The World According to Fannie Davis

by Bridgett M. Davis

  When I returned home the following year, I shocked everyone by deciding to live on Broadstreet with my sister Dianne and her husband, George, who’d moved into the house several years before. I assumed I could because it was the family home and there was plenty of space, so I didn’t have to ask permission. Broadstreet was my right. (I later learned that Dianne was initially unhappy about this.) I stayed in my childhood bedroom, which was both comforting and odd. “This is the same bed John T. used when he lived here,” said Dianne, knowing it would comfort me to sleep where our father had once slept. Sadly, in that time I saw firsthand the dysfunction of my sister’s marriage, her husband’s excessive drinking, irregular work, staying out late. But I also got to see my brother a lot. He and his wife, Renita, had broken up years before, and Anthony, who was living nearby, came over nearly every day. I also got to share my favorite books with Dianne, giving her my copies of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place to read. Driving around in my stepfather’s giant white-with-red-interior Lincoln Continental, I hung out with my junior high and high school girlfriends and enjoyed being back stateside, reveling in this brief respite before I had to figure out what to do with my life. On a whim, I took a graduate creative writing class at Wayne State University, submitting a revised version of a short story I’d written in college to the campus literary magazine, Wayne Review. That story won an award for best story by an Afro-American writer. (“I sure wish there were special awards for the best white person’s short story,” a white male student said to me.) The story, entitled “…And Deliver Us from Brown,” was loosely based on my mother and stepfather’s relationship, and I credit that award with launching my professional writing life. Too at Wayne State, I reencountered a classmate from elementary school, William James. Also a writer, he was visiting us one day, sitting at our kitchen table, when my mother asked him, “What’s the name for a book that’s based on the truth but is still fiction?” He told her the term was roman à clef, and Mama carefully wrote the phrase on a piece of paper and stuck it to our refrigerator with a magnet.

  That was also when I played a special three-digit on a hunch, and hit. My sister Dianne and I had been hanging out all day, running errands, and three different times I saw 788, Mama’s pet number. I saw it on a car’s license plate, as the number on a dry cleaning ticket, and as the cash register total after a store purchase. “I’m gonna play a number today,” I announced to everyone. While Dianne knew what the number was, I didn’t tell anyone else. My sisters and my brother and my mother all said, “I’m in,” and each gave me money to play the mystery number at a party store for them too. “You never play the Numbers, so if you have a hunch, it must mean something,” said Mama. She was right. The number came out that day, straight, and we each had it for “good money,” among us winning several hundred dollars.

  During that time my mother began hosting fabulous poker parties. Those marathon card games would start on a Friday night and not end until Saturday afternoon. “You had a smorgasbord of people at the table,” recalls Tony. “Plant workers, numbers people, teachers, a lawyer… Everybody felt comfortable coming to Grandma’s to play, because it was always the same group of people, no outsiders.”

  Those card parties were also an extra source of money for my mother and Uncle Gene, who as hosts shared the “cut,” or a percentage of every pot. They’d have three tables going at one time, two in the living room and one, higher-stakes poker game in the den. Folks would play the lower-stakes games to win enough money to compete at the big table. It was a thing, punctuated by yummy food, free-flowing liquor, lots of jokes, laughter, Mama as hostess.

  I would come to treasure that moment as part of a magical eight months when I was twenty-three, living in my hometown, surrounded by family and old friends. Using the proceeds from my hit, I soon left home to do a newspaper internship in Gainesville, Georgia, and later take a newsroom job in Atlanta. It felt good to be making my own money, to be living self-sufficiently. Beyond a few weeks one summer, I never did return to Detroit to live.

  Turns out, the four-digit was taking hold and gaining massive popularity, to my mother’s surprise. The lure of such high-paying wins was too strong. Also, players actually believed they were supporting education, as the state began earmarking lottery revenues for its School Aid Fund. (What ticket buyers didn’t understand was that the twenty-nine cents of every dollar of lottery proceeds set aside for Michigan’s school fund translated to less than five hundred dollars per student.) Although Mama wasn’t saying so, Rita was the one who told me that the four-digit was cutting into the business in a big way. I thought this latest usurping by the state was so unfair, yet another attack on my mother’s hard-earned livelihood, and it made me wish for the first time that she had other options. Complicating matters, Mama said it was too much effort, and unwise, to change her business so drastically. Everything she knew about the Numbers was based on a three-digit system—from the payouts to the percentages to the dream books. Besides, the idea of having to pay out a whopping 5,000 to 1 was daunting to my mother. It required a far, far bigger reserve than the three-digit payouts, and she knew it could lead to a far quicker wipeout.

  “She’s really being stubborn about it,” said Rita. “It’s not like her, to not do what she needs to do to make it.”

  I had another point of view: I believed that after nearly thirty years, Mama was simply tiring of the hustle and grind. I’d noticed how the hair around her temples had thinned, how her smooth complexion had faint age lines, how the gray hairs on her head had multiplied. “When does it end?” I lamented to my sister. “Will Mama ever be able to build up a nest egg so she can stop? Everyone deserves to retire.”

  “That’s true,” said Rita. “That’s true.”

  Of course my mother saw the passing of time, faced head-on the price paid for decades of work in a precarious and stressful business, one where the competition kept mounting. Now, as a young adult, I was beginning to grasp the greater extent of her sacrifice. I had to admit this to myself, despite what the Numbers had made possible. And that she’d had other dreams. In fact, over the years she’d enrolled in a couple of college courses, with a desire to someday open a home for the aged. But she could never devote the time needed, because running the Numbers is an all-consuming job.

  Many times, Mama said to us, “I’m doing this so you don’t have to.” I took that to heart. She also would often say, “Don’t thank me. Just take advantage of the opportunities I made possible, and that’ll be all the thanks I need.” I was thinking about that when I applied to Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Mama was happy for me when I got accepted, and oh so proud. I was pleased too; I felt my admission to Columbia was the best way to show her my gratitude. I really believed, still do, that she found comfort in my success.

  In the summer of 1984, months before I applied to grad school, Michigan’s lottery officials introduced yet another new and alluring game: Lotto, with its cumulative, multimillion-dollar jackpots. I’m sure Mama would’ve found a way to come up with the money to pay for Columbia. But I didn’t dare ask. I’d seen the news, and Lotto was a whopping success, setting a national record in first-week sales of over $3 million. I’d also seen the plethora of four-digit dream books now sold in local stores. I didn’t even discuss the cost with my mother. I happily took out a $10,000 loan to pay for the tuition not covered by scholarships.

  By then, my own work had taken me into a world of college-educated professionals, upscale lifestyles, whiteness. And when I returned home for visits, I reentered the world of the Numbers. My two worlds never collided, until the day I announced in class that my favorite book was Louise Meriwether’s Daddy Was a Number Runner, the novel that had validated my own lived experience. A classmate, Suzanne Kay, who happened to be the daughter of the iconic black actress Diahann Carroll (whose Barbie-doll likeness I’d owned, and whose hairstyle inspired my mother’s weddi
ng-day chic), looked at me quizzically and asked, “What’s a number runner?”

  I was silent. I could not, would not explain the meaning of that vocation to this rich black girl in front of our white classmates, inside the hallowed walls of an Ivy League institution. Yes, I’d spent my life keeping the secret both out of necessity and because I didn’t want Mama to be judged. But this was the first time I ever felt embarrassed by what my mother did for a living.

  After grad school graduation, I was working as an intern at the Detroit bureau of the Wall Street Journal when the house on Broadstreet was set on fire by an arsonist and badly damaged. Mama had only truly owned the house for four years. Mr. Prince, who’d sold her the house, had waited until she’d paid for it in full to sign over the deed, “given pursuant to and in fulfillment of a certain land contract between the parties” in 1982. After twenty-one long years, Broadstreet had finally truly become ours.

  Her name was on the deed, yet Mama had put my brother-in-law, George, in charge of paying the homeowner’s insurance, since he and my sister lived in the house as their own. Unbeknownst to anyone, he’d deliberately let the coverage lapse. Mama pondered what to do with Broadstreet, now uninhabitable without a costly renovation, and with no insurance money to pay for the work. She did briefly toy with the idea of slowly renovating the house, and I remember going with her once to an antiques shop that sold original, refurbished materials and watching her look at costly stained-glass windows and French doors. But we left the store without her purchasing anything. A complete restoration was just too daunting a prospect; and it was obvious her heart wasn’t in it.

  Besides, she was again fighting to save her business. Mama finally acquiesced after years of vacillating and began taking the four-digit lottery alongside the three-digit. She had to, to stay competitive. So many other number runners were accepting four-digit bets that Fannie’s customers were leaving her, even loyal ones who figured it was easier to play all their numbers, both the three- and the four-digits, with one bookie. A cottage industry for the four-digit had already sprung up and thrived—not just dream books, but tip sheets and new rundowns and even psychics who now miraculously envisioned numbers with four figures.

  I recently found among my mother’s possessions a numerological rundown from that time, provided by Dennis Fairchild, a radio host of a program called Thank Your Lucky Stars; Fairchild had, in his own handwriting, figured out the personal-year numbers for my mother; Burt; me; Rita; my nephew, Tony; my aunt Florence; and my mother’s older sister Alice, all for 1987. Mama’s personal-year number was 4, which meant: Like the four corners of the earth, this is a year of developing new monetary foundations. Be practical and logical and don’t financially over-extend yourself. Fairchild added: Most people leave a 4-year with more money in the bank than they enter it with.

  For me, it was odd, once again, to hear the shifting cadences of Mama’s voice as she wrote down a customer’s bet: Three-eight-nine-two for fifty cents, uh-huh, 8-1-4-5 for a dollar, okay, and 2-9-9-6 boxed for a dollar. This came as I was in the throes of pursuing my own career, moving to Philadelphia to become a newspaper reporter for its award-winning daily the Philadelphia Inquirer, affectionately called the Inky. (Mama drilled me on a list of most commonly misspelled words as we rode to the airport for my interview, helping me prepare for the newsroom test I’d be given.)

  During this time, Mama also threw her energies into steering her grandson as best she could through the ever-increasing dangers for a black teenage boy in mid-1980s Detroit. The city was in the throes of the nation’s crack epidemic, so a young man or woman now had to avoid drugs and getting caught in the crosshairs of drug-related shootings, as well as the relentless police brutality for which Detroit was notorious. As Robert De Fauw, the local DEA’s former head, put it: “With cocaine in the mix, things got pretty chaotic. Life was cheap.” And drug lords, the most famous among them a fifteen-year-old called White Boy Rick, made hundreds of millions of dollars.

  It shatters me to fathom how drug dealers changed Detroit, hurt so many people, some I’d known all my life. This is why I’ve always loathed comparisons made between illegal lotteries and the drug trade. As if all “illicit” enterprises are equal. People often say that the head of a drug cartel could, with better opportunities, have been the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, and the same is often said about major number runners. I certainly believe that to be true of my own mother. But that’s where the comparison ends. Selling chances to win a lottery obviously has no similarity to the whole-cloth destruction of lives, families, and communities that selling hard drugs leaves in its wake.

  Some have said that number runners preyed on people’s gambling addictions; I reject this claim. As someone who grew up going to the racetrack often, thanks to my horse-trainer uncle, I’ve seen up close the adrenaline rush folks get from gambling; so yes, I’m clear what that particular addiction looks like, clear that folks who need it will find a way to gamble on something. But I’m equally aware of how certain forms of gambling are indulged without denigration and allowed to thrive within certain sectors of society (horse betting, for instance, gets a free pass, as do Catholics’ bingo nights at church). This makes me wary of the charge that Numbers had a negative impact on the black community. If there were disadvantages, if some folks gambled too much, and if others spent coins and dollars on the Numbers that could’ve gone to more so-called honorable means, then in my mind that is completely offset by the invaluable ways Numbers money was used. I’ve also seen firsthand how outsiders, i.e., whites and Arabs, maintained businesses in Detroit’s black neighborhoods as store owners and landlords and never reinvested that money made off African-Americans in our community; many number runners not only launched legit businesses that provided vital services, but that Numbers money stayed in black neighborhoods, those dollars turning over many times.

  Still, how did my mother manage to run a cash-based business amid the Wild West–style shootings inflicted upon the city during one of its most notoriously dangerous eras? And how did she do it, given that her enterprise was decidedly underground and therefore couldn’t rely on protection from “the law”?

  One way was to hire a brawny and brave young man named Buster to handle her collecting and payments “out in the street.”

  “He was like an enforcer,” recalls Tony. “Because he was big, with a broad chest, big shoulders, stood about six foot three inches, had a big mustache and goatee. Always in leather, wore a bebop hat.”

  While Buster might’ve “had a record,” as they say, maybe served time in prison, he was not an actual enforcer for my mother. He did do an important job for her, though, and what I remember most about Buster is his loyalty to her, and how he was ever respectful and reliable. For her part, my mother was both grateful for Buster’s service and happy to give him a job when few others would bother to even give him a chance.

  Soon enough, Tony turned sixteen just as the Daily celebrated its tenth year and lottery sales reached $1 billion. With his driver’s license and a brand-new white Camaro compliments of my mother, Tony also started collecting payments and delivering payouts. “I’d be out driving with my friends,” he says. “And I’d tell them I had to stop off and pick up some money from one of my grandmother’s ‘rental properties.’ I might have an envelope with ten thousand dollars in it, and my friends never knew.”

  They also never knew that Tony carried a gun: a .380 automatic given to him by his grandmother.

  “What did she say to you when she gave it to you?” I ask, learning this fact for the first time.

  “There wasn’t a bunch of talking,” says Tony. “She said, ‘Come straight home.’ I would always tuck it under my seat, just in case anything went bad in between going and getting home. You know, they used to do a lot of kidnapping back in the day. It wasn’t like I was walking around the street with it. You know I’ve never been a hothead. If I was going somewhere at night, or was going to pick up some money, I had it.”

  To
ny also took charge of burning old Numbers tickets and notebooks in the basement incinerator, destroying evidence every week or so. His primary job, however, was to go daily to the nearest party store to buy lottery tickets for the numbers that customers had “loaded up on,” or played heavily. “I went all the time,” recalls Tony, because given the 5,000-to-1 payouts on four-digits alone, no way could my mother risk getting hit for ten or twenty dollars on a number without playing it herself legally to help pay for the hit. Of course, she often played a number for more than she needed to cover a potential hit. A windfall provided extra reserves.

  It was rare, but every now and then a number would get by my mother, and she’d miss the fact that several bettors within her business had actually played it.

  “I do remember her getting hit hard one time,” says Tony. “She had all of us counting the money, trying to figure it out.” Adding to the pressure was Mama’s payout policy: winners got their money the next day by noon.

  With the possibility of such big payouts, my mother also needed to verify folks’ claims of having played a certain number. While she didn’t have to do it with most of her customers, my mother did tape-record a few, those she felt might lie to her. She used a little circular wire device that attached to the phone’s receiver, and after a week she’d destroy the tape. In time, Mama took advantage of the newest technology and had people fax their numbers to her on a machine that sat in the back bedroom—a perfect approach, since the faxed document itself provided paper proof of who’d played what for how much.

  Throughout that treacherous decade, my mother was determined to keep Tony out of trouble, sending him to a total of five different schools—private, public, charter, and Catholic—in an effort to keep him “on the straight and narrow” toward high school graduation. Tony did stay out of trouble, and he says it’s largely because he never wanted to add more stress to his grandmother’s life.