The World According to Fannie Davis

by Bridgett M. Davis

  Because my mother had introduced me to positive thinking, I felt justified. Wasn’t she the one known for believing things could get better if you just got your mind right, and trusted? When I came to her for advice, overwhelmed by some crisis, she’d often say, “Nothing is so impossible it can’t be overcome,” and then tell me to sleep on it, before quoting Scarlett O’Hara’s last line in Gone with the Wind: “After all, tomorrow is another day.”

  I convinced myself it was my duty as her daughter to do what you should never do to a cancer patient: put the onus of her recovery on her, making my mother feel it was her job, her responsibility to us to remain positive so she could get better—the implication being that if she didn’t heal, it was because she was just not being positive enough.

  She was back in the hospital a month after her first chemo treatment for a second round. That hospital visit lasted two weeks, during which I didn’t return to Detroit. Rather, the day after my thirty-first birthday, two days after my mother returned home from the hospital, I went to St. Thomas with a friend for five days. I told myself that I was going to a peaceful place by the water to meditate, to get into the Flow and send all the positive vibes and energy I could out into the universe, so that Mama would get better. I was trying to be a true student of Unity, and the teachings of Eric Butterworth, who wrote that the best way to help a loved one heal was to “Try to go apart in some way, and get yourself centered.” He even stressed that “Being removed from close proximity with the one who is hurting may be an advantage, for you may not be tempted to react emotionally to the appearances.…If the consciousness is high enough, you should be able to pray for one on the other side of the world as effectively as one on the other side of the room, perhaps even more effectively.”

  What I now know is that I was shirking my responsibility to help care for my mother, and sending the message to her and everyone around her that I was selfish and insensitive; after all, while my sister Rita and my stepfather, Burt, lovingly tended to and nursed her, I was vacationing on a beach in the Virgin Islands. During a conversation we had over the phone after my trip, Mama made it clear how she felt with four simple words: “I’m your mother too.”

  When she said those words to me, I gripped the telephone receiver as tight as I could and cried wracking tears of remorse. But I did so in silence, determined that she wouldn’t hear me crying. Of course she heard the silent sobs on my end of the phone. “I know you better than you know yourself,” she used to say to me. Now, with those four new, bruising words, I’m your mother too, she’d pierced my shame, and my extraordinary fear of losing her. I was devastated that I’d disappointed her. Yet I didn’t say, “I’m sorry, Mama.” Instead, after I cried those silent tears, I complained to Rita that Mama was “tripping,” that she expected too much, that she should understand that I escaped to St. Thomas to “meditate on her spiritual wholeness.” Rita, in her infinite grace, only said to me: “I think your vacation was just poor timing.”

  But I clung to the belief that my mother was the problem, even as my anger at her morphed into new forms of insensitivity. It pains me now to see what I wrote weeks after our phone call: Thoughts again of Mama. I’m less annoyed. More saddened. She needs constant reassurance that people love her, yet she doesn’t really know how to show love herself. My denial was deafening.

  Meanwhile, Vatrize was there, and she saw how much weaker my mother had become. “She had a walker,” says Vatrize. “And because she and I had gotten really close and I wasn’t working anymore, I was around her a lot. I’d do little things for her, help her get up, or get something for her.…I do remember one day she was in a lot of pain, and she was trying to bear it. I just sat with her the whole time.”

  Throughout their time together, Vatrize had sought counsel from my mother, who’d encouraged her to think about her own future and what she wanted. Soon enough, Vatrize decided to move to Long Island for a fresh start and went downstairs to say goodbye. “Mrs. Robinson was really sick that day,” she recalls. Vatrize sat on the chaise lounge beside my mother’s bed, quiet for a while before she finally said: “All right, well, I’m going to go.” My mother looked her in the eye, and Vatrize says her last words to her were: “Whatever you do, remember to respect yourself.”

  I spent a week at home that summer and gained only slightly more self-awareness: I learned a lot, I wrote in my journal. I learned that I need to get re-accustomed to Mama’s ways, that her negativity bothers me and that I get on her nerves too. With my holier-than-thou attitude. I want her to learn to release things, but I have to stop fussing at her about it. When she slept through an entire day, I missed her. And I was concerned.

  Still, I wasn’t really confronting the severity of my mother’s illness, in part because Rita and Burt were caring for her day to day in Detroit, while I lived and worked in New York. When she experienced a six-month run without more treatment, I convinced myself the chemo was working.

  Adding to my willful denial was the fact that Mama wasn’t talking about her illness and remained steadfast that we say nothing to no one. But people knew something was very wrong. It didn’t take a lot to figure out that her symptoms—surgery, weight loss, tiredness, repeated hospital visits, hair loss—connoted the big C. Still, her belief was that if you could see she was sick, that was all you needed to know. If you wanted to be there for her, support her and even help care for her, why would you need to know the details of her illness? Why would you need to know her diagnosis and prognosis? To my mother, no words needed to be spoken for you to do the right thing by her, whether you were family or a close friend.

  Oddly enough, I’d never actually heard Mama talk about death, except to say “Dying is easy. Living takes guts.” Nor did I know her beliefs about an afterlife. The founders of Unity believed in reincarnation, or rather “re-embodiment,” but I’d never heard her talk about coming back. Nor did she believe in the old folks’ religious philosophy that you’d get your rewards in heaven, “in the by-and-by.” And she really didn’t care what people would say about her once she was gone.

  She wanted to be appreciated in the here and now. “Give me my damn flowers while I can still smell ’em,” she’d often say. She hated the idea that people who didn’t really know her, or had been two-faced or jealous or backstabbing (all of which she encountered in her line of work), would flock to look down on her in a casket. This combined with my mother’s disdain for black folks who went to funerals largely out of curiosity, just to see how the deceased had been “laid out” or “put away.” She’d say, “Bury me facedown so I can tell all those nosy niggers to kiss my ass.”

  With her health declining, Rita took over the business. My mother, so sick, did not resist; besides, she knew her customers were in good hands with Rita, who ran the Numbers well. Luckily, Rita kept Mama’s loyal customers even while the state provided yet more lottery options. In addition to the eight existing “draw” games and a plethora of ever-increasing instant “scratch-off” games, a brand-new draw game called Cash 5 was introduced. (It was replaced eight years later by yet another game.) While only the Daily 3 and Daily 4 mimicked the Numbers, the myriad other lottery games were, in a sense, competition.

  Only in looking back do I see that my mother was confronting her own mortality by trying to prepare us for a life without her: She began lecturing Tony about becoming more responsible and taking advantage of every opportunity she provided, because “I won’t be around forever.” And one day, she called and gave me the gift that would release me from a lifetime of immobilizing guilt: “I thought about it,” she said to me. “And I wasn’t there for my mother when she was sick. I didn’t move back to Nashville because I knew my sisters would take care of her.”

  On one of my visits home, Mama did a private reading for Rita and me from her “book,” or as she now called it, her roman à clef.

  As we sit with her at the kitchen table, she opens the black three-ring binder, the same one I’ve glimpsed my entire life but have never s
een inside, and with reading glasses perched on her nose announces the title: 617 Crawford.

  Mama recites the words she’s written in a low yet confident voice.

  As the bus rolled along the Kentucky road nearing the Tennessee borderline, many thoughts filled the mind of Rose Miller, fifteen years old, beautiful, pregnant and running away from home. Thoughts of her family kept coming back. What was her mother going to say when she discovered her gone? Would she call the police in right away or would she give her time to come back? Rose had an argument with her mother just yesterday, when her mother found out she had skipped school.

  She reads it all to us that day, the story handwritten across decades in green and blue and black ink, all in her lovely cursive, each capital letter a flourish, moving across forty-three pages.

  It’s the story of Rose, a fifteen-year-old girl who after running away from home finds her way to Minnie, the madam of a genteel, well-run whorehouse at 617 Crawford Street in Nashville. There Minnie treats Rose like a daughter, helping her get a safe abortion with the aid of a black woman doctor, and allowing her to stay at 617 as her personal assistant, rather than a prostitute. Minnie helps Rose finish high school and “becomes her benefactress,” paying for her to attend Vanderbilt University to study nursing. Eventually, Minnie teaches Rose how to run the business, and when Minnie becomes ill, Rose cares for her. Minnie dies, “the darkest day” of Rose’s life. Rose inherits Minnie’s business, which she decides to close down or sell as soon as she completes nursing school. The whorehouse, coupled with Minnie’s generosity, has given Rose a chance in life she’d never otherwise have.

  Mama’s way of seeing the world shone out from this story: the young woman setting out for a more inviting place, determined yet unprepared for what she finds; the older woman who helps her out; an underground enterprise run with integrity and expertise, and also caution, which gives myriad people new opportunities.

  Mama used the power of luck, as Rose fortuitously ends up at Minnie’s house of ill repute because the cabdriver takes her to 617 Crawford, assuming she’s one of Minnie’s new “girls.” And the title reflects the symbolism Mama saw in a three-digit house address (her childhood home had a three-digit address: 410 Wingrove), and of course she knew what three digits from a house address could do to change a life, given what 788, taken from her own Detroit address, had done for her.

  I now suspect that the story’s plot turn, Minnie’s illness, was influenced by my mother’s own illness: She had long noticed that Minnie…had been going to the doctor quite frequently.…Rose had a feeling that Minnie was hiding something from her. But she did not ask questions. That she also learned from Minnie. Never ask personal questions and never pry.…If they want you to know something important they will eventually tell you.

  We spent Christmas ’91 in Las Vegas, a family trip that was Mama’s idea. She joined me at a blackjack table on that first day, and I let myself think that this was like old times, when she was the luckiest person I knew. It was her one good day in Vegas, and the last thing we ever did together, just the two of us—gamble.

  That evening at dinner, I greedily told my mother about my plans to shoot a feature film, hungry for her usual support. She nodded, tried to listen, but when I escorted her to the hotel’s bathroom, I stood by helplessly and watched as she pulled out a vial of morphine and took a dose.

  We shared our gifts with one another on Christmas morning, trying to act normal. She gave each of us cash. I gave Mama a navy knit pantsuit with tiny silver rhinestones, in a small size that I had to force myself to buy, because I couldn’t believe that she, who’d always been plump, could actually fit into it. (“Well, now I know,” she’d announced on one of her better days, as she stood before us in Rita’s size 10 dress. “The way to lose weight is to not eat.”) She stayed in bed for the rest of the vacation, sleeping through the days. When she needed to get up for any reason, my stepfather carried her in his arms.

  It turns out my mother wanted a refuge from the onslaught of people who would’ve certainly come by to visit had she been at home for the holidays. She didn’t want others to see her so gravely ill, still wanted to retain her dignity. She flew to Nevada with her family for privacy. But Rita and I didn’t see the trip for what it was. We saw her desire to take a trip at all as a sign of our mother “getting better.” So when she slept every day, it made us upset, antsy, restless. We decided we couldn’t bear to stay for the entire ten days, announcing that we were returning home early. Rita and I were impatient, complaining, puffing on cigarettes. In a rare moment of anger, my stepfather scolded us. “How could you think about leaving Vegas when this was something your mother wanted us to do together as a family?” He knew what we did not. The doctor had given him the prognosis for his wife of more than twenty-two years.

  I did not write about my mother in my journal for five and a half months. Rather, I busied myself with the goal of “making her proud” by working exhaustively on a screenplay and a novel and full-time teaching, even as she was receiving radiation treatments. On Mother’s Day 1992—the day after her sixty-fourth birthday—I wrote: Mama’s illness is a cloud, a time-bomb over my head saying, “Hurry up! Be a success!”

  That day I sent my mother two dozen white roses; she loved white because it was “the color of purity.” Our house on Seven Mile filled with flowers and plants, a plethora of friends dropping off bouquets and arrangements as a way of saying how much she meant to them. “It’s like a florist shop in here,” reported Rita. “Flowers are everywhere.” She said Mama took the bouquet I’d sent her and brought it back to Tony’s bedroom, placed it on the nightstand, then lay down on his narrow bed. “She just wanted your flowers near her,” said Rita. For a long time I comforted myself by imagining my mother enjoying the white roses’ fragrance.

  Twelve days later, Rita called me at daybreak. First she said, “Happy birthday.” Then she said, “Mama was just rushed to the hospital with a faint heartbeat. They say she may not make it through the day.”

  I boarded a plane that morning and braced myself for what I might find when I landed. But I prayed that Mama wouldn’t die on my birthday. When I think about it across the distance, perhaps there would’ve been a sad but apt symmetry to her life ending on the same day that mine had begun—given that my birth had marked the family’s good fortunes, and given all she’d done to make my life so good. There might have been something resonant and meaningful in that. But of course I was terrified that every year on my birthday, I’d also be marking the anniversary of my mother’s death.

  Mama didn’t die that day. In fact, I got to spend a week with her in the hospital, sleeping in a chair beside her bed each night; I never left the room. Late in the week, out of the blue, she called out to someone, “Wait for me, I’m coming! I’m coming!” Then she paused and frowned, realization setting in. “Oh, I can’t move my legs,” she said. “I can’t walk.” Seeing her face in that moment destroyed me. Another day, she suddenly began reciting random combinations of numbers, her voice strong: “Two-nine-five, three-eight-six, and four-three-two.…” But beyond those two outbursts, she said nothing those days, not quite unconscious, but under heavy morphine sedation. In between the stream of visitors, I clung to the pleasure of waking up throughout the night to watch Mama breathe, prepared to stay like that, the two of us in a quiet togetherness, forever.

  One day, long before she became ill, Mama, Rita, and I decided to figure out our personal numbers, based on which number recurred the most in each of our lives. Rita decided that her number was 4, because she was born in the fourth month, her name had four letters, and she was the fourth child in the family. I decided my number was 7, because I was the seventh member of the family, my name had seven letters in it (before I added an extra t), and in a nod to numerology, the numbers of my birth date equaled a 7. Mama decided her personal number was 9 because she was the ninth child in her family; she was born on May ninth, the full name that everyone called her as a child, Fannie Mae, ha
d nine letters in it, and the date she bought Broadstreet—April 15, 1961—equaled a 9. (I secretly told myself that this also meant that Mama, a good witch, would—like the cats that are witches’ supernatural familiars—have nine lives.)

  On day seven, the day of my personal number, Mama began making a loud wracking sound when she breathed. Mercifully, the nurse told us she needed to clear our mother’s lungs and made us leave because the procedure, she said, could be “upsetting” to the family. But when we returned to the room, Mama was completely silent, yet opening and closing her mouth, clearly gasping for air. It was hard to witness, and Aunt Florence pulled me into the hospital corridor. “Listen,” she said to me. “She’s holding on for you. Let her go, because she’s suffering. Just let her go.” I cried hard in that hallway before I reentered her room, leaned into her ear, and said, “Mama, you can go. I love you, and I’ll miss you, but I understand. You can go.”

  I held her hand. Her mouth relaxed. She died shortly after, squeezing my hand with surprising strength just before she took her last breath. The date was May 29, 1992, a 9. In her story, Mama had written: Aunt Minnie had taken sick and went into the hospital. She died on the 29th of May.

  We stayed with her for a while, and when we left, my family and I assured one another that Mama’s passing had been both peaceful and beautiful, with her surrounded by loved ones, what she would’ve wanted.

  It was during the car ride home that Burt told me, “I waited ten years to marry her. She was the love of my life.”

  “When she died, half of me died with her,” says Aunt Florence. “Because when she was living, I didn’t have no kind of worry. None whatsoever. Fannie knew how to take care of everything.” And then it dawns on her, how well Fannie kept her secret: “You know what? As close as we were, God is my witness, I didn’t know my sister had cancer until she was dead.”