heat Wave,” and the Miracles’ “Mickey’s Monkey” and “Come On Do the Jerk,” and Mary Wells’s “My Guy.” Mama never joined in, but she never said, “Turn that music down,” either. I used to try to sneak a glance at Diana Ross, sometimes standing outside her corner house just a couple of blocks from Broadstreet, waiting for her to leave. One day, I saw her and waved shyly. She waved back. Certainly, Detroit was having its heyday as Hitsville, USA, and the Motor City. The city’s population, while no longer at its height, was still 1.6 million, with black folks nearly half a million of its residents. I could feel that proud energy even as a child. It was as though Marvin Gaye was singing an ode to us when he sang, “You are my pride and joy.”
And a sense of possibility was in the air. My cousin Jewell and I got to be flower girls in a wedding, wearing pretty white lace dresses with pink ribbons around our waists and mini lace veils atop our heads. In our innocence, she and I rode through the streets atop the back seat of a convertible, our veils fluttering in the breeze as the bride and groom sat up front. And that same year, 1966, our family was excited about another wedding, that of Pete Moore from the Miracles. What made this an extraordinary affair was that my sister Dianne knew his bride, Tina. That meant she got to go to the wedding, and that meant she’d get to meet Smokey Robinson. Dianne had a teenage girl’s crush on Smokey, sang all his songs in a sweet voice mimicking his own falsetto. In a photograph from the reception, there she is, Dianne, wearing a red skirt suit with a ruffled blouse, standing beside Smokey. He has his arm around her, and she’s beaming.
Cousin Bill also had a nice wedding, and in spring of 1967, he and his new wife, Susie, came to Detroit for their honeymoon. “I never will forget,” recalls Bill. “Fannie bought me a blue suit that had one button; seemed like the suit changed colors. And she bought me some knit shirts; then she sent my wife with Dianne and bought her a wardrobe. That’s just how she was, always thinking about others, giving things, helping people.”
Bill also remembers my father’s gratitude. “Your daddy said, ‘Thank you, Bill, for going back and telling folks in Nashville that we were doing all right back in fifty-eight.�
�” My cousin points out that “By then, y’all were doing real good.”
In many ways, we were: Deborah was in her senior year at Wayne State University, majoring in English (deterred by her advisor from majoring in psychology, a “useless choice” for a Negro girl); Dianne was attending Oakland Community College and had met the man she’d eventually marry. Anthony was finishing junior high and making good grades. Rita was gathering a reputation as a best friend, becoming one of the popular girls at school. And I was enjoying second grade at Winterhalter Elementary, with a teacher who never asked questions about my parents, let alone my shoes.
But another world was brewing outside our doors. Older blacks who’d managed to secure jobs in the plants still had theirs, but unemployment for young black men, for those older blacks’ own sons, was between 25 and 30 percent, with few prospects of improvement. As James Baldwin once wrote, “The most dangerous creation of any society is that man who has nothing to lose.” The city’s black poor were in the same situation their migrating predecessors had been in thirty years before, relegated to overcrowded, depressed inner-city ghettos. Whole sections of the city were off-limits to blacks, thanks to white residents’ violent tactics, with twenty-five crosses burned on city lawns in 1965 alone. The only two groups of whites ever-present in black neighborhoods were opportunistic shopkeepers and police. I still remember my father talking about how Mr. Stein, who owned the corner store near our home, overcharged for his cold cuts, which were more often than not near rancid.
Tempers flared across the city. On July 23, 1967, my cousins Ava and Buddy arrived from Nashville. Ava, who was twelve, remembers that it was such a big deal for them. They took the train up; neither had ever traveled that far before. She’d been looking forward to their big trip to Detroit all summer. Her father, my uncle Napoleon, had just died and my mother had invited her niece and nephew to come visit as a little getaway, a treat. They got to the city, which was in the midst of a heat wave, and made their way to Broadstreet. As fate would have it, that was the day that police had busted a “blind pig,” an illegal after-hours joint on Twelfth Street, a stone’s throw from Delaware Street, where my family had begun its life in Detroit. These blind pigs, which got their start as Prohibition saloons, remained the go-to nightlife spots for black folks well into the sixties. Even after desegregation, working-class folks preferred the blind pigs; most of these men and women toiled long hours on assembly lines in the city’s plants, and here were places where they could recuperate and seek some pleasure, where “the night time becomes the right time.” Police raids on these spots were commonplace, “an unwise attempt by a white middle class to foist its morals on the lower class,” said Errol Miller, a representative of the US Justice Department at the time. Police had attempted to raid this particular blind pig nine times the previous year.
At three in the morning, an undercover officer gained entrance to the pig, and soon after, his commanding officer and crew broke down the door with a sledgehammer and charged in, finding a crowd of nearly one hundred people; owners of the pig were hosting a party for two men who’d recently returned from Vietnam and one who was about to leave for the war. The sergeant decided to arrest everyone present—on the claim that the after-hours club was operating illegally—and transported the partygoers to jail in four paddy wagons.
While this was happening, a crowd that grew to two hundred people gathered in the streets outside; the crowd got hostile when it witnessed police officers’ rough treatment of the men and women, from pushing to kicking to arm-twisting. Someone yelled, “Black Power! Don’t let them take our people away!” and quickly folks started throwing bricks, rocks, and beer cans at the police; one bottle smashed through the last police cruiser to leave the scene, and what forever came to be known in the media as the “Detroit riot,” what government officials dubbed Detroit’s “civil disturbance,” and what blacks called the “Great Rebellion,” erupted. The crowd grew to three thousand by 8 a.m. Chaos ensued, and the uprising raged on.
“By the time we got to the house, we saw it on the television, all the looting and burning,” recalls Ava. “I remember being real scared. I’d never seen anything like it in my life.…It was a long time before I wanted to come back.”
I spent the days of Detroit’s uprising lying prone on the floor of our home, below the windows that faced Broadstreet Avenue, hoping to avoid stray bullets. Instead of gunfire, however, there was eerie quiet on our block, interrupted only by National Guardsmen who rolled down our street in armored tanks, their megaphones ordering residents to “Stay inside. This is an order. Stay inside.”
No numbers ran during that entire week, as looting, burning, and violence wore on for five days. A combined force of nearly seventeen thousand officers, National Guardsmen, and federal troops was sent in, and by the time the uprising was suppressed, as many as 155,000 rounds of ammunition had been fired by law enforcement; forty-three people were dead—thirty of them African-Americans, including a four-year-old girl named Tonya, victim to a .50-caliber bullet fired by the National Guard; more than seven thousand people were arrested on riot-related charges. During those few days, Detroit cops also tortured and brutally killed three black teenagers in what became known as the Algiers Motel incident. And the entire area around Twelfth Street was in ruins. The remnants of that damage remained for decades, much of it incredibly never rebuilt, even as the street was renamed Rosa Parks Boulevard.
During most of those five days, the city was all but shut down, with businesses, factories, and schools closed. Rumors flew that Russell Woods Park, just a couple of blocks from our home, would be set on fire, the entire area supposedly a target. My parents were nervous wrecks, and so with my visiting cousins tucked in for the night beside us, my father stayed awake each of those five nights, keeping watch from the front window, guarding the house from angry rioters who had nothing to lose. My family had Broadstreet to lose, and that was everything.
When it was all over, we were lucky. More than twenty-five hundred buildings had been looted and burned, but our beloved house remained intact. But I suddenly developed a paralyzing fear of the outside world, of losing Daddy to it, and began a habit of grabbing on to his leg every time he tried to leave the house. I was seven and had seen armored tanks roll down our street. I could sense a looming catastrophe coming to get us.
Four
Fannie and Burt on their wedding day, April 10, 1969
Mama celebrated her fortieth birthday with a “surprise” birthday party, which I doubt was really a surprise because my mother didn’t like to be surprised, and everyone who knew her knew that about her. Still, I remember the excitement surrounding the whole evening. The party was a big one with lots of guests, hosted by Mama’s best friend, Lula, at her home just a couple of blocks from Broadstreet. I can imagine how good it felt for Mama to be at that point in her life, with five children ranging in age from eight to twenty-one, and having come so far in the decade since she’d arrived in Detroit. That cold-water flat on Delaware was a distant memory, as Mama’s thriving business was celebrating its tenth year. I’d never seen my mother so beautiful. I don’t recall what she wore that day or how her hair was styled, just the light in her eyes and my own adoration. Mama often said that forty was the perfect age: not too young, not too old. That day, it showed.
My father was at the party, which is where my most treasured picture of him was taken. In that photo, my cousin Jewell and I are sitting on Daddy’s lap. He wears a crisp white shirt unbuttoned at the neck, and looks lovingly at me; my head is down as I fiddle with a bow on my silvery new organza dress. It’s one of the only pictures that remain of Daddy taken during my lifetime, and it’s the last time he appears anywhere as my mother’s husband. They’ve been married twenty-two years by then. I recall his nervous excitement about the party, as if he knows things could still go either way.
I now see what a precarious time it was for our family. Both my oldest sister, Deborah, and my brother, Anthony, had begun experime
nting with “smack,” i.e., heroin. Dianne was dating a man Daddy didn’t approve of, which caused friction between her and our father, and my parents were living separately in the same house. Rita was still writing letters to God, asking him to keep her from worrying. One month before the party, Dr. King had been assassinated. As we all watched the funeral procession on TV, it was the first time I saw my mother cry—so rare an occurrence I only recall one other time. The day before, on April third, I’d made a giant card with too many candles to celebrate my father’s birthday. Daddy kept saying, “He was three years younger than me. The man was three years younger than me.” I thought King looked a lot like Daddy; and his wife, Coretta, reminded me of my mother—same complexion and hair and beauty and what I now recognize as quiet dignity. Because Coretta’s sadness and tragedy leapt out from the TV screen, their resemblance scared me. Turns out, Coretta was just one year older than Mama. My parents, as contemporaries of the Kings, felt the loss intimately, as we do when our same-age friends die. And I felt the worrisome way you do when your friend’s parent dies.
The World According to Fannie Davis Page 9
