Yet the fact of the city’s high crime rate found its way into my everyday life. Whenever I pulled into our driveway, I followed the required ritual of tooting the car horn so my mother could come to the side door and watch as I got out of the car and entered the house. I never, ever walked Detroit’s streets after dark. And I remained relieved that my mother carried a gun in her purse, and had another in the house, because I believed she needed them. She often said, in response to why she didn’t want me out late or going to a specific area, “It’s just too dangerous out there.” I felt this pervasive sense of danger ever lurking, confirmed by gruesome local news reports as well as the curfew imposed one whole summer requiring “all people under eighteen in before 10 p.m.,” with police patrolling neighborhoods to enforce it. I never felt I could fully relax or feel truly safe in Detroit, and I was ready to say goodbye to all that.
Honestly, I was also ready to be away from ringing phones and the daily tension in anticipation of customers hitting the number. I wanted to feel free from a life tied to a three-digit fate, and graduating from high school was my ticket out. Mind you, until then there was much to look forward to: senior trip to Toronto, graduation photos, and of course prom. I was determined to find the perfect dress.
As soon as I received the proofs of my graduation pictures, I took them over to Daddy’s. As he looked at each pose, I noticed that he had to sit very close to the lamplight, the high blood pressure having worsened his vision. He was now wearing thick prescription sunglasses, both to offset the glare of bright lights and to help him see better. He chose a double-exposed image of me, the one with both a front view and a side profile; I ordered that one in eleven by fourteen, as he requested.
Before my graduation photos came, Daddy was admitted to Ann Arbor’s VA hospital. Having suffered with hypertension his entire adult life, he’d once told me that his doctor seldom bothered to check his pressure levels using a regular cuff, that was how high his baseline numbers were. Besides his doctor’s advice to avoid too much salt, little was done to treat my father’s condition. Now Daddy’s pressure had quickly accelerated, causing dizziness and difficulty breathing, and he’d taken himself to the hospital. On one of my visits, he told me that he’d had two mini-strokes since being admitted. I didn’t see how this could be true—Who gets worse when they’re in the hospital? I thought in my naïveté—and I tried to quiet him. He got upset and yelled, “Listen to me! I’m telling you, I’ve had two strokes!” Looking back, it haunts me that I didn’t do anything with that knowledge, didn’t advocate for him and demand proof that the doctors aggressively treat his condition. Back then doctors only managed to control 10 percent of all patients’ hypertension, and studies now show that African-Americans, who suffered more frequently and severely from the disease, got inferior treatment in hospitals overall. I recall how a nurse said to me, “He’s a very sick man. Why didn’t someone encourage him to lose weight, with such high blood pressure?” More guilt.
If it was up to anyone to do more, it was me. I’d spent every day of the first nine years of my life with Daddy, sharing a close intimacy: sleeping atop his back; his saving the last swig of Pepsi-Cola for me; sticking out his arm and pointing to each scar as he told me the story behind it. After my parents’ divorce, I spent many, many weekends with my father, playing cards and Chinese checkers, watching favorite TV shows, going to the movies, walking hand in hand to the corner store—still a daddy’s girl and in many ways the center of his world. But I was now in deep denial. When Rita asked would I go on my senior trip to Toronto as planned if Daddy was still in the hospital, I said, “He won’t be.” She said, “But what if he doesn’t get better?” I said, “He will.” She let it go.
On another visit to the hospital, Daddy pulled me close to him and said, “Be a good girl.” I nodded my promise. Then he said, “And tell Fannie that I love her.” Again, I nodded.
Two days later, on a cold, wintry evening in March, I called home from my salesgirl job at Northland Mall and asked Rita, “How’s Daddy doing today?”
“About the same,” she said. “When are you coming home?”
“When I get off work,” I snapped. It seemed like such an unnecessary question.
But as I pulled up to the house that evening, too many cars were parked both in the driveway and out front, along Seven Mile Road. As soon as I opened the front door, my aunt Florence greeted me in tears, pulling me into her arms. More arms grabbed at me, my sisters’ all at once. “He didn’t make it,” said Dianne. “John T. didn’t make it.”
That night, I wept in my bed for hours, Jewell handing me Kleenex and, grieving herself, unable to say much of comfort; I cried until I was weak with exhaustion. Suddenly, I remembered the scrapbook I’d created when I was a child, capturing a spring of playing card games and tic-tac-toe with Daddy during my weekend visits. I will begin this book by showing you the numerous amount of games my father and I played in the year 1971, I wrote. We began playing dots… I taped pages into the scrapbook, showing a plethora of tic-tac-toe and Chinese Dots and S.O.S. games played. (Daddy loves S.O.S. So do I!) Atop one page I wrote, Then we fell for Gin Rummy 500. We love 500 so much we decided to keep a record of all the games we play. I filled the scrapbook with our game scores, one column headed with my name, the other with John. I won a lot, and when we didn’t finish a game, I noted why below the score: We quit, so nobody won. Candid Camera is on, and we want to watch it. And: We had to stop because Flip Wilson is on. And: We stopped to watch The Greatest Show on Earth. On another scrapbook page, this one capturing a score that included a third player, a family friend named Gregory, I wrote: We didn’t finish because I had a stomach ache. On still another I recorded the time: At 4:05 in the morning. I noted too that we played on Mother’s Day 1971, yet I didn’t mention that it was also my mother’s birthday that year.
On that night when Daddy died, I quickly rose from my bed and scoured through my closet until I found the green-covered scrapbook on a shelf, held it to my chest, and rushed into the living room, where my mother sat with a circle of visiting relatives and friends. Crying, I thrust it at her. “What do I do with this now?”
She was startled as she paged through the scrapbook, unaware until that moment that I’d captured my childhood visits with Daddy this way. “Save it,” she told me. “It’s really good you have it.”
“I just hope he knew how much I loved him,” I blurted out, suddenly stricken with recent memories of every time I chose to talk on the phone with my boyfriend instead of spending time with Daddy, every time I promised to come over and then let my social life get in the way, every time I gave Daddy a late Christmas or birthday gift out of carelessness.
Mama looked up at me, and as I write this I can still feel her dark eyes on me, her voice steady. “He knew, Bridget. He knew. How could he not?”
My aunt and uncle joined in to reassure me, as did Mama’s best friend, Lula. He loved the ground you walked on. You were his baby…Crazy about you…No doubt in hell that he knew you loved him. Don’t you never say nothing like that again…Honey, wasn’t nobody closer to her daddy than you. You were his life.
Their words just made me feel worse. I was devastated, my grief thick and impenetrable. I felt I’d failed my father somehow. And when I found the letter I’d written to him when I was eight, tucked inside his wallet and worn with age, I cried uncontrollably.
In the days that followed, my sister Deborah and I hovered over Mama’s blue desk and together, his oldest and his youngest, wrote a tribute poem, “In Remembrance of our Daddy”:
You were our father, so gentle, loving & strong
Your grasp on life made you tolerant of its wrongs
The simpler things of life never made you sad
Despite the occasional lonely hours you might have had
There never was a crisis you couldn’t joke your way through
So you kept on smiling, no matter what beset you
Though now we wish sometimes you had, our time y
ou never demanded
You knew we had our own lives, and for that you were understanding
The everlasting impression you inscribed on our hearts
Is so intense, that for us, memories of you will never depart
The funeral procession left from our house on Seven Mile, and I remember my stepfather, Burt, standing on the porch, watching as we all entered the limo. “I turned to him. “Are you coming?” I asked. “No, Chicken,” he said. “You don’t need me there. I’ll be here when you get back.”
At the funeral, Mama holds me in her arms, and I bury my head in her soft bosom throughout the entire service, wanting to crawl into her lap. I am seventeen and six inches taller than her, yet my mother holds me tight like a baby, pressing her arm tighter around me every time I sigh.
But when we view Daddy’s body lying in his white casket, dressed in a white suit, Mama stands off to the side, tears falling. Stunned to see her cry, I go up to her, and she says, “Nobody even thinks about how I feel.”
When my graduation photo chosen by Daddy arrived, I couldn’t bear to look at it. I gave it to my brother, Anthony.
Several days later, in my journal I wrote, I dreamed about Daddy last night…he looked at me with those eyes. I think about his eyes all the time. That searching, rambling, wandering look they had when he was in the hospital. It was as if he was really trying hard to show us he was okay, really trying hard to make it—to live for us.
With signs of spring after a long, hard winter, Mama decided to treat Rita and me to a weekend in New York. It was our first trip to the Big Apple, and I fell in love with the city immediately. I’d learned about New York from watching Robert Redford and Jane Fonda’s Barefoot in the Park as a young teen, and had decided I’d eventually live in one of those crazy walk-up apartments with bizarre neighbors, very near Washington Square Park. Now, in New York for three days before I left for college, Rita and I got to see our first Broadway musical, The Wiz, went dancing at a disco, walked for hours through the Village, and shopped along Fifth Avenue. On one of our shopping sprees, we passed by a stunning dress undulating in a store window: slate and light gray with small pink roses, the dress had a belted waist, a blouson bodice, and a split up one side. Its fabric design was exquisite, shimmering in the light with raw and refined silk stripes, gold threads woven throughout. The dress cost $350, more than I’d ever spent on one item of clothing. When I tried it on, it fit perfectly, and I called home to ask Mama’s permission to purchase it. “That’s your spending money,” she said. “Spend it how you see fit.” I bought the dress. For the longest time, the running joke with my friend Stephanie was that I was the only girl she knew who managed to pick a prom dress you could actually wear beyond prom night. I did wear that dress again and again for years.
Only much later did I learn that Mama had divided up Daddy’s modest life insurance proceeds by first giving some to his two older sisters and then sharing the rest with us, his two youngest girls. It made me deeply fond of that silk dress in a new way, knowing where the money came from. And it offered some odd comfort when I actually did move to New York, knowing that Daddy had, in the way he could, helped me experience for the first time this city that I loved.
High school graduation picture, 1978
Nine
Spelman College graduation, 1982
After the initial shock of those early weeks, I found myself reacting to my father’s death with anger at the world, furious that one of the most loving relationships in my life had been taken from me; and I was in terror that that hole would never be filled. I withdrew, wanting to escape from everything and everybody that reminded me of who I’d lost. That included my mother. I distinctly remember one of those endless June days before high school ended: I had come home from somewhere, and didn’t say hi to Mama as I passed by her bedroom en route to my own. She stopped me and said, “Oh, you call yourself not speaking to me? Let’s see who can go the longest not speaking; let’s see who needs who first,” and she refused to speak to me. Of course, the next day I needed lunch money from her. I apologized, and having made her point, my mother handed me a twenty-dollar bill, no hard feelings.
Yet, hard for me to admit now, when I left home in early July 1978, accepted into a special prefreshman summer program at Spelman, I did so in stony silence, rejecting Mama’s offer to accompany me to college, filled with what my family called “her attitude” and what I later harshly described in my journal as my “evil, selfish and secretive” ways. Mama said nothing to me about my demeanor. She must’ve known that I was suffering from a paralyzing grief. Now I can see that I was depressed, but at the time I simply had a pressing new reason to escape Detroit—to leave behind the place where I’d lost my father. I decided, rashly, that I also wanted to leave behind my name. Having again changed the spelling, I changed the pronunciation, no longer wanting to be called Bridgett, (BRIDGE-it); I wanted to be called Bridgétt, with the accent on the second syllable (Bridge—JET), the way Aunt Gladys, Lisa’s mother, pronounced my name. (As a preteen, I’d already changed the spelling from its original B-R-I-D-G-I-T to B-R-I-D-G-E-T). Mama didn’t object and actually helped me legally change the spelling. But she never called me by my new name.
My departure that summer coincided with the first anniversary of the state’s Daily. Lottery officials celebrated the milestone, crowing that by the end of the year, the thousandth Daily sales outlet would be licensed. (“Play today—Cash tonight!” was the bureau’s newest promotional slogan.) When I returned home after four weeks on a magnolia-filled college campus, I was blithely indifferent to Mama’s Numbers operation. To my eyes, nothing had changed: she still took in folks’ numbers, checked the business, collected her money, and paid out hits. I did work long hours at Winkelman’s that final summer month, using my pay to buy a wardrobe for life at Spelman, where fashion mattered. Interestingly, I didn’t ask Mama to buy those clothes for me, as she’d always done.
When it was time to return to college, Mama drove me to the airport. Before I boarded the plane, she handed me a fat envelope with L-22, a customer’s code name, scrawled across the front. The envelope was stuffed with bills, easily a month’s take from one of her biggest books.
“Try to make this stretch,” she said. “I’ll send more when I can.”
I’d never heard my mother speak quite that way. Try to make this stretch. I’ll send more when I can. That was when it dawned on me: while I’d been home, our telephones hadn’t rung as much as usual. When I got to campus, I went straight to the financial aid office and requested a work-study job. I was given one in the student newspaper office.
Years later, Rita told me what was actually going on when I left home that late-August day in 1978: “Mama’s business was really down, I mean really down,” she said. “But she didn’t want you to know that.”
As it happened, Mama traveled to Las Vegas for a nine-day vacation the day after I left for school. She was joined by Burt, Rita, Jewell, Aunt Florence, Uncle Gene and her friend from childhood, Mariah. I was invited too but turned down the offer, to be at school for Freshman Week. I later regretted my decision, because that trip became a touchstone they all spoke about with fond and animated memories. “They were like kids,” recalls Jewell about our parents in Vegas. “I never saw them! They were gone all the time. They’d come knocking on the door at three in the morning asking, ‘Did you eat?’ ‘Yeah, we ate.’”
My mother loved Las Vegas, visiting it several times throughout her life. Ironically, gambling was a small part of its lure for her. Mostly she enjoyed the live shows, and over the years got to see Cher, Diana Ross, Sammy Davis Jr., and many others perform. “You have not seen an entertainer perform until you’ve seen one put on a show in Vegas,” she’d proclaim. When she did gamble at the casinos, my mother chose a set amount of money to wager on blackjack, roulette, or the slot machines, and when that cash was gone she left the floor. Conversely, when she won, she got up from the table, turned in her chips, returned to her room, an
d napped. Her motto was: “The only way to win in Vegas is to know when to quit.”
The Vegas trip, planned and paid for months in advance, came along just as the Daily lottery was roaring its way to $4 million per week in sales. Meanwhile, Mama had paid for everyone’s hotel and airfare. “We were not out of a penny” is how my uncle Gene described it more than thirty-two years later. “She paid for everything.” That included everyone’s tickets to see Liberace perform at Caesars Palace. Could Mama afford that trip? Even if the legal lottery was hurting her business, she would not have wanted it known that she was struggling and unable to keep sharing the good life with others. Of course they took the trip.
That first semester, I found a college filled with girls from upper-middle-class black families, girls who’d grown up in leafy suburbs, many who’d gone to predominantly white schools, some who’d chosen Spelman for a new “black experience.” I felt like the only girl on campus from a working-class, urban background and a public high school, whose parents hadn’t gone to college, let alone pledged sororities and fraternities. I was no legacy. (“How could any of you have parents who didn’t go to college?” asked my English professor, Millicent Jordan, herself from an illustrious upscale African-American family. She was genuinely incredulous, but I was left feeling humiliated.) And when my new friend from Los Angeles, Heather, asked to borrow my navy silk Calvin Klein pleated skirt and matching blouse, I didn’t dare tell her I’d bought the outfit from a booster back in Detroit. Yet, throughout those first weeks of college, whenever I heard the disco queen Gloria Gaynor belting out that 1978 anthem, “I Will Survive,” I couldn’t help but think of Mama. She wasn’t “educated,” but she knew how to stay alive. Still, I definitely made sure to keep Mama’s profession a secret from my college classmates. I did not want my two worlds colliding.
The World According to Fannie Davis Page 19
