The World According to Fannie Davis

by Bridgett M. Davis

  “You take one step, God will take two,” Mama loved to say.

  Likewise, my mother didn’t use church services as an opportunity to find numbers to play, as so many people she knew did. Many congregants would use a minister’s selected Bible verse to help them pick a “good three-digit,” so that, for instance, Romans 12:2 would be 122 and Matthew 6:33 would be 633. Ditto for the chosen hymn numbers. A 1972 Detroit Free Press article quoted a Detroit Baptist minister who once famously said from the pulpit, “I know some of you are taking the numbers of our hymns and betting on them. I’m not saying whether I approve or not, but if you play them…be sure to box ’em.” Certain preachers actually built their church followings on the claim that they had the ability to prophesy, and would give out numbers that had supposedly come to them in their dreams.

  Given her belief that the poor and meek would not inherit the earth, my mother also enjoyed attending another very different Unity church, where followers practiced a “metaphysical Christianity” led by a legendary minister named Eric Butterworth. Butterworth, a leader of New Age thought and author of sixteen books, taught the Law of Attraction long before Deepak Chopra and Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret. Some have called him “the twentieth-century Emerson.” Butterworth was for many years minister of Unity’s Detroit Temple, which he grew into Unity’s largest church, attracting two thousand people every Sunday to the massive white-stoned structure located close to our future home beside Palmer Park; as minister, he led “worth-ship” services, espousing the belief that you attract good in your own life by being thankful in advance, by giving generously, and by believing that “Prosperity is one of God’s greatest gifts to us.” This idea of universal law aligned beautifully with Mama’s beliefs, and soon enough with my own; long after Butterworth had moved to New York to lecture weekly at Carnegie Hall and other ministers took his place in the city, I liked attending Unity Temple services with my mother; there we’d stand, joining other congregants, holding hands and singing “Divine love flowing through me blesses and increases all that I give and all that I receive” as the collection plates passed along the pews. Mama always threw in a twenty- or fifty-dollar bill.

  I see now that my mother lived a spiritual contradiction. With a livelihood based on gambling, she could easily slide into worry, into a negative mind-set: “I hope that damn number does not come out today.” And when she got that way, she was hard to be around. Worry is contagious, and I tried to quarantine myself against it in my room. But Mama really wanted to be a proponent of positive thinking. She tried to mitigate that habit of anticipating bad outcomes by becoming a better student of Butterworth’s teachings. I often accompanied her to Unity Temple’s adjoining bookstore, a cornucopia of New Age thought books, where Mama and I would browse the shelves after the one-hour service; there she’d buy bookmarks and stickers with aphorisms printed on them, such as: “No one can keep your good from you but you” and “We must live from the inside out.” She’d always be sure to buy the latest Butterworth book, and one of my treasured inheritances is her collection of first-edition hardcovers by Eric Butterworth, with titles like Life Is for Living and Discover the Power Within You and the provocative How to Break the Ten Commandments.

  Just as she admired ministers like Butterworth and Reverend Stotts, Mama had special derision for con men, so-called men of the cloth who duped their poor and working-class followers out of hard-earned money by claiming to be prophets. Chief among them was Prophet Jones. A migrant from Alabama to Detroit in the 1930s, James F. Jones was one of the earliest “prosperity pastors,” who went on to head two churches, both with unwieldy yet lofty names: Triumph, the Church and Kingdom, and later Dominion Ruler of the Church of the Universal Triumph. He was known for his gold tooth, two hundred suits, $12,000 mink coat, pastor’s robe worth $20,000, outlandish jewelry, and two mansions that he called castles. His entire fortune was acquired from congregants’ monetary gifts and donations given to him in exchange for advice and blessings. And despite preaching “morality,” he sold so-called lucky numbers for his followers to play. Whenever my mother spoke of this shyster, who was at his height by the time she migrated to Detroit, she seemed angered anew. I could never decide what she hated more, the hypocrisy, how Prophet Jones exploited and took advantage of weak-minded, poor people, or the people who foolishly let him do it.

  “One thing I can’t stand, it’s a follower,” she’d say, shaking her head for effect, baffled that people felt they needed an intermediary in their relationship with a higher being: “Why would I need somebody else to talk to God on my behalf?” she’d say. “I can get my own blessings.”

  Mama was so passionate about the subject she’d sometimes go on a tear, often for an audience of visitors, or during a debate with her best friend, Lula. “I’m not worshipping no man!” she’d say, voice raised. “What’s the point of having your own mind? Folks wanna believe in something so bad, they should believe in the common sense God gave ’em.”

  She did believe that some rare individuals were authentically psychic, especially those “born with the veil,” meaning that a part of the birth sac covered their faces at delivery. These people, she said, had visions, and could “see into things,” witness the future. If she called someone “gifted,” that meant she respected her spiritual powers. She held these women, always women, in high regard; I remember accompanying her more than once to see a psychic, who’d do a reading for Mama and share what “came up” for her. She gave this woman money for her reading, but I don’t ever remember Mama asking her for a number to play.

  At the same time, she had no patience for those who claimed gambling was an evil force or “against God.” Her position was: “Folks need to focus on not breaking the ten commandments that do exist, instead of trying to add an eleventh.” This is where she had nothing in common with the men and women who belonged to rigid Sanctified churches, with their strict codes of morality. (More than a few of Mama’s customers were “saved” or Sanctified women, who secretly played numbers with her regularly.) Nor did she have much respect for the men and women pastors of those churches. “A lot of those preachers would get up in the pulpit and talk about the Numbers being bad,” says Aunt Florence, “but they ain’t turn down that money in the plate.”

  Even still, Mama genuinely believed that ministers or pastors or psychics or anyone who had a true “calling” should not traffic in giving out Numbers; it felt to her untoward, the worst kind of racket, combining religious leadership or spiritual gifts with Numbers profiting. To her, the secular and the sacred shouldn’t be in business together.

  Aunt Florence agreed with her sister on this: “I don’t believe in these little churches you go to, and they up there preaching and then they tell you what number to play,” she insists. “God don’t work like that.”

  In Mama’s mind, closely aligned with charlatans like Prophet Jones were Spiritualist leaders who ran their own storefront churches. These women, again always women, provided religious teaching and a space for “getting happy,” what scholars call “ecstatic worship.” In addition to the shouting and clapping and “getting the Holy Ghost,” congregants could have their bad luck cured, and also receive numbers to play—services Spiritualist ministers provided in exchange for donations to the church. Some women weren’t ministers, rather worked solely as “mediums” within a Spiritualist church or by doing individual readings, again for a fee. These mediums were believed to have the power to either predict a number outright, or divine it by feeling a believer’s “vibrations,” which “gave off” what number he or she should play. During a church service, congregants who wanted to receive numbers would stand and march single file past the medium, who’d be standing near the altar. She’d dip her hands in holy water, sprinkle the believer, and whisper a number in her ear. In another variation, the medium would lie in a coffin, and as people filed by, she’d give each one a number from “the deceased.”

  Aunt Florence was less hard-core than Fannie when it came to the
se women. “Some of them could tell you a number to play,” she says. “And some of them could tell you lies too.”

  By far, the most potent hunch Mama could get was via a good dream. Nothing in her myriad ways to find a winning combination carried more weight than “dreaming up” a number to play. And this was pretty much true for all Numbers players. Nothing was more clear, no sign greater, no hunch more valuable, than what your own subconscious provided while you slept.

  Night dreams have always carried deep meaning and power in African-American culture, what Anthony Shafton in Dream-Singers calls “a lively tradition.” People believe it’s a spiritual carryover from Africa that powerfully shapes our way with dreams, that our ancestors and deceased loved ones visit us this way, via prophecy and warning, as a way to help with the real world. For some, this connects to the deep religious aspect of dreams and they believe that going into a dreamlike state, what we call a waking dream, is a form of religious practice, while nightmares are a form of bad spirits; and not being able to wake up from a dream is “witches riding you.” No wonder some feel it’s the spirit world or God or a deceased loved one who communicates with us through our dreams, blessing us with a certain number to play.

  Our household was awash in the language of and belief in dreamed-up numbers. Often, Mama would share her dreams, or speak of one that got away from her because the phone rang, or something else woke her up just as she “was getting to the good part” of a dream.

  Often, a typical morning conversation began with Mama asking me, or a sibling, “Dream anything good last night?”

  She believed that someone else’s dream could be as lucky for her as if she’d “dreamt it” herself. And nothing carried more weight than a child’s dream; it’s a widely held belief in black culture that children are naturally gifted with the power to divine or predict things, particularly in their dreams.

  “Children have no bias or hang-ups and will tell you things that they see or feel,” explains my cousin Jewell. “We adults need to have evidence of everything, but kids honestly are in tune with their spiritual selves.”

  I must have intuited this belief, because I desperately wanted to have good dreams. There was no higher compliment in my childhood world than to be deemed gifted in just this way, to be that girl who dreamed of images and situations and people that translated to the next day’s winning numbers. I knew how much Mama valued a good dreamer. Funny thing, I remember sharing dreams with Mama, but not the follow-up of finding out whether or not she actually hit on what I shared.

  When Mama spoke of a good dream, she meant one with a definite character, clear symbols and images that could easily be “looked up” in one of the most important books in our home, the encyclopedia-style Bible of every Numbers runner and every Numbers player: the dream book. These books interpreted dreams by assigning three-digit numbers to different symbols, nearly any random image or experience that could appear in a dream, from “ladies’ names” to love songs to lizards to laughing out loud.

  The first dream book appeared as early as 1862, back when lotteries were legal and whites dominated the playing. After lotteries became illegal and morphed into policy and then into the Numbers, African-Americans were the primary buyers. Apparently more than three dozen dream books have been published from the mid-1920s through the 1970s, but in our home, two dominated: The Red Devil Combination DreamBook Almanac and The Original Lucky Three Wise Men Dream Book. These were bestsellers, and Mama could easily buy either for a dollar at a neighborhood party store. New editions came out every year, and copies of both dream books, often dog-eared and worn, could be found within Mama’s nightstand drawer, as well as the den and kitchen drawers. It wasn’t unusual for a customer to pause and ask Mama what something played for while putting in their numbers with her for the day. I have a vivid memory of Mama looking up something in a dream book, her index finger traveling down a row of words, in later years with reading glasses perched on her nose.

  The competing dream books didn’t agree on specific three-digit numbers for the people, places, objects, animals, events, and experiences listed. Where Wise Men listed fish as playing for 377 and 637, Red Devil listed fish as playing for 134 and 436. That made the books no less credible or popular. My favorite of the two dream books was the Three Wise Men; I was drawn to the cover, with its woodcut image of three men, one in shadow, all on camels, all waving, a five-point star above them. I found the cover of Devil slightly frightening, with its bright red-and-white backdrop against the image of a leaping, mischievous-looking bloodred Satanic figure. Back then I wasn’t interested in looking up dreams, but I was attracted to the supernatural, which is why I read and reread Three Wise Men’s introduction. It was wonderfully written by a “Prof. Zonite,” a so-called sage who turned out to be a Detroiter named Mallory F. Banks; I liked his mystical language: “Dreams are illusions produced by an involuntary activity of the mind during sleep,” he wrote. “In primitive societies it was, and still is, believed that dreams are inspired by the gods—that in sleep the soul of a dreamer visits his friends, and that the souls of the dead come to visit him.” Meanwhile, The Red Devil’s text had a more scholarly bent, less engaging to my young taste: “We might infer relationships between our dreams and secondary elements, such as numbers,” it stated in pseudo-seriousness. “The following list combines dream images along with their numeric counterparts.…”

  Within the pages of these annually updated dream books, you could not only read mystical text and look up specific objects or situations listed in alphabetical order, you could also find astrology guides, yearly forecasts, moon phases, hunches, and holidays—all with assigned numbers to play. You could also find a list of popular fancies, and “daily vibrations” for each day of the week. The essentials of the original text didn’t change across the decades with subsequent reprints; nor did the covers of these cheaply made paperbacks deviate from their original images, apart from listing a new date. And despite the fact that policy hasn’t been around for decades, the books continued to list not only three digits, but a sequence of three two-digit numbers based on old-fashioned daily drawings from policy wheels. Reading a dream book’s list of imagery and symbols is like peering into a window onto that time in America, to see what haunted black folks’ sleeping and waking lives: You could look up three-digits for lynching and negress, prejudice and white woman. No surprise that dream books “mirrored a sobering reality,” as Playing the Numbers put it. And further capturing a time capsule, you could also look up what played for ice box, looking glass, vaudeville, coal man, and odd fellows. Under automobiles, you’d find among others the DeSoto, the Hupmobile, and the Studebaker.

  Dream books weren’t only used for interpreting dreams. Like any worthy guidebook, they were there to look up whatever a person might experience while awake. Wise Men had a page devoted to Things You See and Hear, everything from getting fired from your job to seeing a black cat crossing street to see suicide; another category was called If You Get, and under that heading you could find listed, among other things, a new lover, pregnant, a telegram, and arrested. Mama and others often would look up loved ones’ names to see what numbers they played for.

  “Jewell’s name plays for one-six-one,” Aunt Florence tells me. “And that number was good to me too. I furnished my house on that number.”

  Charlatan preachers also used dream books. One dream book publisher was quoted in Dream-Singers as noting that he “had a run on Aero books back in ’72 or ’73 because there was a minister in Detroit who would have private readings for like twenty-five dollars.” Congregants would go into a chapel, only to find a coffin. Its lid would open and the minister would sit up, look at the person, “read” him or her based on his “visions,” then use the Genuine Aero Dream Book to give that person a number to play. Likewise, the Spiritualist women preachers and mediums would relay messages they received from the Holy Spirit in codes, such as a message recorded verbatim from St. Ruth’s Spiritualist Church in Detroit by s
cholar Gustav Carlson: “When I come in touch with you, all right, a beautiful cloud is over you. The spirit brings cotton to you. Watch yourself very carefully and you will succeed, said the spirit. A bridge is standing before you and you will be successful in crossing this condition.” The parishioner would then go to her favorite dream book and look up cloud, cotton, and bridge and play those numbers.

  Some people believed in a “scientific” system for figuring out a winning number. Often, this fell into three categories: those who kept track of which numbers fell on which days across a given year, in order to ascertain a pattern; those who did workouts, or “rundowns,” which were specific formulas for figuring out a number; and those who combined the two. Some who claimed to have surefire methods for picking winning numbers advertised their services on the front and back inside covers of the dream books. And folks could buy separate “workout” books devoted solely to various methods.

  Aunt Florence explains her own preferred rundown method thus: Take the day’s date, for example 6/03, which is 603, add to that the previous day’s winning number, say 568. Add those figures together, but don’t carry the 1, so that the total of 603 plus 568 would be 161—today’s number to play. Or you could continue the rundown another way, by taking the day’s date, 603, and adding a 2 to each digit (again without carrying the 1), and adding that over and over, until you see a number that “feels right.” It looks like this: