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"My mother gave us a good life at great expense," Bridgett M. Davis writes in the prologue of a just-published memoir that she'll discuss at three Detroit appearances:
- Friday, 6:30-8 p.m.: Pages Bookshop reading and audience questions,19560 Grand River Ave. (Grandmont-Rosedale).
- Saturday, noon-2 p.m.: Detroit Historical Museum reading and conversation with Wayne State scholar Felicia George, whose 2015 doctoral dissertation is about the Detroit numbers; 5401 Woodward Ave.
- Sunday, 2-4 p.m.: Detroit Public Library reading and audience questions, 5201 Woodward Ave.
The Cass Tech graduate, now a professor living in Brooklyn, subtitles her book "My Mother's Life in the Detroit Numbers."
This daughter's memoir came out Jan. 29.
"My mother, Fannie Davis, was a high-ranking numbers runner — a bookie and a 'banker' who collected bets and paid off wins for the underground lottery business that everyone I knew called 'the numbers,'" Davis writes in a New York Times essay about her 320-page hardback.
The game was simple: People called a bookie, put a bet on one or more three-digit numbers, and each day except Sunday "the house" — major numbers bosses — announced the winners, which were based on racetrack results. Individual bankers like my mother had to pay out to anyone who "hit," or won.
The daughter, who pronounces her first name Bridge-JET, recalls wanting to "brag about her distinction as one of the few female bankers in Detroit." In "The World According to Fannie Davis," she writes:
The fact that Mama gave us an unapologetically good life by taking others' bets on three-digit numbers, collecting their money when they didn't win, paying their hits when they did, and profiting from the difference, is the secret I've carried with me throughout my life. . . .
The only way for me to tell Mama's story is to defy her, by running my mouth.
The game that sounds simple let Fannie Drumwright Davis Robinson, who came here from Nashville in 1955, support an ill husband who was a former auto worker and raise four children.
Cass Tech grad Bridgett Davis writes about "the secret I've carried with me throughout my life." (Photo: Nina Sabin)
"What she pulled off . . . was born out of necessity, and she managed to figure out how to make a way out of no way," Davis tells Sheila McClear in an interview at Longreads. McClear, who's also a New York writer and memoir author, admires the new book's plucky hero:
She brought her family into the middle class and the American dream. Success came with a catch: she could tell no one outside her family how she made her money.
Even when Michigan started a legal lottery in 1972, Fannie found a way to keep the business going. Meanwhile, she was able to own property, raise her children in comfort, and provide them with an education. Still, she paid a price for her success in worry and instability, constantly girding herself against . . . a major payout for a winning number that could wipe her savings out completely.
Davis, who teaches creative writing and journalism at Baruch College (a City University of New York branch), has threee older siblings. In Sunday's reflections, headlined "My Mother Was a Betting Woman," the author writes that her "mother understood well the difference between a legitimate endeavor and an illegal one."
While racetrack gambling and Catholic church bingo nights were legal, informal lottery betting — a practice created by and largely practiced by African-Americans — was illegal.
None of this hypocrisy was lost on my mother. "We already know that when white folks want to do something bad enough," she said, "they can just create a law to get away with it."
In The New York Times Book Review section a week earlier, novelist Kaitlyn Greenidge praises the book as "accessible" and says it "would make a thrilling film. . . . A black woman unapologetically engages in criminal activity and excels at it, making a better life for her family, no moralizing included. . . . We need more stories like Fannie's — the triumph and good life of a lucky black woman in a deeply corrupt world."
An excerpt: 'She was a domestic magician'
Bridgett Davis pronounces her first name Bridge-JET. (Photo: Facebook)
Mama never resented her customers' wins. "People play numbers to hit," she used to say. "So you can't be mad when they do. Business is business."
Each time my mother had a large payout, I didn't realize she could be wiped out. Despite the "good spell" versus "rough patch" nature of her work, Mama never conveyed a sense of fear or instability. She was a domestic magician with incredible sleight of hand. She made our family's life appear stable and secure.
And so I might've been anxious beyond my own understanding, but in my day-to-day world, I believed there was nothing to worry about.
I now know that risks were everywhere, coming from different sources, reverberating inward. How hard it must have been to shield us from the vagaries of the business, all run from our home, in full view, where the phones and the doorbell rang constantly and the work of running the Numbers sometimes continued until bedtime. . . .
She used her facility with numbers, good judge of character, winning personality and dose of good luck to build and maintain her business for three decades. But I had no idea just how much of a gambler she was, or the kind of psychological work it took to keep our world afloat.
© 2019, Little, Brown and Company
