Mama and Her Numbers

impressed with myself for remembering the possessive apostrophe. She took one look and said, you can't put my business out in the street like that. Looking back, this was the moment when I became consciously aware that I must keep my admiration from my mother's work a private experience. Before I had known to keep her livelihood of secret, but hadn't yet formed an opinion of feldny pride in when Mamma actually did for a living. Now I understood that my pride for her also had to be kept a secret,

as did all the evidence of her work. That's Brigette M. Davis reading from her memoir The World according to Fanny Davis. Fanny is Brigette's mom, and Fanny was a numbers runner in Detroit in the nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies. This is how she supported her family in style and provided for their future. And Brigette grew up knowing one thing for sure. Never ever was she to breathe a word to a soul about what her mama did for a living.

I'm Danny should euro and this is family secrets, the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves. At the time I was experiencing it, I thought it was normal my childhood because there were many rituals that happened regularly. I could listen to my mother on the phone every day taking her customers beds, and it was like a

daytime lullaby. I loved it. It didn't seem odd to me at all to hear this recitation of numbers right by her, and then every evening we were all going to wait to hear what the day's winning numbers were. And that's how it worked if you were in a household where your parents, in my case, my mom was actually a numbers runner. It was simply a precursor to the lottery, and it existed decades before the state got around to taking it over, So that was the way

that you lived in that kind of elsehold. And I thought, in an odd way, the structure was comforting because I knew it. To count on, Let's go all the way back, literally though, to Detroit the house here. We were in this home that was a colonial, four bedroom brick house. It was very traditional looking and for us, extremely spacious. There was seven of us and all the sisters shared a room. My brother had his own room, and then there was my parents room, so we all had our space.

And what I loved about it as a child is that it really did have this incredibly fascinating addict where I could go up and just play and imagine all kinds of things. I was as many writers as a child, I was very caught up in my own imagination. I could spend hours in my own head, and the attic was a great place to do that because I could look out that window and see everything in front of me, the entire goings on of the street. But the basement

was the same way. It was this gorgeous space that it turns out my mother had uh she renovated it so it became like a lounge. And it was the sixties, so there was wood paneling, there was a wrap around bar that was you know, necessary back then. And because I had all these siblings who were teenagers, there were what I thought was parties every night. When I looked back, it couldn't have been every night, but in my memory

it was. It was all of my siblings friends coming in the side door and running down the steps and listening to lots of Motown. You know, we were in Detroit, so Motown was our soundtrack, and those records were spinning regularly constantly, and I remember laughter and people playing cards and smoke and you know, this sort of sense that it was a social hub. So that was happening, and at the same time, my mother was also inviting lots of people into the home because she was a magnet

for people. They loved being around her. She really was what we call a pillar of the community, but no one used that term. She was just Fanny, Miss Fanny, and her doors were open, so people who were really wanting to come over and have a meal knew they could do that at Fanny's house. If they needed advice, they could come to her. If you know, a young woman was struggling in her marriage and things were a little crazy. My mother would say, why don't you stay

here a few days until things cool off. So there were always these people in the house. My sister used to call a Grand Central station. The doorbell was always ringing, the doors were swinging open, the phone was going off all the time. Describe Fanny for me, I mean, what did she look like, what did she wear, what was her style, what her voice sounds. So my mom was really pretty. I often say that everyone thinks their mother is beautiful, but mine really was. And we would say it.

The girls would say, Mama is prettier than any of us. You know. She got the looks, but she wasn't in any way arrogant or vain. She was just self assured and she was pretty simple in her style in the sense that my mom really only wore makeup if she was going somewhere special. She wasn't someone to wear makeup. She had this beautiful, naturally long, thick hair, which some

days she would comb and some days she wouldn't. And the days she didn't want to comb her hair as she put an Aramis scarf around it and cover it up. She didn't shy away from luxurious things. She loved minx and she liked beautiful leather purses before it was a thing. She also liked to lounge around the house in these gorgeous I call them ensembles, but they were basically beautiful gowns and matching robes, and she had an array of them, and they were so pretty. My favorite was just lace

trimmed with this ribbon woven through it. Gorgeous, you know, white with pink trim. Yeah, sitting there looking lovely but taking care of business. Brigette and her family lived in the heart of Detroit. Fanny bought the house in from a man named Mr. Prince during a time of white flight. Whites were leaving the city and droves and they were selling their homes to blacks. So this was a neighborhood called Russell Woods, upscale, but not as tony as Gross Point,

where the automagnates lived. In the nine sixties, the auto industry in Detroit was doing what it was supposed to do, creating a solid middle class, and much of that middle class was black, backed by strong unions and able to buy their own homes. Then, as the sixties progressed, and the civil rights movement really got a foot. Um. You could see, you could feel the changes. I was just

a child, but I could feel this thing that was rumbling. Um. This these tensions that I couldn't have given a name to, but they were there, these racial tensions happening in the city. And of course it all combusted in ninety seven with the race riots, as they've called them in the media. Detroitters called the uprising or the Great Rebellion. But that was the moment when um, things really as in many other cities, urban centers, in the city, in the country, Uh,

things really came to a head. And there were riots that lasted across five days. And you have memories of this. I have memories. You were a little kid. I was a kid, but I definitely remember it. It was sixty seven, forgive me, you know, King was assassinated and the rise of sixty seven, and those years collapsed for me because they were both traumatic, and I was seven and eight, and I remember them almost as though they merge in my mind. One long year of just trauma. Yeah, that's

what trauma does. We're going to pause for a moment. So there's a story about the way Fanny was able to buy that house from Mr Prince, a story that Brigette really only learned when she began to do research for her book. It says something about the way our parents present our lives to us, and the way as children we don't tend to question this stories we received. In Brigette's case, all her life, what she knew was that her mother bought their beautiful family home on contract,

as it was called. She essentially went into this arrangement one on one with the seller Mr Prince, and didn't involve a bank, and essentially bought it from him that way, so that she paid him a mortgage. Every month paid on the mortgage, and when she was done paying for it, it was hers. And it seemed to me that she was making that choice because she had this unorthodox profession. I always thought, well into my adulthood that well, she

couldn't show a pay stuff. My dad wasn't able to work, he was disabled, so she had to figure out this

creative way to buy home. It was only years later, while working on this book that I found out that, in fact, because she was a quote unquote Negro woman, she wasn't allowed to get a mortgage in the ways that most Americans can because there was this thing called redlining, and it it enabled the Federal Housing Authority to impose these boundaries around so called high risk communities and neighborhoods. What made it high risk? If one black family lived

in that community, it was high risk. So what did that mean? They wouldn't ensure the loans that banks were lending. So banks could say, we're not lending to you because we can't get this loan insured by the f h A. It's too risky. And so it trickled throughout the real estate community. Right realtors wouldn't show homes just two blacks and certain communities, or sell their homes to them, sell certain homes to them. And so imagine having the means, but not being able to buy a house only because

of the color of your skin. You know, this thing that is the symbol of your American dream. It really is your foothold into the middle class. And so that infuriated me when I learned it. Never did I hear my mother talk about it that way or in that context. But I have to tell you, it's pretty predatory because it is essentially like renting your home, so you have all the risk of renting and none of the none

of the benefits of owning. You put a huge deposit down and you never actually build equity in the home. The seller continues to hold the title and you don't get the d to the property until you've completely paid for it um And so if you, for instance, can't make one payment, if you're late one month, the seller can take the house back. So in fact, Fanny was creating this, there was tremendous risk, and what she was doing it was the only thing she could do to

buy a house. But there was this tremendous risk, and yet you and your siblings I didn't know it. We didn't know it was. It was there somewhere, you know, thrumming in the underbelly of it all. Yeah. I suspect my older siblings understood more because they were older. Now, what I felt was Mr Prince coming to our home every month to collect his mortgage payment. And I look back on that and I thought, did he not trust her to send him a check, you know, or he

was still checking on his investment in a way. While there you go, there's that possibility too. And I didn't know why, but I just felt every month that he came that I was almost holding my breath until he left to be able to say, okay, everything's all right. It was serious business. Fanny had bought this home in a risky manner and she had to trust that Mr Prince would do right by her. On top of this, her livelihood was risky when it came to her income.

There were no guarantees and she didn't have the space to miss a single payment or she could lose everything. Describe what running the numbers is for the uninitiated. Running the numbers is a a way of being engaged in this entirely underground but sprawling lottery business that proliferated throughout much of the country underneath the radar, and it generated

millions of dollars in many cities throughout the country. It was literally exactly like today's lottery in that today you can go and play a lottery at any corner bodega and you can say, here's three digits, I want to play nine too, and I want to play them for a dollar, And if those numbers come out, it's all electronic now, so they just randomly choose those numbers. If the number comes out, you could win five dollars because the payoff is five one. Here's how it worked back then.

The winning numbers were arrived at using a convoluted system involving the racing forms from certain race tracks like the fair Grounds in New Orleans or Aqueduct in New York. Once the winning numbers were determined, someone high up in Detroit's racket received it through a long distance call from the numbers service boss in Chicago. The winning numbers hit the streets and spread by word of mouth. Numbers men told their bankers, who told their bookers, who told their customers,

who told other customers, and so on. One of Brigette's jobs was to call her mother's customers and give them the winning combination. That system, which either way in New York they called numbers, is exactly what my mom was doing back in Detroit as a numbers runner. She and many many others were basically engaged in and sort of unofficial knows. I like to call it an informal lottery system. You know, there was a precursor to even the numbers.

There was a game called Policy that was completely invented by and run by whites, and it proliferated throughout the country prior to this new game that was introduced by one man in Harlem who came up with an elegant system, a lot less complicated than what had come before it. So this black man creates the numbers, and it thrives in Harlem, and it moves across the country, and yes, within a very short amount of time, others wanted in

because it generated millions of dollars. We saw it as this communal business that was turning dollars over in the community many times, right, and providing all of these legitimate services through that money. Um. So it's like I knew that it was. I now know that it was happening everywhere and in many communities. Before they moved to Detroit. Before the numbers running and began, Brigette's parents, like millions of other blacks, migrated north as part of the second

wave of the Great Migration. This was the mid nineteen fifties, and at that point they had three small children. When they arrived in Detroit from Nashville. Brigette's father thought he'd find work in the factories, which he did, but it was difficult, inconsistent. Eventually he became disabled and couldn't work regularly. So what was Fanny to do. My mom has these young children, she's left her home. You know, all they've ever known was in Nashville, air she her family had

been for generations. My mom's grandfather was born into slavery in Nashville. That's how far back their roots went. So she's in this new northern city, tough place. The discrimination has its own flavor, and she's not prepared for it. And she checks out the landscape and realizes that se Detroit's black women are either doing day work, which means, you know, cleaning white women's homes, or they are in really low wrong jobs in these factories, making less than

the men, or they're cleaning offices at night. And as she used to say, it seemed risky to her to not figure out something else, because the idea of leaving her children at home while she took one of these jobs for very low pay and letting them raise themselves was not an option. And so she started looking for something else to do. And she didn't have to look

that far actually, because my mom was pretty observant. She was a quick study, and everywhere around her her neighbors were playing the numbers, you know, betting their fifty cents, their quarter, their dollar, not a lot of money, but she saw that it was a brisk business. So as a child, you I know your mom is running numbers, and it's not remotely hidden from you or your siblings. It's it seems like it's almost sort of command central

of the home. You know she's there and and this is her job, and she's not remotely ashamed of it. Um none of you are, but you also know that it must be kept a secret. Yes, I've been asked, how is it that your mother never got caught? And I don't have an actual answer for that. I think she was lucky. But also my mother was really cautious and really smart, and I think there were a few things that she did to really mitigate, you know, the

risk of exposure. And one of them was my mother only had customers through word of mouth, so she'd only take your business if you came highly recommended. There was that, and even though we had a household that felt like grand central station, my mother was actually careful about who came into the house. So there was that piece as well. And also she wasn't flashy. She loved beautiful things, but

she was understated. I think that was really important too, and then she had to take some very practical measures. My mother had a lovely I say it's lovely because I thought it was safe that she kept in her bedroom closet. It was a metal safe with the combination lock, and that's where she kept the day's proceeds. That's where she kept the business. The cash was all in that

combination lock in her bedroom closet. She also carried a pistol in her purse, and there was another one that remained in the house in the linen closet underneath the islet trimmed table claws and the lace napkins, and we

all knew it was there, and we understood. We actually felt safer knowing it was there, because my mom was not only worried about exposure and risk that could lead to arrest, she also had to worry about being in a cash business and and it getting out that that maybe there's a lot of cash and family's house, and so there was that precaution as well. You know, she was really constantly trying to safeguard against a lot of different things. We're going to take a quick break. We'll

be back in a moment. Brishette grows up in a mixed race neighborhood and goes to a mixed school. She lived on the street that's around the corner from Diana Ross and the Supremes. They've all just begun to rise, to start them, and all three of the supremes decided to buy homes on the same block. Diana Ross gets the big corner home. So it's a neighborhood of contrasts

and also of tensions simmering beneath the surface. I was in first grade and I was just in my class, showing my teacher and assignment, and she said to me, literally out of nowhere, you sure do have a lot of shoes. And the thing that was striking is that the week before, she had asked me what my father did for a living. I'm six years old. I said the truth. I said, he doesn't work, which because by then he really had become disabled. And then she said, well,

what does your mother do? Oh my goodness, Um, I told her I didn't know, which wasn't true, but I knew enough to not tell her the truth. But I was nervous. So when she mentioned these shoes the next week, you know, you know, even as a child, you have a sense of things. Something's not right here. I thought, all right, just not and you don't know what else

to do, Just not when she tells you that. And then she really surprised me and said, before you sit down, I want you to name every pair of shoes you have, and you know, trying to be a good girl. I thought, well, this is a test and I don't want to get it wrong. I'm so anxious. Let me just really try to picture all the shoes that line my closet shelf.

And I started listening them, all of them, the black and white, polka dotted once with the bow tie and the buckle ruby red ones, you know, And I managed to come up with I recall ten pears. That teacher Ms Miller said to me, what tim pears is an awful lot. And then she just told me to take my seat. But I could hear that thing in her voice. I didn't know what to call it then, but it was totally disdained, you know. I thought that was it.

And the next day she called me back to her desk and she said to me, you did not tell me you had white shoes. I looked down at my feet, and sure enough, I was wearing a pair of white shoes that I had forgotten to mention, and I thought, I've been calling a lie. I thought, I have so disappointed my teacher, and I hope I'm not in trouble. I was really worried, and that's why I went home and told my mother what happened. I just thought I have to let her know. And I confessed, that's what

it felt like. I was confessing that I forgot to tell miss Miller about the eleventh pair of shoes. My mom, I had never seen her get this angry. I mean, I mean her eyes flashed with anger like I had never seen, and I thought I'm about to get a spanking. But that's not what happened. She looked at me and said, that's none of her damn business. Who does she think she is? So I'm relieved that I'm not in trouble. But then she said to me, get your code, let's go.

I thought, please God, I hope we're not going back to school to come front miss Miller. But we weren't. My mom put me in the car and drove me to Saxoforth Avenue and then took me to the children's shoe department and pointed to the most beautiful pair of like yellow patent leather shoes that I've ever seen in my life. She pointed to them and said, those are pretty, and then she bought them for me. She pulled out

a one dollar bill and pay for those shoes. And I still remember how the saleswoman looked at me and her that saleswoman looked at my mom the way that that Miss Miller I looked at me. My mom didn't seem to even notice. She just said to me, you're gonna wear these school tomorrow, and you better tell that damn teacher of yours that you actually have a dozen pair of shoes. You hearing me, So what could I do? I did what I was told, and as nervous as

I was, I walked up to Miss Miller's desk. I had chosen a beautiful little yellow knit dress to match the shoes, and I said, Ms. Miller, I have twelve pairs of shoes. Oh my god. She looked down at my feet, she looked at my face with those blue eyes, and she told me to sit out. And you know, she never said another word to me ever again the rest of the school year. How did that feel to you? I mean, you're six years old, you're in first grade.

You again something you don't have language for, right, you recognize disdaining, but you know you don't have that word. Um, you recognize it in the saleswoman at sacks for your mother. You don't have that word. But what your mother does is models for you. UM, dignity, Yes, that's it. If she had played that any other way, you know, I think about that now because it's still stuck with me. Look how it has stuck with me my whole life.

I still remember as much as I tell people that story, I can recall how I felt as a six year old. It was traumatizing. And if my mother had, you know, handled it any other way, said we'll just ignore her, or well, you don't have to wear all your shoes as cool. If she had done any of those things, I think the shame would have come rushing down onto me, all that shame that she had kept at bay. You know, I think it would have really been really a very

different outcome. Um. So I'm grateful that she had to wherewithal to handle it that way, because I knew right then that no one could tell me what I was entitled to. That was the thing that I quickly grasps from that situation. There are stories that stay with us and stories that we need to rediscover and re understand as adults once our childhood's become clearer to us, especially when our childhoods have involved a secret. Brigette is already

deep into her adult life. She's in her fifties, a journalist, a professor, a wife, and a mom. Before this secret she has kept her whole life starts to sit less comfortably within her. Fanny's gone. The risks of what she did are long past, and yet still the secret remains. Why I was so used in not telling it was all I ever knew. I inherited that way of life that I never struggled with the idea of wanting to tell of Oh oops, I'm gonna share this and I shouldn't.

I never did. It was incredible because as my best friend since fourth grade, Diane Um, was being interviewed by me as I was researching the book and now we're in our fifties, and she thought, I just wanted to talk about my mom, and she thought, well, that's a great subject, because we all loved your mother. And we all have stories of how she helped us. So yeah, I'd love to talk to her, talk to you about her. And then my final question to her was did you

know that my mom had this whole business? And and she was like, what are you talking about? What it's like? That's when I realized, Wow, I really did keep this secret pretty well, and that we all did, and that my mother did. And you know, I could see it in my friend's face. She was like, wait a minute, I I did know your mom was running something. I just didn't know what. Like I could tell she was in charge, I just didn't know what she was in

charge of. So it was both a revelation but not surprising. But that was my way of understanding for myself that yes, we did keep that secret, solidly kept it um across many years. But here's the thing I came to learn to just because it wasn't a dark, shameful secret didn't mean it wasn't weighing on me. It was because a secret morse, it ultimately becomes something that attaches shame to itself,

to itself. Right, It's like I call shame a secret country cousin because they're not far from one another inevitably, and in my case, I started feeling bad about not telling. I started thinking, I'm acting like I'm ashamed of my mother because I'm not telling anyone, and that felt awful. At what point did you start feeling that way? It really became a hute once I had a child, and once my son got older and actually asked me one

day when he was like ten years old. This was nine years ago, and he very innocently looked at a photo of my mom and said, what was she like? Oh? I managed to answer him. I said, oh, she was amazing. But in my heart, I thought, Jesus, what have you done? You know you have really now reached gone into a territory that's unhealthy. You kept the secret longer than you had to. Why are you still keeping the secret now? Your own children don't know who their grandmother is, what

she did, what she accomplished. Then I thought, get it together. Your mom died when you were thirty two. Yes, when were your children born? So my son was born seven years later. Okay, so you died before, right, So they never knew her. They never knew her. I, as an aside, thought, maybe I'll never have children. Um, I totally waited till the last possible moment because I thought, you know, I thought it was because I could never be the kind

of mother I had. And I wonder now, you know, was that whole business of the secret implicated in there somehow? I don't know how, but maybe something about children requires revelation. And maybe I was hesitant about that too. I don't know, but I definitely felt an urgency once he was asking

about her. That was the trigger. What has it been like for you after a lifetime of that being so embedded as a secret, Not only to have it stopped being a secret um to your children or to your inner circle, but um really shining a light on Fanny and on everything that had been kind of kept in the dark, kept quiet. What what what's that been like for you? Oh? My, Sally, And emotionally and psychologically, it is incredible. It's life changing. I can't put it in

any other way. It's a relief. It's such a relief, and it's so validating. All that time I was stopping a lot from happening, from my children knowing who she was, from myself being able to brag about her, from all these people who loved her, and had been touched by her. They weren't really able to talk about her. Is as though I gave everyone permission, and then I gave permission to all these people who didn't know Fanny but had similar stories. It dawned on me I hadn't thought about it.

Everyone was keeping the number secret. Well. One of the things about secrets, too, is the way that they they beget secrets. That begets secrets, that begets secrets, and so everybody is walking around holding some version of a secret, and they think that they're the only one, right, right, that's it. I thought that I thought that I, um, I didn't have any friends who had, you know, mother's doing what my mom did, so it felt like I was the only one. But of course now I'm not kidding.

Almost everyone I talked to wants to tell me an anecdote. Not just about I had a friend who was in the numbers, though I remember that family down the street or my uncle was doing that, but people who want to tell me about their grandfather who bet on horses, or you know, the history of bootlegging in their family, or you know like that, to me is the quintessentral

American story. It's something. It's really something. Here's Bridgette reading a passage from the World according to Fannie Davis, in which the love of this remarkable daughter for her remarkable mother shines through as a family secret finally blossoms into the light of day. My mother gave us a good

life a great expense. I thought I knew her skills as a number runner, that 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. Scariest of all, is this The only way for me to tell Mamma's story is to defy her by running my mouth. Many thanks

to my guest, Brigette M. Davis. She is the author of the World according to Fannie Davis, and you can find out more about Brigette at Brigette davis dot com. Family Secrets is an I Heeart media production. Dylan Fagan is a supervising producer, Lowell Brolante is the audio engineer, and Julie Douglas is the executive producer. If you have a family secret you'd like to share with us, get in touch at listener mail at Family Secrets podcast dot com.

You can also find us on Instagram at Danny Writer, and Facebook at Family Secrets Pod and Twitter at fami Secrets Pod. For more about my book, Inheritance, visit Danny Shapiro dot com. Yeah for more podcasts. For my heart radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.