The World According to Fannie Davis

by Bridgett M. Davis

  I took home from the hospital Mama’s stylish black hobo-style leather purse with gold studded designs on the front. I held it up to my nose, sniffed its perfumy smell. It smelled like her. It still does. Inside her purse, the things she carried were a combination of quotidian and indulgent, expected and surprising. She carried two Bic pens, a pair of tan hospital footies, a bobby pin, and a Dentyne gum wrapper; in its own Ziploc bag, she carried loose credit cards: Optima, Sears, Saks, Jacobson’s, Michigan Bankard Visa, Discover, and an American Express in her grandson, Anthony Davis’s, name. She also carried a green checkbook for American Express Centurion Bank’s line of credit, its ledger recording checks written to “Cash” for $1,000 and $500, and another to “Bridgett Davis” for $1,000.

  A small purple wallet brimmed with business cards for an antiques store in Washington, Michigan, that sold “Leaded & Beveled Glass Doors & Windows”; Dr. Kadro, her surgeon (on the back of which she’d written Tony’s Atlanta telephone number); an artist in Utica, Michigan, who specialized in watercolor and egg tempera paintings; a college planning coordinator/consultant (for herself, perhaps); and Special Touch Nails (with appointments for a manicure one week and a pedicure the next). Inside a green Italian-leather wallet, she carried her driver’s license, with its date of birth making her ten years younger, and certificates of insurance for three different autos: a 1991 Chevrolet Camaro (Tony’s); a 1989 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme SL (hers), and a 1984 Mercury Marquis (whose?). She carried a receipt from Jacobson’s for a purse and four pairs of shoes totaling $569.92, and the rest of her credit cards: American Express Gold, Carte Blanche, Michigan Bankard MasterCard, Comerica MasterCard, Winkelman’s, Lane Bryant, and American Express Platinum. In there too was Unity School of Christianity’s Airplane Blessing. (This is God’s airplane. His intelligence is in every part of it. I rest secure in His protecting presence, and all is well.)

  In a side pocket of her purse, written on large scratch-pad paper in her own handwriting, she carried a rundown combination of two different four-digit numbers she planned to play, and for how much:

  1112—2.00

  1211—3.00

  1121—7.00

  1101—2.00

  1110—2.00

  0111—2.00

  1011—2.00

  1101—50—50

  1121—50—50

  She also carried a Lotto ticket for five plays, totaling $5, dated February 26, 1992. I suspect that was the last lottery she played.

  The funeral was packed with hundreds of people. I wore a brand-new white skirt suit, its jacket lapel trimmed in faux pearls, which I promptly gave to Goodwill afterward. During the family hour, as we greeted visitors, a woman came up to me and grabbed my hand. I’d never met her. She said she was a psychic, and that late one night my mother had phoned her to say she was dying, and to ask how her children and grandchild would fare in the years ahead, without her. “I told her not to worry, you’d all be fine,” this woman said to me. I thanked her. Reverend Stotts, Mama’s beloved pastor, spoke movingly, I’m told, sharing rich details about my mother’s special place in the world, and offering comforting words to us, the bereaved. But my mind was stuck on the fact that Mama had discussed dying with a stranger; why, I wondered, was that new knowledge so devastating to me? All I could later recall of Reverend Stotts’s eulogy was his saying how peaceful and calm he felt every time he entered my mother’s spacious blue living room.

  Toward the end of the service, Rita walked up to the casket and yelled out, “Get up, Mama, get up!” I rose, rushed over, guided my sister back to the seat beside me on the church’s front pew, and held her hand in mine.

  I wrote the obituary, attempting to capture my mother’s life in 375 words. An excerpt:

  A Service of Memory Celebrating

  the Life of Fannie M. Robinson

  Fannie was a beautiful woman with a feisty personality and many interests. She loved to travel to new places, to read voraciously, to buy lovely furnishings and clothing and to hold lively conversations with countless friends and acquaintances. An independent, proud spirit, she marched through life providing others with a stellar example of strength and spiritual will. Mired in the belief that “God helps those who help themselves,” Fannie flourished in the face of challenges and used her resourcefulness to create a life of abundance and comfort for her family.…Throughout her life, Fannie was there, giving support to those who asked and those who didn’t. These things Fannie did without comment. She believed in doing for others and not discussing what had been done.…it is in the lingering, warm midst of that flow of love that we celebrate Fannie’s life—a life lived with compassion and lived with dignity.

  At her death, I was the same age my mother had been when I was born. She’d lived half her life when she had me. I may have already lived half of mine.…I’m afraid of dying, I noted in my journal, then added: I think I’m faking sanity…I don’t know who I am anymore.

  “You’re an orphan now,” said John, the chair of the English department at my college. I’d just returned to work and was so stunned by that word, orphan, that I headed back to my office, closed the door, and sat there staring at nothing. I felt numb. On the wall hung the student newspaper article about me. After the funeral, I’d found the laminated copy in Mama’s bedroom, bent and worn from her showing it to everyone. I looked up at that framed story, its headline proclaiming, BARUCH GETS A NEW ENGLISH PROFESSOR—MAKING AN IMPACT IS HIGH ON HER PRIORITY LIST, and it seemed to mock me. What does it matter how well I do my job? I thought. Who would care? For the first time in my life, I had no one to make proud. I’d lost her, and myself as hers. I wanted to quit.

  But Rita wanted to keep Mama’s Numbers business aloft. This was difficult, given that she worked full-time as a special-education teacher in a Detroit public high school, so was effectively choosing to manage two careers. But she wanted to honor Mama’s last wish and see our nephew, Tony, complete college; revenue from the business allowed him to remain at Clark Atlanta University. And so, each morning before she went to work, and in the afternoons after work, Rita took customers’ numbers. In the evenings, she checked the business for hits and paid out winnings. On the weekends, she took more numbers, collected payments, ran customers’ tapes, and purchased lottery tickets daily from the corner party store, to thwart a hit’s breaking her modest bank. I was no help at all, living in New York, avoiding Detroit, which felt to me like the very capital of loss. Meanwhile, in September of that year, the Michigan lottery set an all-time-high annual sales record of over $1.2 billion.

  While Rita processed her grief by stepping in and running our mother’s business, “doing what Mama would want,” I desperately needed to believe that Mama was still with me, if only in spiritual form. I searched for her presence everywhere and in all kinds of situations. There were other times, though, when clinging to the idea of her with me in spirit was not working. It hit me hard again, I wrote in my journal. She’s dead. I dreamed about her often, and cried often. I dreamed of crying often. Missing her with a vengeance, I found the pain achingly physical; my chest hurt constantly. I did not want to do the work of living without her, and I had epiphanies of guilt. I could have accommodated her more if I’d accepted her human frailty more, I wrote. I feel guilty for taking that trip to St. Thomas, for not spending January at home, for not acknowledging Mama’s fear and pain, for not being there for her.

  Meanwhile, my attitude to the outside world was “Fuck everything else. I lost my mother.” But I secretly regretted that I was so private, suffering alone, and lonely without someone “who loves me for me,” to help me through it. I haven’t had a genuine, heartfelt conversation in a long, long time, I lamented. And my friends? Some are wonderful, some haven’t bothered. Life goes on.

  Later that fall, I went home and packed up the things I wanted. In the bathroom, atop the long marble counter, sat her mirrored brass dressing room tray, overflowing with skin care products just as she’d left them. She wore very little makeup,
but I did find her Charles of the Ritz Feather Touch Face Powder and her Fashion Fair rouge and lipstick. What she loved most were face creams, and she had a wondrous variety. I grabbed them all, the Clarins Toning Lotion, Lancôme Tonique Douceur, Clinique Crystal Clear Cleansing Oil, Neutrogena night cream, the pretty jar of La Prairie Cellular Moisturizer, and tossed them into my travel bag. I made sure to take the Estée Lauder Youth Dew Eau de Parfum, her lifetime fragrance in the classic turquoise bottle, which I spritzed on my bed pillow for weeks; I also grabbed from the tub’s rim her giant bottles of Vitabath and Jean Naté After Bath Splash, later using them up on long, teary baths in hot-to-cold water. From the kitchen I took her cookbooks, and from her bedroom the natural healing and Unity books. I didn’t take the Man, Myth and Magic encyclopedia from the den shelf, or her books by Edgar Cayce or Bertrand Russell, and I later regretted that; just running my eyes across those titles took me back into her world and affirmed anew that who I was came from who she’d been. I got other things, thanks to Rita: the family sofa, Mama’s diamond-encrusted watch, some nightgowns, two Hermès scarves (one of which I gave to my cousin Lisa; the other I lost), some pairs of shoes that didn’t fit me, linen, her china…but now I wish I’d taken even more, like the Super 8 footage my stepfather shot of Mama over the years. I didn’t think to get those home movies from him, and now they’re gone.

  The loss of her moving image, like the loss of the sound of her voice (which I never recorded), still hurts. What, I ask myself, were the rhythms of her speech, the cadences and inflections? How would I never again hear her distinctive Southern way of speaking, never again hear her pronounce the last name Thompson as “TOMEson,” the state Hawaii as “Ha-WHY-YUH” and the word mature as “maTOUR”? Never again witness how she moved, how she walked with her chin out, back straight and the slightest switch in her hips? Photos simply don’t bring her to life.

  That trip to Detroit made me fully realize she was gone. When I returned to New York, I reached a new depth of despair—late-night drinking, falling asleep while meeting with a student, crying and more crying, insomnia, anger, bitchiness, jealousy toward mothered friends. I felt bereft and deformed, as though I’d suffered an amputation of a limb I could still feel but couldn’t touch.

  “It is a pain that reaches all the way down to your ligaments and bones,” writes journalist David Ferguson about losing a mother. “Our mothers were our first firmament, literally, our first homes, the universe from whose substance we were formed.”

  Frightened by my own sorrow, I entered therapy for the first time. I recently found a laundry list of topics I wanted to bring up in my early sessions: my mood swings and feelings of inadequacy; my guilt; and my deep disappointment at not having accomplished the Big Three before Mama died: a beautiful wedding for her to attend; a grandchild to spoil; and a real success to make her proud. I need to know where I’m headed emotionally without her, I scribbled at the bottom of that list. Linda, my therapist, later said I needed to create a new emotional relationship with myself, and others, to compensate for what I no longer had with my mother. I told her I had no idea how to do that, and Linda said, “Just look at how great your capacity to love another person is.”

  My therapist also tried to help me wrestle with my guilt. I couldn’t understand how I had failed the person I loved more than anyone on earth. Yet my mother wanted to protect me, and for a long time that meant protecting me from the truth of her condition. In 617 Crawford, Mama wrote in Rose’s voice: She knew all along she was going to die. Why didn’t she tell me?…There was a sealed letter for me. A week passed before I could bring myself to open the letter. She started off by saying I am sorry for not telling you. I had known for some time. And in a different color ink, clearly the last lines added to the story, lines I believe she composed toward the end, Mama wrote: To tell you would only have made matters worse.

  But at the same time, my mother expected me to do right by her when it was evident just how sick she was. I will always stay with you and see after you, says Rose in Mama’s story. You haven’t been too well lately.

  This I must face: I was all too willing to remain in denial about a frightening truth I refused to accept. And my mother’s protectiveness made that easy. With others handling her care, my denial blossomed. As the youngest, I essentially got to act like the spoiled child I was. And it cost me then and now.

  While I worked through my depression, for nine months Rita managed to juggle the business alongside her teaching, before doing both became increasingly untenable. Finally, in January of 1993, she announced that she was giving it all up, and officially closed the Numbers business that Mama had launched thirty-five years before. If you should ever decide to close the place do so, and if you want to continue to run it, do that too, Minnie tells Rose. Later, Minnie dies three weeks after Rose’s twenty-first birthday, which turns out to be “on the ninth of May.” (Minnie kept her promise. She stayed through my first year at Vanderbilt. She got everything in order.) Mama’s grandson, Tony, turned twenty-one that summer and finished his last three semesters of college with help from us, his aunts.

  Suffocating from my grief, I no longer wanted to be part of the Fort Greene, Brooklyn, neighborhood where I’d lived for five years; I sought a fresh start where no one knew me, where no one would know what I’d lost, and set out to do the improbable—find a Manhattan apartment quickly. I did just that, signing a lease on the first anniversary of my mother’s death. The date, 5/29, was a 7, and I remain convinced that Mama gifted me that West Fourteenth Street one-bedroom triplex, still caring for me from the spirit world.

  May 29, 1993—1st-Year anniversary

  In one year, it’s all different. Without her.…

  I see this layer of my life peeling off: That huge part of me that was a daughter before all else…not wanting to be a fool for any man (she’d never approve) and depending on her love (all encompassing) as the litmus test for or the substitute for others’ love. My needs were lessened because I had her. All of them: emotional, financial and even spiritual.

  Now she’s gone.

  And I’m being forced to grow up, to really handle my own shit, to be more than a pseudo-independent woman. I’m truly “out here on my own.”

  It’s as though she died so I could live.

  Uncharacteristically, once in my new Manhattan space, I left my computer inside its box. For two years I’d been writing as if running out of time, spending hours and hours each day frenetically working on both the novel and the screenplay, determined to make my mother proud, on autopilot even after she died. Now I couldn’t bring myself to unpack the computer. For the first time in years, I couldn’t write. And without the will or ability to dive back into “the work,” I felt as though I’d suffered yet another devastating loss. I’m just this mixture of heartbreak, failure and grief, I wrote.

  Meanwhile, Michael Terrell still had big hopes for Broadstreet, dreams he’d nurtured since he’d bought the house from my mother in 1988. He’d created blueprints with an architect, renderings that brought to life his plans, which included turning the third-floor attic into a master bedroom with a walk-in closet, en suite bathroom, and small study area. “That was going to be my little penthouse up there,” he tells me. “I was just gonna make it a grand and beautiful place to live.” And he was going to put period-style railings and woodwork back into the house, so it could have as many original details as possible; he’d done the research and found places where he could buy handcrafted 1920s-style materials.

  “I designated a room for Mikey”—his son—“and all the little things I was going to do to make this little room special,” he says. “All my fantasies kicked in.”

  The house was so well built, with lath and plaster where drywall or Sheetrock might be, that it had withstood the 1986 fire. And its frame was only singed in a few spots. “It looked terrible, but it was mainly superficial damage,” recalls Michael. He gutted the house and began rewiring. He set up his tools and worktable in the living r
oom and often slept in the basement. But vandals kicked in his door, ripped out the new circuit-breaker panel, stole some of his tools, damaged the work he’d done. Still determined, Michael boarded up everything and tried to work quickly enough so he could occupy the house and protect it. My mother had had security doors installed, but thieves ripped out those doors. “I said, ‘My God, would these people leave me alone?’” says Michael.

  This time, he made the house like a fortress, blocking all the windows and all other points of entry, and began working on the renovations yet again. But progress was slow and many months went by—my mother died in the interim—and then Rita rang him one afternoon and said, “Mike, the fire department called to tell us that Broadstreet is on fire.”

  When he got to the house, “It was practically burnt to the ground,” he says. “I stood on that sidewalk in front of the house, and I just cried.” He pauses, unable to speak for several seconds. “I still had planned to make that my home.”

  Defeated, and knowing he would only want to rebuild a house of the same caliber, a daunting prospect he simply couldn’t afford, and now facing a huge property tax bill, Michael let the City of Detroit take Broadstreet. On June 19, 1994, the house my mother had bought thirty-three years before “on contract” from Mr. Prince, the white man she remained grateful to for not “doing her dirty,” was razed by the city. Its lot was divided between the two homeowners on either side; each expanded her front yard, and together they erected a chain link fence across the divide.

  I avoided going home for most of that summer, even though I had no reason not to—I certainly wasn’t writing. Finally I made myself get on an airplane. In Detroit for several days, I waited until the last possible moment before I got into my rental car and drove to Livernois Avenue, made a left at Buena Vista, turned right onto Broadstreet Avenue, and pulled up to what once was 12836. As the car idled, I stared in disbelief at the gaping hole where our family home used to be.