The World According to Fannie Davis: My Mother's Life in the Detroit Numbers

 

Notes from Book Discussion May 22, 2021

 

The World According to Fannie Davis: My Mother's Life in the Detroit Numbers  by Bridgett Davis 2019

17 of us met over Zoom.

 

I began the discussion with questions about redlining and predatory lending, especially since most of the people in this group had also participated in Cultural Academy II, where we discussed these kinds of issues in Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns.

 

Marion S. offered that because of the redlining, Fannie couldn’t get a loan from the bank; she had to borrow from somebody and ended up paying huge interest.

Marian: Plus, she didn’t even get the deed to her house for like 14 years.

Marsha: I was wondering what if that man had died? Would his wife honor that agreement? Did his wife even know about the agreement?

 

Shelara: That’s what Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote in his article about redlining and tied it in to reparations…

that happens a lot, people had been paying this money and the person said I never received any money and they had been paying seven, ten years on a house with triple interest, so many people lost value, lost equity, lost the money they worked hard for The government wouldn’t give them a chance wouldn’t protect them we  actively planning out cities so that where Black people lived would have no value. discount what a gross injustice …such a disgusting…they worked hard for their homes, they’ve watched the equity of the home go down or now it’s not even safe enough to live in their neighborhood…wherever we’re living, the government that they pay taxes to actively worked to make sure this happened. 

Bonnie: Everybody should read The color of Law…There was a thing on CNN where a Black woman had her house appraised. The appraisel came back…low and she was suspicious. A white husband of one of her friends pretended to live there when they got the house re-appraised. She got almost double the appraisal.

 

Shelara: My best friend Claudia, if I’m buying a house, I’ll have to take her with me in order to get a fair price for a house. That’s why people take down their pictures, there’s actually a term, it’s called whitening up your house…It’s a practice…it’s just the way things are done.

 Marian: So let’s move from the real estate to microagressions. I think there were two examples of microagressions in the book. I think that the teacher questioning Bridgett about her shoes was one, but also there was a woman in a store, where a salesclerk was trying to direct them to the clearance rack.

 Marsha: to have someone meet you at the door and lead you to the clearance rack is an insult. I would get annoyed when someone would meet me at the door and say, “Can I help you?” I don’t know if that was them trying to make me feel that I wasn’t being ignored butI was almost feeling like the underlying question was “What are you doing in here? You don’t belong in here.”

 Marion S.: The other store where the salesclerk asked Fannie for ID and the person ahead of her was not asked for ID. After Fannie pulled out all of her ID and all of her charge cards, the salesclerk tried to make up for it by making small talk

 Shelara: I’m at the point in my life now that I don’t think it’s imperative for me to support with my dollar a system that discriminates against me.  The idea of giving money to a company even after things changed. No, I want you to go out of business. I don’t feel wonderful that you allow me to patronize your store.  We are not made better …I do not need white validation to feel that I’m ok We need to  change our way of looking at things. What I liked about Fannie Davis was her independence and her knowledge of herself, her self-awareness, but also I wanted her to not care about going in the store and showing those credit cards. It was a great kind of anecdote but she didn’t need to prove anything to those people.

 Sarah: She enjoyed getting back at them.

Marian: Her being in the Numbers, and other people like her they used their money to finance things like the Urban League, the NAACP. It wasn’t just your personal independence; you created independence by financing things in your community that the government would not finance. I keep going back to The Warmth of Other Suns because it’s so big in my mind.

You know we read about the Urban League and the NAACP. And even when we read those Ida B. Wells Barnett biographies, we read that she had started all those women’s clubs and it was black people in the cities who made contributions

p.57

"Denmark Vesey, a Charleston slave, who later was executed for planning a revolt against slave owners. Vesey used $1500 he won from the city lorttery in 1799 to buy his freedom. Vesey also helped found the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, where over two hundred years later a white supremacist shot dead nine African-Americans during a Bible class."

 

Marion S.: She was helping her friends and family

 

Rachel: I think the daughter in writing this book, probably didn’t know all of the people that her mother helped. In the absence of other kinds of support, I think this amazing woman just took care of her community in all kinds of ways including the fact that she always had fully stacked refrigerator and people who were hungry could always come by for a meal.

 Laura: When she went shopping, she actually would have separate bags already ready to give out.

Marsha: I was always wondering how was she able to go shopping or do anything when she always had to stay by the phone.

Marian: The phone was in shifts though Marsha, there were the morning calls when people put in their numbers, then there were the evening calls, that’s why she was home for her kids when they got out of school. It seems like there was a long time in between, in fact she would watch a movie with Bridgett every afternoon when she got out of school. Bridgett explains that her mother wanted to be home with her children: 

p. 56

"What she refused to do was one of the three jobs employing 75 percent of Detroit's black women at the time: 'day work' as a maid in white homes, cleaning offices, or low-rung factory work. All those would require her to leave her children to raise one another while she did menial labor for too little money. Mama was clear that the only way she'd have more than what this country intended for her was to work for herself in a business she controlled that depended on a black clientele."

Marsha: It just seems like it was 24/7

Marian: It wasn’t 24/7, but I guess it was on her mind 24/7 It would have been nerve-wrecking and as Bridgett grew up she realized how much stress her mother was under.

 Randy: The waiting period (waiting for the numbers to come out) must have been excruciating.

 Frances: I found that she discovered by writing the book and so many people responding to it, grateful that she had brought out into the open this really important part of the community economy, that so many people had the numbers in their lives and no one talked about it. This was a secret but it wasn’t a shameful secret. She actually was creating an opening for Black people to talk about it.

 Rachel: I grew up in the formal economy. The formal economy would not have given this mother in any way …a chance use her entrepreneurial spirit…people made a living for their families in ways the formal economy was never going to allow them to.

 Frances: the legitimate lottery…I felt victorious on Fannie’s behalf when the informal economy around the numbers continued as long as it did and she brilliantly figured out how to use the lottery in her own way.

Rachel: It was an important part of the story to realize she put in the line about how her mother really wanting to make sure that she wasn’t feeding a gambling addiction. The point was that with the chance each day to win gave such an infusion of hope. Fannie Davis's response to those who claimed that people played numbers instead of paying their rent or buying food was: 

p.170

"I don't have no customers like that, who bet up what they can't afford to lose...And no damn way would I let somebody gambling up their rent and food money play numbers with me. Not if I knew about it."

"Research done by the scholar Felicia George has since proven Mama's experience to be the nom. Most black people who played Numbers weren't spending money thy couldn't afford to lose; man of them were not poor rather woking and middle-class folks with disposable income, a piece of which they chose to spend on playing the Numbers the way others spent extra money on eating out or buying cigarettes or going to the movies or betting on horses. And people often hit just enough to make it worth their while to gamble. More to the point, numbers players enjoyed it."

Marian: Fannie wanted her people to win

 Shelara: the stress…it’s no coincidence that she ended up having colon cancer at the end. She actually picked doing the numbers because she didn’t want to be a domestic worker. She chose working the numbers.

Rachel: I finished reading the book this morning. I’m still teary from it because to me it was just a beautiful story of a mother and daughter I think as a daughter Bridgett has all kinds of guilt remembering how she went off on that vacation and how indulged she was and at the time she didn’t appreciate it.

 

I think in writing the book Bridgett “got there,” to that point of love and appreciation for her mom.

 

Shelara: Yes, this book is a love story to her mother. 

  

 

Rachel: I finished reading the book this morning. I’m still teary from it.