The World According to Fannie Davis

by Bridgett M. Davis

  “I remember in high school, I would go out with my friends and do whatever. But when it got to be twelve o’clock, I’d be home,” says Tony. “My friends would be like, ‘Dude, you’re crawling home like a kid?’ I’m like, ‘It ain’t about being a kid. She’s worried.’” He knew Grandma wouldn’t relax until he was in the house. “She’d hear the door open,” he says. “And she’d be good.”

  One day, a young man, a stranger, knocked on our door. He told Mama his name was Michael Terrell, that he’d discovered her vacant house on Broadstreet through the Registry of Deeds, and wondered would she be interested in selling it to him?

  “I’d tried to call first,” he now says. “But I couldn’t get through. The line was always busy. The records showed your mom’s name and where she currently lived, so I just took a deep breath and drove by the house on Seven Mile and rang the doorbell.”

  My mother told him about the fire damage. He said that as a carpenter, he’d specifically been looking for a fixer-upper for himself and his wife and three-year-old son. It was just the type of old, spacious Colonial he wanted, big enough for a growing family.

  “I’d driven by the house, and I thought the neighborhood was like a little oasis,” recalls Michael. Also, he’d studied architecture and design alongside carpentry and immediately recognized Broadstreet’s potential. “I saw that beautiful house and I said, ‘Oh man, this is it. If I could get this, I’d be a happy man.’”

  My mother listened as Michael explained that he taught woodshop and mechanical drafting at Mumford High School, stressing that he believed he had the skills to restore the house to its former glory. She nodded. Then she said, “You’re Seventh-Day Adventist, aren’t you?”

  “It was out of the blue,” says Michael. “I thought, This lady must be psychic or something, and I said, ‘Yes ma’am, I am.’”

  “I could tell from your mannerisms, the way you present yourself,” she said. “You’re so polite.” My mother then told him she’d consider his offer, but first she had to be sure that no one in the family wanted the house. Two days later, she called him back and agreed to sell Broadstreet for $8,000.

  “I thought, Eight thousand dollars for a house that size?” recalls Michael.

  When my mother found out Michael and his family were staying with his sister in crowded conditions, she told him that the apartment above us on Seven Mile was vacant, and that while he was fixing up Broadstreet, they could live there for a reduced rent.

  “You’re a nice young couple with a little boy,” he says she told him. “And you’re trying to do something with your life. I want to help you.”

  Michael and his family moved in. “It was just nice, like being with family,” he recalls. “It wasn’t like she was the landlord. Little Mike could go downstairs and sit with your mom, or Rita. It was just a comfortable situation, and nurturing.…It was like having my mother downstairs.”

  During those few years when Michael and his family lived right above her, my mother was in the throes of maintaining a business now fully dependent on the state-sanctioned lottery. She was taking more bets for four-digit numbers than for three-digits, and business was flourishing again as a result. Basically, more than a decade after Michigan had tried hard to usurp the street Numbers with its Daily 3, number runners like Mama were relying on the state’s Daily 4 to sustain those very same street Numbers, by infusing their business with new energy, new opportunities for players to win big, and a surefire way to keep more of their money, tax-free. Nice irony. And it was now an open secret that number runners were using Michigan’s daily three-digit and four-digit winners for their own purposes.

  “We’ve talked about it but nobody has figured out what to do,” lamented a lottery spokeswoman in 1989. “We can’t walk up to a bookie and say, ‘How’s business?’ There’s nothing I could say that would have any impact.” In fact, in another sweet irony, the Wayne County prosecutor said that the legal lottery “may have diminished public perception that playing the Numbers is wrong.”

  This is why Tony remembers those gleaming jars inside the glass-front kitchen cabinet again teeming with quarters and nickels and dimes, silver change available to him whenever he wanted. “I had it down to a science,” he reminisces, smiling. “I knew that a handful of quarters was twenty dollars.”

  With the decade winding down, my mother was now sixty. I’d just quit my newspaper job and moved to New York to be a freelance writer; I was twenty-eight, the same age she’d been when she migrated to Detroit. I decided to write about Mama. In fact, I had a deep need to write about her. I wanted to highlight her parenting style, her generosity, her wisdom, her way of living. And there was something else.

  The 1980s had not been good to our family. Three times tragedy struck. In 1982, my thirty-five-year-old sister, Deborah, in the hospital to control her high blood pressure, suffered a heart attack from a pulmonary embolism and died. Four years later, my thirty-three-year-old brother, Anthony, was shooting pool at his neighborhood bar, the Blue Room, when he and another man got into an argument. Anthony saw that the guy had a gun, and when he ran out, the guy shot him in the back. He made it all the way home but collapsed and died on the steps. (My mother forbade my sisters to tell me about Anthony for twenty-four hours, because she knew my grad school thesis was due that day.) Eight months later my thirty-seven-year-old sister, Dianne, who had never revealed to us any domestic abuse in her marriage, was shot and killed by her husband in a murder-suicide after she told him she wanted a divorce.

  I still don’t know how my mother survived that trauma, how she managed to move forward. She told me once, “On the hardest days, I promise myself I’ll cry tomorrow.” I saw her in such grief, and yet she was still present for those of us who remained, still invested in our lives and our wherewithal. I told myself that made her worth writing about, and set out to craft a compelling profile of Mama by leaving in the tragedies but leaving out the Numbers. In my notes I scribbled, What makes my mother special is her strength, and her unselfish love. But my story—pitched for a Mother’s Day issue—was rejected by the editor of Detroit Magazine, because, in his words, I hadn’t “fully exploited” my story.

  I knew why he said that: I hadn’t captured the depth of my mother’s pain after the cumulative heartbreak caused by Deborah’s and Anthony’s and Dianne’s deaths. When I’d gingerly asked about her feelings, she told me, “I still can’t talk about it.” I realized then that I didn’t want her to talk about it, certainly not for publication. Truth be told, I didn’t even want to write that particular story. I just wanted to write about her. The losses she’d faced as a mother had presumably given me an angle. Yet I knew she was worth writing about even before my siblings died. And I knew her livelihood was at the center of that worth. But she was still actively running her business, which of course was a secret. I now understood that I couldn’t just tell one part of her story; I’d have to wait until I could tell her whole story.

  In a new note to myself I wrote: Interview Mama.

  I never did.

  Rendering of Broadstreet

  Ten

  Detroit, 1990

  October 27, 1989

  Hi Mama,

  I just came in from teaching and found the package you sent. You don’t know what a difference it makes.

  That $900 will be my bill money for November and December—so I can hold off on a part-time job a little longer.

  I think that by the beginning of the year, things will get a lot better.…Next week, I have an interview for a full-time teaching position in journalism at a 4-year, Manhattan college. The position’s not ’til September ’90, but it would be great to get it. That means a good salary and benefits. Believe me, I know that since I quit my job a year ago, it’s been a strain on you. One more thing to worry about. But, there’s nothing like being unhappy with your life. For the first time, I really feel good about what I’m doing.…

  So for now, it’s rough and it seems like it’s not paying off. But it wi
ll. And when it does, I can start doing things for YOU. I try not to take for granted anything you do for me—because I know it’s not because I deserve it. It’s because you want to do it, or you don’t mind. Ever since you brought me home from the hospital to French-Provincial baby furniture, I’ve been this very privileged and spoiled little girl. When my classmates didn’t even know about places like Saks and Bonwit Teller’s, I was wearing trench coats and size AA shoes and expensive dresses from those stores. I remember everything.

  Because you’re so good to me, I’ve always wanted to make you proud of me. All you ever had to do was look like you were disappointed in me and I would start crying. I’m still that way. I like to do well in school and win awards and stuff for myself of course, but also because I love to see that look on your face. That’s the best feeling in the world, to know you’ve pleased your mother.

  This time, I know I’ve really asked a lot—paying my rent, my American Express bill, giving me money in Detroit, sending me even more. Buying me a whole new wardrobe.

  I used to think I could one day pay you back. I know that’s impossible. The only thing I can do is make you prouder of me than you’ve ever been. And be as good to my own daughter whenever I have one.

  Thanks for being so generous. And for making it easy for me to ask for money when I need it. You never make me feel guilty or selfish or greedy.

  I hope you know how much I love you.

  Your baby,

  Bridgett

  PS: I got the new Carte Blanche card. The most I’ll use it for are occasional dinners and a new book once in a while (maybe treat Stephanie to a meal now and then!).

  I recently found this letter in my mother’s brass trunk. I wrote it when I was twenty-nine years old and she’d just sent me the same amount of money her parents sent her when she’d migrated north all those years before. “She used to worry about you all the time, especially in New York, trying to survive that jungle,” my friend Diane confides in me. “But she really wanted you to be able to make it.”

  Weeks after I wrote to thank her, my mother was diagnosed with diverticulitis—pouches had formed in the walls of her colon that had become infected and inflamed. I grew up seeing both the enema bag dangling from a hanger in the bathroom, and the small bottle of Senokot laxative pills on her dresser. But I made only a vague connection between constipation and diverticulitis. This condition was, she assured me, treatable with antibiotics and a liquid diet. Yet when I came home for Christmas, I saw how much pain she was in and asked why the treatment wasn’t working. “They’re running more tests,” she told me.

  I returned to New York, and to an offer for the professor job, at Baruch College. My mother, clearly pleased, said she’d pay my Brooklyn rent for the next nine months until the job started, help I desperately needed. Shortly after, I learned the fuller truth: my mother had a tumor on her colon. She’d insisted no one tell me this fact before I completed my interviews for the new job. My mother has a tumor, I wrote in my journal. Serious? Cancerous? Life-threatening? We don’t know, but my instincts tell me it’s not. Still…my mother has a tumor. Later, I admitted: I don’t want to write about Mama because I can’t. I can’t deal with the possibilities.

  In early March 1990, as I was sitting at Rita’s dining room table in her house on Evergreen Road, she told me: “Mama has cancer.”

  It turns out my mother had been diagnosed with colon cancer several weeks before, but she’d again insisted that the others spare me. While she couldn’t bear to tell me herself, she still made everyone else wait until I was back home and could learn the news in person. Then she had my sister do it.

  I remember it as an out-of-body experience. The words Mama and cancer in the same sentence didn’t compute. That was something that happened to other mothers; mine suffered from blood clots. I got up from the table and moved to the kitchen, suddenly thirsty. I stood at the sink, just letting the water run. “My mother has cancer. My mother has cancer,” I repeated in a low voice, to make myself comprehend. But I couldn’t.

  Mama soon had the cancerous parts of her colon removed. We all waited in the hospital’s waiting room for several excruciating hours for her to emerge. When it was over, the doctor told me that he’d not only removed much of her colon, but had also given her a hysterectomy. He felt he’d “gotten all of it” and was optimistic about her prognosis. As he spoke to me, Aunt Florence and my cousin Jewell stood nearby, and I asked him to step away so we could speak in private. I didn’t want him to say too much in front of them because my mother had sworn us, her children, to secrecy. We were not to tell anyone that she had cancer, not even her sister. My move away really wounded Aunt Florence, and she yelled out, “I don’t need to hear what any damn doctor has to say about my sister! I listen to a higher doctor. God is the only one whose diagnosis I care about!”

  My mother definitely used secrecy as a form of protection; even Burt didn’t know for months after the diagnosis. I see sparing someone by withholding a painful truth now, with distance, as a gesture of love. But did her secrecy also keep her from benefiting from the widest possible treatment options? “If I’d known sooner, I would’ve taken her straight to Mayo Clinic,” Burt later told me. Secrecy also prevented Mama from enjoying a community of support. Today, we handle a cancer diagnosis with openness and receptivity to loving, widespread empathy. My mother believed, like so many black people of her generation, that cancer was something to be ashamed of, a failing of some sort, and definitely to be hidden. To her, it wasn’t like dying nobly from, say, a “weak heart.”

  She was also a very private person. She didn’t want “everybody down South” aware of her cancer. She knew that if her baby sister living up North in Detroit knew, everyone from back home, in Nashville, would know too. Her pride made that an intolerable option. She wanted to retain her dignity, and that meant her privacy. Compounding it all was Mama’s inability to deliver bad news. That itself must’ve felt to her like a failing. Fannie prided herself on helping to improve others’ situations, as a deliverer of good news. For this complex tangle of reasons, Mama swore us to secrecy, made us complicit.

  Still, we were optimistic. For seven precious months she seemed fine, and life moved forward: Tony graduated from high school, and a new young woman in need of nurturing and guidance entered Mama’s life. Beatrice was Michael Terrell’s nineteen-year-old sister-in-law, newly arrived from the Dominican Republic and now living in the space above our family on Seven Mile with Michael, her sister, and their mother. “Mrs. Robinson would check up on me,” says Beatrice, who now goes by Vatrize. “She heard our really loud arguments and one day she just sent Tony upstairs to get me.” Vatrize spent the night and awoke that next morning to find my mother in the kitchen, preparing her breakfast. “She was wearing white, and she was going through the cabinets,” recalls Vatrize. “And I remember I felt such gratitude for this person who didn’t know me; yet I could feel her love for me.” After that, my mother let Vatrize stay downstairs with her, offering her a safe haven and kindness. “Somebody caring for me for no reason?” says Vatrize. “I had never experienced that in my life.”

  We were encouraged by my mother’s interest in Vatrize, because helping others was her thing, and we saw it as life-affirming. We were equally pleased that she began a regimen of healthy eating, paying a nutritionist to prepare “wholistic” meals filled with roughage, and taking vitamins and supplements, having ended the liquid diet. During my visits home, we all went out to dinner, shopping, and on car rides along the Detroit River. One of my treasured photos was taken during that time: Mama in the middle, Rita and I flanking her. Mama is wearing her grandson’s leather jacket and her hair is in crinkly natural curls that I’ve styled for her; she’s looking at the camera with an expression that says, I’m still here.

  Yet there were signs. For one, she started talking about wanting another grandchild, uncharacteristic for her. And why is Mama talking about how beautiful babies are and still asking me about J? I lamented i
n my journal that summer, not seeing the larger meaning at all. Now I understand what makes being 30 such a hard thing for a woman.

  That fall, as a new assistant professor, I was featured in the college’s student newspaper, the Ticker. I sent the article to Mama and she had it laminated, began showing it to everyone who dropped by, including my friend Diane.

  “She cherished your accomplishments, and she was so proud of you,” Diane tells me. “Doing what you wanted to do, and being able to survive New York doing it? In her eyes, that was really standing up to something. That was truly making it.”

  But nineteen days after that article ran, Mama entered a different hospital, and a different doctor performed another surgery, to remove “adhesions,” essentially scar tissue from the original surgery. No one used the word recurrence, despite the fact that she remained in the hospital for over three weeks and was told she’d likely have “light” chemotherapy to kill the remaining cancerous cells lurking inside her, as I phrased it in my journal.

  At the start of the new year, 1991, I wrote: Knowing Mama’s spirits are up has had an infectious effect on me. If she can be strong and optimistic, I know I can. In early April, during one of my visits from New York, she began receiving chemo, and I could certainly see the toll it was taking on her. Mama just came home from the hospital, I wrote. She’s taking a bath. She looks tired, older. She has lost weight, is smaller than I’ve ever seen her. And her hand is dark from the chemotherapy; her hair is shorter (was it cut?).

  Frightened, I’d bark, “Go to bed, Mama!” if she started to nod out around me. And I launched into a rabid regimen of positive thinking. This is the time for my faith to increase, for my belief in God to strengthen, I declared. I have no doubt that God heals, that she can recover fully. I believe. I will affirm her good health daily. And I will pray for her nightly. I want her to put herself in the flow of healthiness; I want her to be positive.