4-02-2019
THE WORLD ACCORDING TO FANNIE DAVIS
My Mother’s Life in the Detroit Numbers
de
Bridgett M. Davis
|
NOTA DE LEITURA
Uma professora universitária de 58 anos, de cor,
narra a vida de sua mãe,
falecida em 29 de Maio de 1992. A falecida não era uma pessoa qualquer.
Era alguém que lutava pela vida de um modo bastante peculiar: organizava
uma lotaria clandestina de números de 3 algarismos, muito popular nos
anos 60, quando ainda não havia lotarias oficiais.
A mãe nascera em Nashville, Tennessee em 1928 e ali casou muito nova aos
18 anos e veio a ter 5 filhos (1 rapaz e 4 meninas) do casamento. Como
muitos outros pretos, migraram em 1956 para Detroit, Michigan. Tinham
então um rapaz, Anthony (nascido em 1953) e três meninas Débora (n.
1947), Dianna (n. 1950) e Rita (n. 1956). Esta última ficou 3 anos com
os avós em Nashville e só depois se reuniu com os pais. Em Detroit
nasceu depois em 1960 a autora, Bridgett M. Davis.
O pai foi trabalhar para a General Motors em Detroit, mas o salário era
magro para tanta gente e além disso, tinha períodos de doença,
nomeadamente hipertensão.
Na lotaria, Fannie começou por ser simples agente, recebendo as apostas
que colocava a seguir em quem as bancava, recebendo apenas uma
percentagem das contribuições e dos prémios. Era toda uma actividade
secreta. Conta a autora que uma vez a mãe se esquecera de passar ao
“banco” um número que saiu premiado e então teve de pagar ela mesma o
prémio, procurando dinheiro e moedas por toda a casa.
Passados poucos anos, decidiu “bancar” ela mesma as apostas. Deste modo
arrecadava todas as apostas não premiadas, mas tinha de pagar a
totalidade dos prémios dos clientes. Depressa arrecadou bastante
dinheiro e passou a viver bem.
A actividade tinha de ser secreta e exigia muitas precauções. Fannie
tinha de procurar bancos e funcionários bancários de muita confiança.
Tinha de moderar a actividade para não chamar a atenção das autoridades,
nem das mafias.
Durante uns bons 30 anos, a vida correu-lhe bem. A actividade só
diminuiu mesmo quando foram criadas as lotarias oficiais em 1972. Mas as
lotarias clandestinas não desapareceram logo. Isso só aconteceu mesmo
quando no final dos anos 80, surgiu
uma lotaria oficial igual à dos “números”, isto é, apostando três
algarismos.
O marido reformara-se por doença e as relações entre os dois eram
tensas, dormiam em quartos separados havia muito tempo. Em
Novembro de 1968 divorciaram-se e ele saiu de casa. Mas a autora ficou
sempre muito ligada ao pai, afinal era a mais nova. O pai veio a falecer
em Março de 1971. Já a mulher
havia casado com outro homem.
O rendimento do jogo permitiu sempre suportar as despesas da casa e
ainda os estudos da filha mais nova Bridgett, mesmo em Universidades
muito caras. Mais tarde ela tentou reembolsar a mãe mas acabou por não
conseguir.
A prosperidade veio porém tarde demais para permitir a formação dos
filhos mais velhos e isso terá condicionado a vida deles.
Nos anos 70, o filho Anthony começou a consumir heroína e nunca mais se
livrou até que foi assassinado numa rixa em 1986.
Tinha casado aos 18 anos, mas
depressa se separaram e confiaram o bébé à avó para o criar (é o
sobrinho, Anthony II ou Tony).
Em 1982, falecera a filha Débora aos 35 anos, de uma embolia pulmonar
(também ela consumira heroína).
No final de 1986, a filha Diana, de 37 anos, foi assassinada pelo marido
quando ela lhe pediu o divórcio; o marido suicidou-se a seguir.
A autora diz que nunca conseguiu perceber como podia a mãe sobreviver a
estes traumas. Sentiu a necessidade de lhe pedir uma explicação; anotou
Interview Mama, mas nunca o
fez.
O livro está muito bem escrito e acho que só exagera quando gasta
páginas a explicar as técnicas da lotaria dos números e a fantasia das
pessoas a procurarem supersticiosamente números vencedores.
Devemos também dizer, porém, que o livro é tanto a história da filha
como a da mãe.
https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2310&context=oa_dissertations
A doutoranda contactou a autora e o capítulo 12 da Tese narra a história da mãe da autora, com nomes trocados. |
Jan. 23, 2019
Remembering a Mother Whose Gambling Operation Was a Very Successful Secret
By Jennifer Szalai
The filmmaker and novelist
Bridgett M. Davis remembers her mother as a proud, confident woman who was also
meticulously private, because she had to be. By the time Fannie Drumwright Davis
Robinson died in 1992, she had been running an underground numbers
gambling operation out of her Detroit home
for more than 30 years, collecting her customers’ bets on three-digit numbers
and paying out if they won.
Fannie wanted her family to make full and forthright
use of the opportunities that her profits made possible, but the source of those
profits had to stay hidden. She taught her five children to keep their heads up
and their mouths shut.
“The World According to Fannie Davis” is a daughter’s
gesture of loving defiance, an act of reclamation, an absorbing portrait of her
mother in full. “The fact that Mama gave us an unapologetically good life by
taking others’ bets on three-digit numbers,” Davis writes, “is the secret I’ve
carried with me.” Blending memoir and social history, she recounts her mother’s
extraordinary story alongside the larger context of Motor City’s rise and fall.
Davis’s parents moved to Michigan from Nashville,
Tenn., in 1955, fleeing the Jim Crow South as part of the Great Migration. Their
first years in Detroit were rough. They squeezed into a rat-infested cold-water
flat with their children while Fannie’s ailing husband found intermittent work
at an auto plant. A fourth child only added to Fannie’s sense that she had to
figure something out, and fast.
Fannie’s brother worked at Detroit’s racetrack, and she
saw her chance. The numbers had been flourishing in Detroit, buoyed by the
steady incomes supplied by the auto industry, and the daily racing forms were
used to generate the winning three-digit combinations. After working as a bookie
for Eddie Wingate, a big numbers man notorious for his ruthlessness, she struck
out on her own. To make money, she needed volume; and to get volume, she
required an edge. Hers would be a reputation for reliability — which, in an
unregulated business, turned out to be worth a lot.
As the fifth and youngest child, Davis describes
herself as the first of Fannie’s children “born in comfort”; even though she
knew from a young age what her mother did for a living, she doesn’t remember
worrying about it much. She recalls sitting at the dining table of their
red-brick Colonial, eating Frosted Flakes and watching her mother take bets over
the phone. When young Davis wanted to be alone, she retreated to her own
playroom in the basement, replete with an Easy-Bake Oven and a toy chest from
F.A.O. Schwarz.
What Davis recognizes in hindsight is how precarious
that comfort and prosperity were. In 1960s Detroit, redlining meant that banks
would deny mortgages to black home buyers, no matter the source and regularity
of their income. Fannie couldn’t purchase that red-brick Colonial outright,
entering instead into a risky land contract with the seller. If she missed a
single payment, she would forfeit the house.
Fannie also had to worry about cash flow on the
business side. If one of her customers won big, she could get wiped out. Davis
depicts her mother as a disciplined businesswoman, making sure to limit bets on
popular numbers — “fancies” like 007 (for James Bond) and 313 (Detroit’s area
code) — so that she wouldn’t be too exposed. She was also superstitious, putting
her customers’ business in the freezer to “cool it off,” and assiduously
avoiding anyone or anything she deemed unlucky; aside from one Dinah Washington
song, she couldn’t bear to listen to the blues.
Fannie used her profits to provide for her family, but
as Davis movingly shows, the proceeds allowed for something more. The family
home wasn’t just a roof over their heads; it became “our armor against a world
designed to convince us, black working-class children of migrants, that we
didn’t deserve a good life.” Davis remembers how abundance afforded her “the
indulgence of daydreams” and a first-rate education. Fannie also put some of her
profits into the local community, supporting black-owned businesses and giving
out “a little piece of money” when someone needed it.
Davis links her mother’s
generosity with the bigger outlays of the established numbers operators, some of
whom used their profits to fund Detroit’s civil rights movement. “This makes me
wary of the charge that numbers had a negative impact on the black community,”
she writes. “If there were disadvantages, if some folks gambled too
much, and if others spent coins and dollars on the numbers that could’ve gone to
more so-called honorable means, then in my mind that is completely offset by the
invaluable ways numbers money was used.”
“Completely offset”? Is such an exacting calculation
possible, or even necessary? Gambling can be a source of hope and pleasure; it
can also be grinding addiction. Anyone ruined by it, or duped by a proprietor
less scrupulous than Fannie, might feel like a discounted item in Davis’s
ledger. Not to mention that Fannie herself took risks that were bigger than many
people would willingly hazard. She kept a gun in the linen closet and another in
her purse. One of Davis’s older sisters became so anxious that she wrote
pleading letters to God.
The private philanthropy that Davis commends leaves it
up to the people with means to apportion the money as they see fit — an
individual solution to what is arguably a structural problem. But then Fannie’s
experience taught her not to put much stock in public forms of redistribution.
“Black folks,” Davis writes, “had many, many reasons not to trust the
government.” She describes her mother’s politics as “a blend of progressive and
conservative,” girded by a firm belief in self-reliance. Davis herself calls the
Michigan state lottery, legalized in 1972 as a way to bring in government
revenue, a “usurping.”
Yet the novelist in Davis knows that Fannie’s whole
story was more complicated than a daughter’s protectiveness will allow. The
state lottery ended up being a mixed bag for Fannie. It was a competitor, yes,
but Davis concedes that it injected new energy into Fannie’s business by taking
some of the stigma away from gambling. Fannie started to use the daily lottery
as her source for three-digit numbers, shrewdly turning the state into her
backup bank; she could offset a customer’s heavy bet by playing the same number
in the lottery, which meant she no longer had to depend on the big numbers men
for cash flow.
“Nice irony,” Davis writes, though her mother might
have called it something else. Like so many other times in her remarkable life,
Fannie had found a way beat the odds.
The World According to Fannie Davis
My Mother’s Life in the Detroit Numbers
By Bridgett M. Davis
Illustrated. 308 pages. Little, Brown and Company.
$28.
·
Jan. 25, 2019
o
THE WORLD ACCORDING TO FANNIE DAVIS
My Mother’s Life in the Detroit
Numbers
By Bridgett M. Davis
“The World According to Fannie Davis” opens with an
extraordinary story. The author, Bridgett M. Davis, recalls going to school in
1960s Detroit as a 6-year-old black girl. She brings her work to the front of
the class for her teacher to inspect but the teacher, a white woman, has
something else on her mind. “You sure do have a lot of shoes,” she says. She
asks Davis what her parents do. Davis says her father “doesn’t work” and that
she doesn’t know what her mother does. Her teacher then asks for an inventory of
Davis’s shoes, and after the little girl stammers out a list she is told, “Ten
pairs is an awful lot.” The next day, when Davis wears a pair she forgot to
mention, the teacher snaps, “You didn’t mention you had white shoes.”
What makes this incident extraordinary is what happens
next, when Davis reports it to her mother, the Fannie Davis of the book’s title.
Fannie takes her daughter to Saks Fifth Avenue and buys her yet another pair of
shoes, yellow patent leather ones that she pays for with a $100 bill. Bridgett
notices that the white clerk looks at Fannie the way her teacher had looked at
her. Fannie, unfazed, tells her daughter, “You’re going to wear these to school
tomorrow. And you better tell that damn teacher of yours that you actually have
a dozen pairs of shoes.” The teacher “never says another word” to Bridgett.
All of
this is possible because Fannie is a numbers runner. “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,” Davis writes. “We lived well thanks to Mama and her numbers … My
mother’s message to black and white folks alike was clear: It’s nobody’s business what I do for my
children, nor how I manage to do it.”
Fannie was able to buy the trappings of middle-class life while laying the
foundation for generational wealth.
Bridgett M. Davis is a novelist, screenwriter and
creative writing professor. One of the running themes of her book is how her
mother’s work made Davis’s current life possible. What her mother did was
illegal, of course, and steeped in secrecy. Davis includes wonderful details
about growing up as the daughter of a numbers runner — the coins she and her
siblings had to roll, the way her mother counted cash so fast her hands were a
blur. She also remembers her mother kept two pistols: one in her pocketbook, the
other in the linen closet, “underneath the eyelet-trimmed sheets, lace
tablecloth and linen napkins.”
Davis lovingly describes a childhood full of creature
comforts — a beautiful house, designer clothing, countless toys and books. But
she juxtaposes nearly every detail of the good life with the slow decay of
Detroit around her, the killing of a black community through aggressive
policing, the spread of drug abuse and targeted neglect by the surrounding white
communities and politicians.
Davis accomplishes this through archival research,
interviews with family members and thumbnail sketches of America’s underground
economies, the Great Migration, housing segregation and politics in the
post-civil rights movement era. Especially exhilarating is her history of
lotteries. All 13 original colonies ran them and used the proceeds to fund
capital improvements. But by 1860, most states had become suspicious of
lotteries and had outlawed them precisely because of the egalitarian nature of
luck — a poor black person could win one. Denmark Vesey, Davis tells us, was one
such example. He used his winnings from a 1799 lottery to buy his freedom; later
he founded the African Methodist Church in Charleston and led a famous rebellion
against slaveholders in 1822. Lotteries, then, had the potential to upend the
systems the states ran on — no wonder they were outlawed for so long. (States
did not begin to reintroduce legal lotteries until 1964.)
Davis’s book is accessible, her language plain and
direct. She has a cleareyed understanding of what it means to be poor and what
kind of opportunities money creates. At one point, she notes that a small family
loan “gave my mother what poverty did not: time to think.”
“The World According to Fannie Davis” would make a
thrilling film. That’s probably a testament to Davis’s screenwriting background.
But the arc of her mother’s story may be too radical for most production
companies: A black woman unapologetically engages in criminal activity and
excels at it, making a better life for her family, no moralizing included.
Thrumming beneath every sentence is an important
question: “Who gets to be lucky?” Our culture loves stories of the lucky
criminal, the Mafioso who gets away with it all, but that person is usually a
white man. We need more stories like Fannie’s — the triumph and good life of a
lucky black woman in a deeply corrupt world.
11/01/2018
Library Journal
By all accounts, Fannie Davis was a lucky woman. Moving from segregated Nashville to Detroit in the 1950s, she realized her husband, John T, was unable to support the family as an autoworker. She made the choice to start a homegrown business as a bookie for the Numbers, a "ubiquitous" lottery. Her success allowed her to provide for her family better than most blacks or women could hope for at the time. But in 1972, when Michigan voted to lift the legislative ban on a state lottery and then went from a weekly to daily lottery in 1977, the government was running their own numbers game. Fannie sustained her business for more than 30 years, but this challenge ended her reign. Novelist Davis (journalism, Baruch Coll., CUNY; Into the Go-Slow) switches to nonfiction to recount her mother's "triumphant Great Migration tale." But this isn't Fanny's story alone, it's also a sociological urban history of Detroit as a Northern sanctuary city that still suffered racial constraints.
VERDICT The
Numbers' background is rarely explored, and works such as Don Liddick's The
Mob's Daily Number lack the personal connection Davis so vividly exploits in
this successful combination of family and sociological history.
—Jessica Bushore, Xenia, OH
2018-10-15
KIRKUS REVIEWS
A remarkable story of a mother whose
"ingenuity and talent and dogged pursuit of happiness made possible [her
family's] beautiful home, brimming refrigerator and quality education."Fannie
Davis was an amazing woman. Sharp and unwilling to be hemmed in by the dual
restrictions of race and gender, she did what it took to raise a family and to
uplift a community. In 1960s and '70s Detroit, she ran the "Numbers," an illegal
lottery that was nonetheless central to many urban and especially
African-American communities, especially in the era before states realized that
licit gambling could be a lucrative trade and even as they cracked down on the
gambling they defined as illicit. Above all, Fannie Davis was a mother. In this
admiring and highly compelling memoir, Bridgett Davis (Creative, Film and
Narrative Writing/Baruch Coll.; Into the Go-Slow, 2014, etc.) tells the
story of her beloved mother. The author knew that her mom's role in the Numbers
had to be kept secret, but she also knew that it was not shameful. Placing her
subject in the larger historical contexts of the African-American and urban
experiences and the histories of Detroit and of underground entrepreneurship
embodied in the Numbers, and framing it within numerous vital postwar trends,
the author is especially insightful about how her mother embodied the emergence
of a "blue collar, black-bourgeoisie." Although there was considerable risk in
running the Numbers, it also provided a path forward to a comfortable lifestyle
otherwise nearly unimaginable. While critics liked to paint the game as a path
toward dissolution, for the author—and many others—it was anything but. This is
not a story about capitalizing on degeneracy. It is one of hope and hustling in
a world where to have the former almost demanded the latter. This outstanding
book is a tribute to one woman but will surely speak to the experiences of many.