These stresses came as I was also feeling the hormonal effects of puberty. My diary reflects this complicated dynamic: Momma and I went through it again, says one entry, about my being late for school yet another time: She kept saying, “What more can I do?” Anyway, I know I better not be late again, cause she won’t stand for it. And in another entry: One minute I love my mother and everything about her, the next thing I know, her ways urk me! And from December 1973: Momma and I got into it again. She called me a liar and after a few words she says, “Well, I just made a mistake. Do you want me to say I’m sorry and take it back?” I said, “No, if you think I’m a liar I don’t want you to apologize.” I wasn’t mad at her by then.…On New Year’s Eve of that year, I wrote: What’s going on around here? Is it me? Is it her? It’s her. She’s so tough and mean right now.
I was certainly more judgmental of her: I’m so mad at my mother for not letting me see The Exorcist! I lamented. Everybody else gets to go, but not me. I think she’s just acting that way to impress Carol Ann’s mother. They both try to act like model little mothers. Bull Crap! I’m gonna ask her again!
This was also when I developed an obsession with Richard Pryor, shortly after my cousin Curtis took me to see the concert film Wattstax, which included Pryor’s stand-up performance. I carried a picture of him in my wallet and regularly rifled through my sister Deborah’s record collection, sneaking and listening to Pryor’s stand-up albums, filled as they were with “blue humor,” half wanting to get caught. I never did.
Despite my quasi-rebellion, it would take yet more to shake off my mother’s generosity. And some good spells did appear just in time to mitigate the rough patches. I think ’74 will be better financially for this family, I wrote with confidence. Things did pick up enough for me to get my own telephone line (with an easy-to-remember number: 861-8666). Also, that spring my mother treated me and my cousin Lisa to a Washington, DC, trip to visit relatives; I recall this sophisticated teenager, Joanie, who sat with boredom watching The Sound of Music in a movie theater alongside us and her mother; later she took me and Lisa with her to hang out on the lawn of the Washington Monument. There she danced to the Isley Brothers’ “Summer Breeze” with other cool-looking teens, the sun setting behind them, this giant obelisk reaching into the sky; she was dazzling, a pot-smoking black hippie in a flowy midi dress and velvet choker, and as I watched Joanie, with her perfectly round Afro, I thought she was the freest spirit I’d ever seen, not unlike a modern-day Josephine Baker. Was this when I started formulating a way to live a life far from the Numbers and from Detroit? Inspired by that visit, I returned home and began writing my first fictional story, in cursive, on one of Mama’s lined legal pads used for the Numbers. I don’t recall the story’s plot, or its title, but I still remember its first line: The scent of cherry blossoms permeated the air as Percy Jordan walked along the streets of Washington, DC. I read Mama the entire fifteen-page story, which I referred to as “my book”; she nodded her approval.
As I was fantasizing about leaving home, Detroit was getting its first black mayor amid enormous excitement and expectation. Diana Ross flew in from California to perform at Coleman Young’s inauguration, and Young was promising a new era for the city, what was being called economic revitalization. Black folks, meanwhile, were genuinely excited about the idea of black political control in a majority-black metropolis; and the word renaissance got thrown around a lot, given that the massive Renaissance Center, conceived by Henry Ford II, was already under construction downtown.
And in other good news for the city, as the mammoth RenCen was rising, busily employing thousands of workers, a federal appeals court had just ruled that in order to achieve racial balance and desegregate public schools, some black students in Detroit must be bused to the suburbs, and many more white suburban students bused to Detroit. The judge noted that the district boundaries, drawn along racial lines, were unconstitutional. His ruling meant that integration, rather than racial isolation, was on the horizon. We needed it. In the few short years since I’d won the Heritage Day award, white flight had been so complete across Detroit that such a day of diversity would be impossible to pull off. But now, white residents, many of whom had fled the city after the 1967 uprising, would find it far harder to abandon Detroit financially, psychologically, and literally, since their children would be enrolled in its public schools. To avoid that fate, whites would have to move deeper into suburban or rural townships, much farther from Detroit proper, and its industry.
Sadly, within months of Young’s taking office, the Supreme Court agreed to take on the case, Milliken v. Bradley, and in a landmark decision described by a public policy scholar as “one of its most villainous,” determine the fate of urban schools across the nation. The highest court in the land overturned the earlier ruling and upheld the city’s segregated school districts. Of course, white businesses and residents and investors found incentive in the ruling to keep their resources focused on the surrounding suburbs. This while urban Detroit was already facing economic decay, with its auto industry feeling the brunt of the OPEC oil embargo. Hence, Mayor Young’s efforts toward renewal and equality for the city’s black residents were both thwarted. Young himself later admitted: “I knew…that my fortune was the direct result of my city’s misfortune.…I was taking over the administration of Detroit because the white people didn’t want the damn thing anymore. They were getting out, more than happy to turn over their troubles to some black sucker like me.”
Those disappearing jobs were not coming back. Folks needed to hit the number. And it didn’t help that during his inauguration speech, Young made the famous comment that would haunt him throughout his mayoralty: “I issue a warning to all dope pushers, rip-off artists and muggers. It’s time to leave Detroit—hit the road. Hit Eight Mile Road. I don’t give a damn if they are black or white, or if they wear Superfly suits or blue uniforms with silver badges. Hit the road.” Because Eight Mile Road divided the city proper from the suburbs, many white folks believed he was telling them to get out of black Detroit.
Amid the upheaval, rumors spread that the state might launch a daily lottery game, and lottery commission officials in Lansing didn’t deny it: “The Bureau continues to analyze the possibility of a daily lottery operation which might, as was hoped by some when we began operations, provide direct competition for illegal gambling,” stated the Bureau of State Lottery’s first-year report. Yet, at the same time, there seemed no urgency to change what worked: “The Lottery’s primary objective,” noted the report, “is revenue.” And there was plenty of revenue. By the end of its first year, the state lottery had sold over 271 million weekly tickets across the state, including in rural counties. The Michigan lottery lauded itself as the most successful of all state lotteries, one that operated with “integrity and dignity.” But despite the legal lottery’s obvious success, many black residents held to their beliefs that Mayor Young would protect the city’s Numbers racket. Young was born and bred in Detroit, raised in its culturally rich Black Bottom, a former vocal union boss, and a fierce defender of the city’s African-American traditions and culture. He’d most likely once played the Numbers himself.
But even a sympathetic mayor was no match for the drumbeat of unprecedented coverage and support by the press, and by the lottery commission, that worked to portray the lottery as the positive alternative to the Numbers. Gone were the exposés on how Numbers gambling was a fraudulent evil, indulged in by poor, ignorant black people. Now the Detroit Free Press and other newspapers lauded the state’s lottery betting. Stories of winners were pushed by the lottery bureau itself, to prove the lottery was fair, and of course to encourage ticket sales. Profiles featured the first million-dollar winner, Hermus Millsaps, a white man who worked for Chrysler, described as “an excellent winner.” The second million-dollar winner was a forty-seven-year-old Greek immigrant named Christeen Ferizis, who didn’t speak English and had come to America with her husband eight years before to “get rich.”
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Despite its looming presence throughout those early years, Mama didn’t reveal any major concern about the legal lottery. Our lifestyle remained intact. She was, in fact, now officially raising her toddler grandson. His father, my brother, Anthony, was struggling with his heroin addiction—in and out of a private drug treatment program that my mother found for him. Tony’s mother, Renita, decided the best place for her son was with his grandmother. “I just wanted better for Tony,” she explains. “And I knew he would get it from her. She exposed him to things that he would never have been exposed to had he been with me.” She adds: “He’s everything I wanted him to be, and it’s all because of her, really.” Tony certainly had the best back then: educational and imaginative toys from F.A.O. Schwarz—a stuffed horse and buggy with actual reins, which Tony furiously pedaled up and down our driveway, comes to mind; stimulating activities and fun trips; and attendance at a quality preschool called Buttons and Bows.
Mama also continued to travel with my stepfather, Burt. When they vacationed in Aruba, she sent me a postcard that read, Hi, wish I could stay longer. I like it very much. The weather is so nice, 86 degrees and it stays like this. I am going on a tour Monday. Aruba is an island in the Caribbean controlled by the Dutch. Love, “Mama.” She spent some of that vacation working on her book and, of course, shopping. Mama returned with a pretty fourteen-carat tricolor gold braided necklace and matching bracelet, which she gave to me. (I was astonished that gold could be yellow and white and rose.) Also during that time, she and Uncle John bought a horse together, paying $1,500 for the Thoroughbred; soon enough, Mama won $10,000 “right quick and everything,” as Uncle John put it. He and Fannie enjoyed watching their horse compete at Hazel Park Raceway before eventually selling it. I remember a photo of brother and sister in the winner’s circle, standing before their horse, Uncle John also its triumphant trainer.
Mama also wasn’t done beautifying our home. I recently found among her belongings a telegram sent from a saleswoman at Wiggs Furniture store in Bloomfield Hills, who resorted to writing because the main telephone line was always busy, an occupational hazard in our household in the days before call waiting. She wrote:
Dear Mrs. Drumwright:
I do believe you are the busiest gal in town, as I simply cannot get through on your phone.…Please call me at your convenience, and I will be happy to help you. Your furniture is to be shipped in 3 weeks.
Polly Garland
My mother had decided to redecorate and transform our living room into a blue oasis. She removed the gold carpet and the furnishings that had followed us from Broadstreet and replaced it all with powder-blue walls, sky-blue custom drapes offset by pale blue sheers, and royal-blue carpet flecked with shades of midnight and cobalt. She chose a sinewy cerulean crushed velvet sectional sofa with circular button pillows; a cream coffee table with a cushioned top in the same color as the sofa; a light blue French Provincial desk and matching chair; cornflower-blue-and-white-striped Louis XV chairs; and a baby-blue Tiffany-style floor lamp.
“Ah, the blue living room,” sighs my cousin Lisa. “Everything in the whole room was blue, which kind of sounds tacky when I think about it, but when I picture it, it was very elegant and regal and timeless.” Lisa ponders how my mother might’ve pulled it off: “Where she developed this sense of style I don’t know. A lot of black folks who had first-generation money during that time, they chose things that were gaudy, overdone. But her style was sophisticated and understated.”
I loved our sprawling blue room, found it both calming and bold, a perfect extension of Mama. That signature living room was not unlike our home’s unique exterior, with its giant picture window and its gray brick against black-and-white double front doors, giant circular brass knobs in their centers (reminding me of the mansion doors in The Beverly Hillbillies). The house stood out from the rest of the modest redbrick houses on the block, and to me it gave us yet another layer of distinction.
The best indicator that her business remained secure was Mama’s continued giving. And during those years, my cousin Lisa says, she was a prime beneficiary. Her example involves one of the key ways my mother showed her generosity, via gifts of clothing.
“I was twelve or thirteen, and I’d hit puberty,” recalls Lisa. “I’d had a bad case of chicken pox, and had a lot of scars, and a lot of acne; and my hair wasn’t right and boys didn’t like me. I felt ugly and insecure. It was not a cute time.” She pauses. “And your mom took me shopping. She bought me my first real outfit that I loved.” Lisa remembers that it came from Bonwit Teller or Saks. “And it was a white cotton summer pantsuit with all this fancy embroidery on the lapel and the yoke of the jacket, and on the back of the pants; and she got me a pair of those sandals that strapped all the way up your legs. It was my first semi-grown-up girl outfit.”
Lisa goes on: “During that same shopping trip there were some cottony jeans that I liked and I picked them in let’s say, navy blue, but she ended up getting me the blue, the red, the yellow, like four colors of the same pants, and I was like, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to be so sharp!’ There was no regard for price or anything; she just let me pick out what I wanted. And she didn’t make me feel like, ‘You better take care of this, now don’t get it dirty, you know how much this cost, dah, dah, dah,’ which was the situation at home.”
Looking back, Lisa realizes it was no coincidence that Aunt Fa, as she and her siblings called my mother, took her shopping for a new outfit just when her parents’ marriage was collapsing and she, a pubescent girl, was in desperate need of attention and affection.
“She always had a way in her, not direct, but some indirect approach to soothe me,” recalls Lisa. “And make me feel like, ‘I am special, and I’m going to be special.’”
It was a special time in many ways for my family, with me and Tony living at home with Mama and Burt; I have memories of trips up north, the four of us going to apple-pick, do overnight stays in my cousins’ camper trailer. And the rich pop and soul tunes of the era provided a perfect soundtrack. Even though everyone was losing their mind over the Jackson 5’s “Dancing Machine” after Michael did the robot on Soul Train, I preferred the slower songs that, as a brooding teenager, resonated with me: Elton John’s mournful “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me,” the sensuous crooning of Minnie Ripperton’s “Loving You,” with its risqué line, “Making love to you is all I wanna do,” and especially Stevie Wonder’s lyrically complex singles. Stevie’s mother lived on the same block of Greenlawn as Lisa’s family, and she and Lisa’s mother were friends; she gave Aunt Gladys an early release of Stevie’s masterful album Fufillingness’ First Finale, and I spent many days at their home listening to the funky “Boogie On Reggae Woman” and the more political “You Haven’t Done Nothin’” blasting from the living room stereo. But my favorites were Stevie’s somber songs: “Heaven Is Ten Zillion Light Years Away” and “They Won’t Go When I Go.”
Josephine Baker died in spring of 1975, the morning after an extraordinary comeback performance in Paris, just as I was completing ninth grade. I saw her sudden death as a sign, a cautionary tale of time running out, of needing to define what I wanted to do with my life. When I entered Cass Technical High School that fall, I was no longer helping to take customers’ bets, or calling them to share the winning numbers each evening, or looking for hits. I was too busy, either at school, where I was on the newspaper staff, or at my part-time job at Winkelman’s department store at the mall, or hanging out with friends, often at parties. I was decidedly not interested in the family business, and it was easy to distance myself from the Numbers. The world was too big for that life. I had other plans, as I half-jokingly wrote in my diary: I could make modeling a career if I wanted to. But I’m going to be a phyciatrist (sic). I never told you this, dear Diary, ’cause I can’t spell it!
I always had some activity or event or rehearsal after school—pep rally, bowling team, Technician staff meeting, fashion show rehearsal—which my sisters viewed as a ploy, a
way to be too busy either to help out with the business, as they all did, or to do household chores. They weren’t wrong. I liked socializing and having new experiences away from home, “out ripping and running,” as Mama called it. But she let me be. She never said “It’s your job to help with the business.” She didn’t really need my help, with other family members and hired help around, but the point was that she decidedly let me steer clear of the Numbers, while supporting my love of school. “She acts like the doors of Cass Tech can’t open if she’s not there,” she’d say about my spending so much time at school. I could tell in the way my mother said it that she approved, was proud of me.
I also preferred to largely ignore our family business because I was becoming more aware of its negative connotations. I hadn’t read those derogatory articles in the newspaper, but I was listening to what others were saying. My friend Stephanie once told me: “Our neighbors are into the Numbers, and I can’t stand them. They’re into illegal stuff, yet they think they’re better than everybody.” She had no idea, and of course I kept quiet. And one of the most popular songs of the era was Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes’ “Bad Luck.” A verse from that song went, Played a number ’cause that number’s hot. But the bookies get you for every cent you’ve got. Bad luck! That’s what you got, that’s what you got. I hated the implication that my mother was in any way ripping off people.
While I wasn’t interested in the Numbers per se, I was interested in the ancillary world created by the Numbers. The best example of this was that in eleventh grade, I chose to write a major research paper on dreams. I was obviously interested in dreams because of the central role they played in our household, but I knew I couldn’t reference our ubiquitous dream books. I turned to my sister Deborah, known for her brilliance. She thought my topic was great and gave me her copy of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, but the late-nineteenth-century language was a bit over my head.
The World According to Fannie Davis Page 17
