My Amazon Review of Bridgett M. Davis' "The World According to Fanny Davis: My Mother's Life in the Detroit Numbers"

 

Love and Capital in Motown

Baruch College creative writing professor Bridgett M. Davis has written a loving biography of her mother Fanny and along the way a partial autobiography of herself and the Black experience in declining Detroit through the prism of the subculture around the numbers game. (Note: I received this book as a gift and although I have an association with Baruch College, I have not met the author.) Fanny Davis moves her family from Jim Crow Nashville to Detroit in the mid-fifties and the author, the last of five children is born there in 1960. It is through her eyes and the research that she had undertaken we see the larger-than-life Fanny Davis.

After winning a big 500-1 payout to the tune of $25,000 Fanny has the cash to “buy” (actually a land contract of sale because the neighborhood was redlined.) a house and is also taken with the idea of at first being a numbers bookie and then a numbers banker. All of this is illegal. For the uninitiated, the numbers game involves betting on three-digit number that is derived from the last digits of a parimutuel pool in a given race. The odds of winning are, of course, 1,000-1 while the payoff varies between 500-1 and 600-1 making the expected value of a $1 bet 50 or 60 cents. Thus, there is huge “vigorish” for the house. However, the house faces the risk of ruin if too much is bet on the winning number. It is the success of this business that enables the family to grow up with a middle-class lifestyle.

The author was born in 1960, the youngest of five children and she is treated like a princess. She wears fancy clothes, has lots of shoes and most importantly many books to read. There is an early incident where her first-grade teacher questions the number pairs of shoes she has and further questions how her family makes its money. Fanny soon puts her into her place. We see similar incidents in high end department stores where store clerks question Fanny’s ability to pay. She then either roles out $100 bills or a stack of credit cards.

Fanny and other members of the numbers reinvest their profits back into their businesses and into the community at large by founding legitimate businesses and funding the local NAACP and Urban League chapters. Capital accumulation occurs at different levels.

In 1972 new competition enters in the form of a legal state lottery. Fanny had to adjust her whole business strategy. In the parlance of today’s Wall Street, she creates a derivative bet on the state lottery. She allows people to bet with her on the same numbers, but she pays out 600-1 instead of 500-1 and because the activity is illegal the winning better avoids the income taxes associated with winning in the formal state lottery. Further the risk of ruin is gone, because if there were excessive betting on a given number, she laid off the bet with the official lottery. Again, using Wall Street terminology this is called delta hedging. In a different era, Fanny could very well have run a casino or worked as a trader on Wall Street. To highlight her acumen in that regard, she bought Chrysler stock when it was on the brink of bankruptcy in 1980.

We also see her family in turmoil as three of her children die young, her divorce from her first husband who moved with her from Nashville, and her dying of cancer. The author brought tears to my eyes as she recounted her Mom’s death.

All the events in the book are going on amidst Detroit’s long wave decline. The auto industry is collapsing, whites are fleeing the city and the crime rate skyrockets. Indeed, the house that the author grew up in was later vandalized and ultimately bulldozed. The triggering event was the 1967 riot where the Army was called in. I would disagree with the author that the passage of the 1968 Fair Housing Act was the trigger for the white flight. In my opinion the white flight was already underway and that the Fair Housing Act did not have the perverse effect of advancing racial segregation.

Although I largely focused on the business side of things, Bridgett Davis’ endearing story of her Mom is an American story of success and capital accumulation against the backdrop of a major American city in decline. I would end by noting that this story will soon(?) be a major motion picture. I can’t wait.

For the complete Amazon URL see:  Love and Capital in Motown (amazon.com)