The irony is not lost on me that while I was working hard to make sure no one at my beloved college knew what my mother did for a living, she was struggling to maintain her livelihood largely so she could keep me enrolled there. My high school friends, also children of working-class and lower-middle-class parents, all attended in-state schools—Michigan State, University of Michigan, Western U, Eastern U. I was the only one of us who “went away.” I knew I was an exception, and I worked hard to fit in. I also worked hard to leave that other, secret life behind.
And then barely a month into my fall semester, Mama got carjacked. A driver bumped her car from behind, and when she got out to investigate, the carjacker hit her on the side of her head with a pistol, knocking her to the ground. And then he stole her car. The robbery so shook us up that Rita and I flew home from Atlanta shortly afterward to be with her. (Rita had just begun an MBA program at Atlanta University.) Whatever misguided anger I’d felt dissipated long before we boarded the plane. For the first time in my life, I was forced to consider the improbable: the possibility of losing my mother. I realize how lucky I am that she’s still alive, I wrote in my journal. If she’d lost her life, I’d be saying “If I had just told her…” I don’t want to wait until it’s too late…I want to tell Mama that I love her. I’ve never said that to her. She’s never said it to me, either, but I know. She knows too, but I still want to tell her.
“A lot of stuff changed after that,” recalls my nephew, Tony, who was seven. “You didn’t see a gun prior to that. After that, a thirty-eight was always visible in her purse. And she started carrying bigger purses. I remember that.”
While back in Detroit, I noticed so many orange lottery terminals that it was staggering. In one party store on Six Mile Road, I watched as a man in his twenties bought $120 worth of tickets for the week. It was suddenly clear to me that for young people like him, the street numbers evoked no warm memories or sense of loyalty. Placing their bets with the state simply made sense, both modern-day and convenient.
I also noticed Mama’s glass jars, once filled with gleaming coins, now empty. “It was impossible to tell exactly how much the state-sanctioned lottery took business away from the illegal numbers,” writes Felicia George, the scholar, but clearly my mother was facing the biggest threat yet to her livelihood.
So she fought back.
When I returned home for Christmas break, I discovered a major shift: Listening to Mama doing her business over the phone, I didn’t hear her say to a customer, Morning, Darlene. I’m calling to take your numbers, as I’d heard her say for my entire life. I heard her say, Morning, Darlene. Will this be for the lottery or for the Numbers?
My mother had done her own market research and learned from folks that yes, they really liked how the lottery’s numbers got announced publicly, so that everyone found out the winners at the same time. But customers also told her they didn’t like giving the state their money, even though they grew more and more nervous about the alternative. Could the Numbers’ bankers pay off hits? Phones across the city quit ringing: the Daily had cut into so many runners’ profit. One mini–grocery store on the east side, Chene Trombley Market, sold well over a million dollars’ worth of Daily lottery tickets that year, to six thousand people a week; and more important, the store paid out over $850,000 in winnings. Perceived by players as a lucky spot, the mini-grocery proclaimed itself the number one agent in the state in lottery sales and payoffs. A feature story in the Detroit News Magazine noted that the store’s owner, with his “friendly Slavic face,” had “every right to…enjoy his ‘big daddy’ role, given that the license he’d been granted by the State of Michigan was garnering him up to $50,000 a year in commissions.” This prompted many business owners to open up party stores specifically to sell lottery tickets, only adding to the competition Mama faced.
“The Daily Lottery Game is the pride and joy of Michigan’s Bureau of the Lottery,” proclaimed that same article, with the reporter bluntly declaring that the lottery was “a state sanctioned version of the numbers racket,” adding that its growth had been “phenomenal.” The more the lottery impinged, the less people felt they could trust the Numbers; the less they patronized them, the weaker street Numbers became.
Given this reality, Mama had a brainstorm: offer customers options—to play the lottery with her, play the traditional Numbers as always, or play a combination of both. She later said that the idea came to her while on that trip to Las Vegas. She was standing at a roulette table, watching the dealer rake in players’ piles and piles of chips, when it dawned on her: You can never beat the house. Another thought quickly followed: If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. Why not make the state and its Daily the new operator for her Numbers business?
In a very short time, Mama did away with the street’s winning numbers altogether and exclusively used the lottery’s Daily winners. My mother’s shift was a brilliant move, as it relieved her of the need to derive one set of three-digit daily numbers from a convoluted calculation based on horseraces and it eliminated the ability of syndicate men to “fix” another set of three-digit numbers. She also made her business more alluring by becoming more competitive: she started offering a higher payout than the state, paying 600-to-1 winnings compared to the Daily’s 500-to-1.
Also, with the Daily, for all its bells and whistles, you could never win more than $3,000 at a time. Folks wanted the chance to win big. Mama said she’d watched closely in Vegas as cashiers in cages took in tens of thousands of dollars on the casino floor but also handed out wads and wads of cash. The house always wins in part because it can pay out with ease the occasional large win. That fact is the lure (something Mama knew well from the days when she wasn’t her own banker). She figured out a way to allow larger bets than she’d ever accepted, for as much as $15 or $20 on a given three-digit. She figured, let people have a shot at winning $9,000 or $12,000.
I witnessed with fascination how my mother did this, in a new household ritual unfolding before me: Burt made daily trips to the nearby party store to buy lottery tickets, essentially using the State of Michigan as insurance against Mama “getting hit hard” on a particular number, i.e., making the state her “backup” bank; this was the very backing she had once depended on big Numbers men to provide. Burt came home each day at dusk with his pockets full of lottery tickets, pulling them out, these long paper accordions purchased before the 7:08 p.m. cutoff, and dropping them onto the kitchen table. And each evening at exactly 7:28, conversation abruptly halted, Mama shushing us and holding her breath as we all turned to watch the TV, waiting until the local news anchor announced that day’s Daily 3. Another shift: Mama didn’t have to check the business to find out if anyone might’ve hit. Our phones now rang within seconds, with a customer who’d also just learned from TV what digits were winners calling to “let you know I put in today’s number.” My mother now checked the business—the rundown of numbers played—largely to confirm a hit, rather than to see who hit. Essentially, customers called in their numbers as usual; the only difference was that the winners were provided by the state and announced on TV each evening rather than by the old methods of racetrack calculations and syndicate selection.
Soon enough, all number runners adopted this approach, which saved Mama’s business and our livelihood. I returned to Spelman for the spring semester and promptly moved off campus with my dorm roommate Nikki into an apartment in a new complex called Bordeaux South. My mother helped me furnish the place and paid my rent for months in advance, enough proof for me that she knew how to survive, stay alive, and thrive.
As the eighties rolled in, Mayor Young was left in control of a 63 percent black-majority city suffering from an inadequate tax base, too few jobs, and swollen welfare rolls, which the new president, Ronald Reagan, was determined to slash. Yet while Detroit’s population had dropped from its 1950 height of 1.85 million people, the city still boasted well over a million residents. Young lobbied hard to bring casino gambling to the city, a dream h
e’d had since taking office, as he saw it as a way to create jobs and offset Detroit’s dying tax base while making the city a major tourist destination. The question was placed on the ballot, and for the second time, voters said no. Ministers lobbied hard against it. Detroit was a Numbers gambling town, true, but this was different: the fear of commercial sex and yet more drugs killed Young’s casino dreams. And in another destabilizing development in the city, Chrysler Corporation found itself on the verge of bankruptcy, an unthinkable outcome for a Big Three auto company. Mama, liking the way its new president, Lee Iacocca, lobbied Congress for a bailout, decided to invest in the company. Chrysler’s value was nil, but that didn’t bother her. “It has nowhere to go but up,” she said, acquiring shares of its common stock.
This was also when my mother vigorously returned to her philanthropy and began helping several young women get through “rough patches,” including my cousin Lisa, who’d also chosen to attend Spelman College. Her parents’ bitter divorce had jeopardized the family’s financial status, and despite loans and grants and work-study and a part-time job off campus, Lisa couldn’t pay the balance of her tuition. She’d called her father, explained her predicament, and asked for five hundred dollars; he told her he didn’t have it. There was a new wife, and new responsibilities. This meant Lisa wouldn’t be allowed to take her finals and would have to drop out of school. Heartbroken, she called Aunt Fa and lamented her plight. She says my mother said to her, “Are you kidding me? How much? That’s not a problem. There’s no question your bill will get paid.”
“I remember thinking, Wow, I mean wow. Her just doing that for me with no lecture, no guilt trip, no martyr type of attitude, no sense of ‘you owe me,’” recalls Lisa. “And I was so upset about my dad not being willing to help me, and she said, ‘Well, you don’t know what’s going on with your dad.’”
Mama had also helped Lisa’s older sister, Leslie, go back to school by taking care of her little boy; she did the same favor a few years later for my childhood friend Diane, caring for her infant daughter, Brittany, while Diane completed her master’s degree.
“She said, ‘Who’s gonna keep that baby?’” remembers Diane. “And I said, ‘Mrs. Robinson, I don’t even know right now.’ And she said, ‘You bring that baby over here.’” Diane says she offered to pay Mama, but my mother told her, “You’re not paying me to do nothing; just bring that baby over here, and don’t even think about taking that child anywhere else.”
When Diane came to pick up her little girl each day, “She was clean and she was happy,” recalls Diane. “And more than a few times, she was rolling around with a couple other little babies.”
My friend Stephanie has her own story: She’d moved to New York and was struggling, unhappy, living in a cramped one-bedroom with a roommate she didn’t get along with. My mother visited us both, saw Stephanie’s situation, and later sent her “a little piece of money,” as she called it—five hundred dollars to help her move into her own place. “I never said to her, ‘Oh, I’m overwhelmed,’ says Stephanie. “But she could see, and just the fact that she offered that encouragement, that extra help that my own mom wasn’t able to offer, was such a sweet thing to me.”
My mother deeply wanted us all, Diane, Lisa, Stephanie, me, and other young women she cared about, to pursue our education—and yes, if need be find a life outside Detroit, which had become unrecognizable from the Motor City she’d migrated to three decades before. While I remember two black street gangs, the Errol Flynns and the BKs, when I was growing up in the seventies, Detroit had now entered into what local criminologists refer to as one of the most violent eras of crime in American history, with hundreds and hundreds of gang-related and drug-trade homicides. The former head of Detroit’s DEA, Robert De Fauw, quoted in an exposé by journalist Scott M. Burnstein, said of that time: “The streets were decaying, people were fleeing the city in masses and the dope peddlers took over what was left.”
Further terrorizing residents was the notorious Devil’s Night, a uniquely Detroit phenomenon of a largely harmless tradition run amok. Since the late 1970s, each year on October thirtieth, vandals set fire to buildings “for fun.” That number had grown exponentially year by year to include hundreds of fires throughout the city, prompting watch groups to patrol their own streets that night. Meanwhile, into this morass the State of Michigan introduced the Daily 4 lottery game, in which a player must match four winning numbers. That meant much higher odds but also much higher payouts: $5,000 for a $1 bet, versus the Daily 3’s $500 for the same $1. Mama was confident that this new four-digit game would have no impact on her three-digit-based Numbers business. It was an extra gambling option, sure, but it was hard enough to hit the three-digit, she insisted. People wanted better odds than the Daily 4’s 10,000-to-1.
The following spring, I graduated from Spelman. It was such a communal celebration that even Buddy, our upstairs tenant, flew to Atlanta to join in the festivities. Shirley Chisholm gave the commencement address. As the first African-American woman to run for Congress, and also for president, her campaign slogan had been “Unbought and Unbossed.” Mama enjoyed her speech, later telling us all at my graduation dinner, “You know what I really like about Shirley Chisholm? She didn’t wait around for somebody to accept her. She just accepted herself.”
Did the state’s latest encroachment weigh on my mother’s mind, prompting her to begin thinking beyond the Numbers business? Shortly after graduation, I mentioned to her that my friend Elliott was struggling to find backers for a local production of Purlie, the Tony Award–winning “spirited black musical” based on a play written by Ossie Davis. My mother surprised us all and announced that she’d like to invest in the production. While I’d spent my previous summers since sophomore year away from home (working in Atlanta, interning in New York, and traveling through Europe), I committed to staying in Detroit that summer and coproducing Purlie with Rita (Davis & Davis Productions).
The musical, set in the Jim Crow era, premiered at Detroit’s venerable Music Hall Center. Our local production starred Ruben Santiago, billed as “a New York actor!” Later adopting his mother’s maiden name, Santiago-Hudson would go on to become an accomplished actor, playwright, and theater director. In fact, Santiago-Hudson wrote and directed Lackawanna Blues, an off-Broadway play and later a film—his tribute to a spirited and loving surrogate mother who ran a boardinghouse in 1950s and 1960s Lackawanna, New York. (My nephew Tony loved the film version of Lackawanna Blues, always said the woman at its center, Nanny, reminded him of Grandma.)
Purlie was a family affair. I can still see my brother Anthony sitting in the theater in his suit and tie, looking handsome, Rita greeting guests in the lobby, Mama waiting quietly in a front-row seat; I remember thinking, We’re a family that does cool stuff. (My favorite line from Purlie: “It sure is fun being colored, when ain’t nobody looking.”)
“Your mother was down for it, and that was rare,” says Elliott, who brought the musical project to her. “We were in our early twenties and yet she had the vision to invest in someone so young; she was into giving people opportunities to pursue nontraditional things that at that time in the early eighties, black folks didn’t do.” He adds: “And I think it was more about that than ‘I’m going to get a return on my dollar.’”
Sadly, Mama didn’t get any returns. We weren’t as successful as we’d hoped, with the result that Mama’s total investment in the production—the entire $15,000—was lost. As inexperienced producers, we made lots of novice mistakes: gave away too many comps for the ten-day run; chose a union-house venue that cost too much and was too large to fill, didn’t do publicity soon or widely enough. I tried to put a good spin on this flop, saying how we “brought art to the masses.” Mama said that was ridiculous, no comfort at all. “Don’t try to make it into something that it’s not,” she snapped. “Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. And we lost.”
Our financial loss came just as law enforcement raided a large street Numbers operat
ion in the city. Twenty-one locations in Detroit and the suburbs were found to be part of a $60-million-to-$80-million-a-year Numbers ring owned and operated by the local Mafia, not much smaller than the $90-million-a-year operation J. Edgar Hoover’s sting had uncovered twelve years before. In this 1982 bust, Mama and other midlevel operators were again spared, but it showed that years after the Daily was introduced, and just months after the four-digit launched, law enforcement was hell-bent on protecting the state’s interest.
That fall I went to stay with a boyfriend in Atlanta, happy to escape our family’s theatrical-debut defeat. My mother never brought it up again, nor blamed anyone else for the financial loss. Her staunch belief was that just as you should never loan money you need back, you should never gamble money you can’t afford to lose. I suspect she saw her younger, risk-taking self in us when she signed on to the project. But I felt awful about our defeat. Several weeks later, I escaped farther, and for longer, by leaving for a year on a post-college fellowship, one that allowed me to travel to Nigeria and Kenya to study African women working in media. My experience with the continent was culturally shocking and life-changing and I wrote many letters home to Mama, some as long as fifteen pages, to share details with her. (Your letter was so interesting. I really did enjoy reading it, and I think that is what helped me to get out of the hospital, wrote my mother after getting my long-awaited first letter from Nigeria, just after she’d suffered another blood clot.)
The World According to Fannie Davis Page 20