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

Abstract

Book Reviews 157 Bridgett M. Davis. The World According to Fannie Davis: My Mother’s Life in the Detroit Numbers. New York: Little, Brown, 2019. Pp. 308. Bibliography. Illustrations. Cloth: $28.00. The World According to Fannie Davis: My Mother’s Life in the Detroit Numbers chronicles the Davis family’s involvement in “The Numbers,” or underground lottery, in Detroit from 1950s to the early 1990s. The author, Bridgett Davis, is both a novelist and Fannie Davis’s youngest daughter. The World According to Fannie Davis is her first memoir: a highly engaging, well-researched page-turner that diversifies our understanding of black social history and labor by moving beyond the auto industry. The book details Bridgett Davis’s mother and father’s postwar migration from Nashville to Detroit, her mother’s subsequent multidecade career as a black female numbers runner and banker, and the author’s coming-of-age story. A cross-generational “love letter” to her mother that, Davis explains, tells “her story, and mine,” Bridgett Davis stresses and chronicles her mother’s fearlessness, determination, and willingness to transgress the narrow boundaries placed on black women and families to “make a way out of no way” and provide her family with “a good life at great expense” (p. 14). As the book makes clear, Fannie Davis, one of only two black women numbers bankers in Detroit, commanded respect rather than respectability. While the author’s detailed account of her mother’s career in The Numbers is both well-crafted and fascinating, her ability to weave this story within the broader historical context of structural racism, black class identity and formation, and black history and culture stands out, providing a rich social history of postwar black migrants and black Detroit, particularly of the non-autoworking and non-professional segment of the black population that Davis refers to as “blue-collar bourgeoisie” (p. 94). The World According to Fannie Davis is divided into three sections. The first, “Hitsville, USA,” refers to the centrality of The Numbers to black life, culture, and survival in Detroit during the economic downturn of the 1950s and early ’60s and is told through the lens of the Davis family’s migration to Detroit from Nashville. The second section, “Hey, You Never Know,” explores rising black political consciousness, luck, prosperity, and spiritualism in working-class culture; Mrs. Davis’s economic success and the growth of her business; black economic nationalism; and backlash from the police and state as black Detroit and black numbers operators rose in prominence during the late 1960s and ’70s. The third and final section deftly documents Fannie Davis’s ability to adapt and maintain her business—which remained active but slowed 158 The Michigan Historical Review in the 1980s—despite law enforcement crackdowns, inflammatory, and racialized depictions of the illegal “Numbers racket,” and the legalization and expansion of the state lottery. This section, told through the author’s perspective, is interlaced with a discussion of her school years, burgeoning career, and her relationship to her mother’s secretive life story before and after Fannie Davis’s death in 1992. The World According to Fannie Davis sheds important new light on the history of black Detroit. While not a formal work of history, it uses the Davis family’s story to discuss how structural racism impacted black Detroiters’ daily lives and struggles as well as their multi-varied efforts to transcend these imposed limitations. The World According to Fannie Davis should appeal to anyone with an interest in Detroit, urban history, and African American history, and is perfectly suited for classroom use. David A. Goldberg Wayne State University James Berton Harris. Once upon a Time at the Opera House: Drama at Three Historic Michigan Theaters, 1882-1928. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2019. Pp. 240. Appendices. Bibliography. Illustrations. Index. Cloth: $54.95. The golden age of American opera houses wasn’t really about opera, James Berton Harris reminds us in Once upon a Time at the Opera House. Using the performance facilities in three small Michigan cities as a template, Harris recalls a time when a municipality’s “opera house” was merely its main theatrical space—a home for nonmusical plays, band...