00:00:01
The sound of the phone ringing is uh embedded in my sort of memory of life. Growing up, the phone was always
00:00:11
ringing, and it wasn't just one phone. At one point, we had three lines. And uh my mom tried to keep them separate, so
00:00:19
to speak. One was a business line, one was a personal line, one was the children's phone line. But of course,
00:00:26
you know, if people couldn't get through, these are the days before call waiting. If people couldn't get through
00:00:31
and they were anxious, some of them had access to a personal number, and they'd start calling that one. So, yeah,
00:00:37
ringing phones. This is Bridgette Davis. [music] Her mother, Fannie Davis, was born in
00:00:44
Nashville in 1928. Fannie's grandfather had been born into slavery there, and her father owned a
00:00:50
successful plastering business in the early part of the 20th century. >> [music]
00:00:55
>> And that enabled him to buy property, and so he was both a businessman and a property owner. And so, my mom witnessed
00:01:04
his entrepreneurial spirit and was highly, highly influenced [music] by him. She really admired her her father's
00:01:12
life. [music] Fannie grew up in Nashville and married Bridgette's father when she was 18. But
00:01:18
like many African Americans, she decided to migrate north with her family um in the mid-50s [music] so that they could
00:01:26
have better opportunities and more liberties. And so, they chose Michigan and ultimately Detroit.
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>> [music] >> And they hadn't prepared themselves for what was awaiting. One, the racism in
00:01:44
Michigan was so virulent and distinctive from the southern sort of discrimination
00:01:50
they'd known about that it took them off guard. They weren't prepared for that. And the way it manifested was in all the
00:01:56
key ways. They couldn't find decent housing. They were charged exorbitant rent. My father was unable to find steady
00:02:03
work. And so, these things really plunged them into poverty. So, she very early um
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realized she'd have to step in and figure out something. Fannie Davis found a way to [music] take
00:02:19
care of her family. She started small, but built a robust and lucrative [music] operation.
00:02:26
A business that a lot of people knew about, but no one talked about. Which happened [music] to be illegal.
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>> [snorts] >> It was called the numbers. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. What were the [music] numbers?
00:02:46
The numbers The numbers are [music] an underground lottery business or operation that has [music] been in place
00:02:56
since the early '20s. Um it moved across the country and it was [music] designed by created by a black man in
00:03:07
Harlem and really was a black business. It thrived. It was a >> [music] >> It was a true economy, actually.
00:03:16
By 1970, police estimated that one in every 15 people in Detroit played the numbers daily and that it was generating
00:03:23
[music] $94 million a year. Here's how you play. You get to choose a three-digit number
00:03:30
and if that number is the winning number, you actually win a 500 to 1 payout. So, if you bet a
00:03:39
dollar on that three-digit number and it came out, as we call it, then you actually would get $500.
00:03:47
And so, my mom knew about the numbers. Most black Americans knew or know about the numbers.
00:03:54
Uh and she played a bit herself. She played a few coins on numbers, but she noticed
00:04:00
in her community where she was living in Detroit that people were playing those numbers a lot
00:04:07
and she thought, "Hmm, they could they could actually give me their bets." So, she was very small scale at first,
00:04:14
what she called a penny business and eventually worked as a banker for a large banker. So, there were hundreds of
00:04:21
bookies. You are a bookie if you take other people's numbers. Maybe you just sit at your kitchen table and you have
00:04:28
five customers who call you and turn in their numbers to you. You're a bookie. The thing that distinguished
00:04:34
her, the thing she did that almost no other women in Detroit did um was she was a banker.
00:04:42
So, that meant she paid out hits. So, she wasn't going to the bank to collect on. She The bank was
00:04:51
her. Yes, ultimately. Before she could graduate from bookie to banker, Fanny needed a pool of money to pay out
00:04:59
winning hits. So, she asked her brother for help. And so, she entered his home, as he tells me, he she didn't even take
00:05:09
her coat off and she stood there and told him, >> [music] >> "John, I want to bank the numbers."
00:05:16
And >> [music] >> he said, "Are you sure about that?" She said, "Yes, I thought about it." And she
00:05:20
explained how she would do it and he [music] said, "Okay." It made sense to him. She said, "The only thing is, I
00:05:27
need you to loan me $100. [music] Can you do that?" And he said, "Yes, Fanny, I can do that."
00:05:34
>> [music] >> Being a banker wasn't something that [music] women did often. What do you think gave your mother the
00:05:43
confidence to do this? >> [music] >> I don't think it ever occurred to her that she couldn't.
00:05:50
I don't think it ever occurred to her that I'm a woman, so I can't do this. >> [music]
00:05:54
>> She thought, I have a I have a head for numbers. I am clear about my goals. >> [music]
00:06:01
>> I uh I have all the skill sets in place. I can command respect, so I'm not worried about that.
00:06:09
So, why not? There was something about her. Not everyone could have done it. She was
00:06:16
really perfect for this [music] role, and she had the qualities that made it possible
00:06:21
to thrive at it. And that has everything to do with her, just who she was. Tell me about [music] your mother's
00:06:28
schedule, how the day would go once the business picked up. What was the day's [music] schedule?
00:06:34
My mom was up taking numbers in the morning, early. >> [music] >> Uh some of her customers wanted to turn
00:06:40
their numbers in before they went to work, and so she had to accommodate them. >> [music]
00:06:45
>> Um I remember someone in particular, a customer who would love to go fishing on
00:06:49
Saturday morning, so she liked to turn her numbers in at 6:00 a.m. A lot of people turn like to call in
00:06:56
their numbers during lunchtime. You [music] know, there were these busier periods and then these sort of slow down
00:07:01
periods, and then busy again. And it got a lot more hectic [music] um as the afternoon wore on because there was a
00:07:09
cutoff time. So, that [music] was often the busiest time of the day, that time right before the evening.
00:07:17
Um so, that was really how her day went, a lot of taking people's bets. And also, there were people who liked to
00:07:24
come to the house and give their numbers directly to her, so there was that piece
00:07:28
of it. There were people who liked to come in weekly and pay her directly, you know, so
00:07:34
there was this mix of collecting the money and then receiving it from people who who showed up at the
00:07:39
house. How were the winning numbers chosen, decided? Each city came up with its own
00:07:46
way to determine a winning number, and many of them landed on this idea that they would get the number
00:07:53
um from racing forms, daily racing forms from various racetracks across the country, because those numbers also
00:08:02
changed all the time, and there was a calculation that was done to determine each digit of these winning three-digit
00:08:09
winning numbers. The calculation was made using an elaborate formula based on horse race
00:08:15
winnings from racetracks. Those results wouldn't be tabulated until after Fanny's bets were closed, so there was
00:08:23
no way to cheat. So, how would people find out if they'd won? I always say it's a little bit like a
00:08:33
game of telephone, but it has to be accurate. So, the numbers bosses would sign off on
00:08:40
these winning numbers based on these calculations, and so the word would go out that okay, it's official, these are
00:08:47
the three winning digits for today. And the numbers bosses' employees would then make the calls to various
00:08:56
bankers who would inform various bookies, and they would inform their customers. And so, the word would go out
00:09:03
on the street. It would go out in a telephone call. You know, it really was word of mouth.
00:09:09
And it was really an incredible system when you when you think about it. But that's how it was done.
00:09:17
Bridget remembers that when the winning numbers would come in each night, things
00:09:22
could get stressful in the house. If someone won big, her mother would have to pay out. That was a big part of
00:09:30
um sort of the business. Luckily, it wasn't daily. She didn't get hit daily. Um but there were times when she got
00:09:38
really people won big, and so that was a whole process, you know, gathering that
00:09:43
money to pay off which was her policy to pay off the next day by noon. So, that was also a big
00:09:49
part of the business. Do you remember being a little kid and helping out with the business? What What
00:09:58
were some of the tasks that you were given? So, I wanted something that I could do
00:10:05
to contribute, and so she decided that my job would be to call all the customers and give them that day's
00:10:12
numbers. And she paid me $20 a week. That seems like an important job. It was great, and
00:10:19
guess what? You know, the customers loved hearing from me because I was this child calling, "Hi,
00:10:26
this is Fanny's daughter, and I'm just letting you know today's number is 697." And they say, "Oh, thank you, baby."
00:10:34
>> [laughter] [gasps] >> Do you remember customers coming over? Oh, I vividly remember customers coming
00:10:41
over all the time. All the time. Um, one of my favorites of her customers was a woman who had been a lady of the
00:10:50
evening in her youth. And she had an extraordinary wardrobe of clothes from that life, and she liked to
00:10:58
talk to me about fashion. And she knew fashion. She knew real fashion. She knew designers, etc. So, I I really learned
00:11:06
all these things from my mom's customers that went above and beyond just seeing them, you know, engaged in transactions.
00:11:15
Do you ever remember anyone sitting around the house and kind of talking with your mother and think saying,
00:11:20
"Well, I I think maybe 532 this week. And what do you think about that?" Or she 478 or back and forth about the
00:11:28
number that they wanted to play? Yes, so much of the reason that people like to come over and turn their numbers in
00:11:37
directly is they wanted the social piece of it. You know, they wanted to be in conversation about the numbers. It
00:11:44
really generated a kind of um sort of like communal experience. So, customers are like, "What do you feeling is a good
00:11:53
number?" And I was thinking about this and oh, I dreamed I actually dreamed about fish.
00:12:00
And so, then a customer could say to my mother, "Fanny, what does fish play for?" And what does that mean? That
00:12:08
means that the customer's asking, "What does the dream book say the three-digit equivalent is for
00:12:17
fish?" And you might ask, "What are dream books?" Yeah. What is the dream book, you know? The
00:12:23
dream book um was a publication, a little book, that really was more like the Bible for numbers
00:12:34
players. And [music] it essentially was encyclopedic. It really listed every [music]
00:12:41
person, place, or thing you could imagine, as well as experience, that someone could dream about. [music] And I mean
00:12:48
just about anything. And so, again, as I was saying, these experiences or places or persons
00:12:55
or things all had three-digit uh sort of numbers assigned to them. And so, that's how you figured out,
00:13:03
again, "What [music] does fish play for?" Well, the dream book says it plays for 497. I think [music] because I
00:13:09
dreamed it, I'm going to play that. And there were many different versions of dream books. Dream books date back
00:13:17
way back into the 19th century. Um and so, the more popular ones in my household were two in particular.
00:13:27
>> [music] >> The Red Devil Dream Book and the Three Wise Men Dream Book. And so a customer
00:13:32
might have a preference for one over the other and say, "Well, Fanny, I don't know about that. I don't really know
00:13:37
about what the Three Wise Men says. Tell me what the Red Devil says it plays [music] for." And then the customer
00:13:44
might say, "Okay, I'm feeling lucky. I'm going to put that number in today." >> [music]
00:13:50
>> Did Did your mother also believe in the dream books and [music] use that type of mystical
00:13:58
numerology [music] in in her own life and around your house? My mom believed in luck and she believed
00:14:05
in conjuring luck. >> [music] >> And so she had these rituals that she followed. There I might add there was a
00:14:14
proliferation of sort of paraphernalia that you could purchase around the numbers business.
00:14:21
There were shops designed to sell all these things to you and one of them was candles, lucky candles. The kind that
00:14:29
can burn for a week, the nice tall ones. And so my mom often had these candles burning in the household in in strategic
00:14:38
places. The idea was that once the candle burned down, there was actually a three-digit
00:14:44
number at the bottom. And there were lucky oils and there there was incense that did the same
00:14:51
thing. Once it burned down, there would be a three-digit number at the bottom. And that's maybe a number to play.
00:14:58
So yes, in in many ways as a child I found our home so magical. And I felt that she was at the center of that
00:15:06
magic, that she herself was magical. Fanny wasn't just running the numbers. She played them and she was lucky.
00:15:15
In one especially large hit, she won enough money to put a down payment on a house.
00:15:21
She wouldn't tell anyone how much she'd actually won. Bridgette says that owning the house meant a lot.
00:15:29
Her mother's policy was feel free, feel welcome, be happy. And she wanted her children to feel
00:15:36
proud. I went to school one day and my teacher said to me, you sure do have a lot of pairs of shoes. And it was true,
00:15:45
I did. Um I didn't know how to answer her. I was concerned because the week before she had she had asked me, what
00:15:52
does your father do? And I told her he doesn't work. My father actually was disabled.
00:15:59
So she naturally asked, well what does your mother do? And I said, this time I wasn't lying. I said I don't know.
00:16:06
Because I knew she was in the numbers, but I knew I wasn't supposed to tell anyone that.
00:16:10
So I suspect looking back that she was already looking at me and thinking, what this little girl is really dressing
00:16:16
well. This little black girl. Um and I think that that prompted the questions, but I was naive. I didn't
00:16:22
know that. I just knew that on this day she was telling me I had a lot of pairs of shoes and I I agreed. And then she
00:16:28
really stunned me by saying name every pair of shoes you have. Do not sit down till you do that.
00:16:36
Go ahead. And I was so nervous. I thought it was a test and I didn't want to fail it and I
00:16:42
worked really hard nervously and named 10 pairs of shoes. I was being so diligent.
00:16:49
And she said to me, what that 10 pairs of shoes, that's an awful lot. And again, I didn't know how to answer her.
00:16:56
I sat down. The surprising thing for me was the next day she called me to her desk again. And
00:17:02
this time she said you did not tell me that you had a white pair, too. And I had forgotten to tell her about
00:17:10
the white pair I was wearing that day. And I apologized. I didn't know what else to do. She dismissed me with a flip
00:17:17
of her hand, but at that point I thought, "Oh boy, I'm in trouble and I need to tell my mom cuz I I've clearly
00:17:25
done something wrong." And I told my mother that evening and I can't even begin to describe the
00:17:33
look on her face. I still remember it. She was furious. I thought she was angry at me, but she
00:17:39
said, "That is none of her damn business. Who does she think she is?" She was so angry and she told me get in
00:17:47
the car now. I of course thought we were going back to the school to confront my teacher,
00:17:52
Ms. Miller, and I was really frightened. I did not want to do that, but that's not where we were going at all. My mom
00:17:58
took me to Saks Fifth Avenue. And she took me to the children's shoe department. She pointed to a gorgeous
00:18:04
pair of yellow patent leather shoes and she said, "Those are pretty." She pulled out a $100 bill and paid for
00:18:11
those shoes [music] and then told me, "Listen, you're going to wear these shoes to school tomorrow
00:18:17
and you're going to [music] tell your teacher that you actually have 12 pairs of shoes. You hear me?"
00:18:23
>> [music] >> And I did. And Ms. Miller never spoke to me again. >> [music] >> Was it Was it just accepted knowledge in
00:18:34
your house that you didn't talk about your mother's business? We never talked about not talking about it. It was just
00:18:41
understood. >> [music] >> There were no conversations around it. It was clear. It was clear.
00:18:47
You don't talk about what happens inside of this household. And of course we understood the
00:18:53
implication that we could get busted by the, you know, authorities and that's not good.
00:19:00
Someone could hear about it and try to rob us. Not good. So, there was no need to work in in sort of struggle with
00:19:07
keeping the secret. It was natural and easy to keep that secret And we all did. When did it become clear to you that
00:19:18
your mother's business had become very successful? I don't think I processed it that way
00:19:25
for years. We lived well from my memory. It was my normal. And so, I didn't think
00:19:32
about my mom, "Oh, she's successful." I thought, "She's doing We're doing well at this." That's how I looked at it.
00:19:37
Um and so that's how I always viewed it until I was an adult and began to see the toll it was taking.
00:19:50
>> [music] [music] >> Lots of things happened that as a little girl, Bridget Davis, didn't see.
00:20:10
In 1962, there was a massive raid at the Gotham Hotel, the hub of the African-American numbers operation in
00:20:18
Detroit. Police conducted a room-by-room search and confiscated numbers tapes, adding
00:20:26
machines, hundreds of boxes of bet slips, and 30 safes. And then, one night in 1970, 200 FBI
00:20:35
agents conducted raids all over the city of Detroit, making arrests in 58 different locations.
00:20:43
J. Edgar Hoover called it the largest gambling raid in history. Bridget was in elementary school. My mom never made it
00:20:52
known that that was going on. And that's why I always call her an incredible domestic magician, the
00:20:59
slight of hand she had to use to make sure none of us were constantly stressed out by the possibility of these sort of
00:21:06
busts happening. Now, she did do some practical things. She had a big safe that she kept combination safe that she
00:21:13
kept in her closet. That's where she kept the money. That's where she kept the day's business. We had an
00:21:18
incinerator in our baseboard and she burned her tickets and proof of the business on a weekly basis. You know,
00:21:24
she was in no way reckless. That was not my mom. Do you have any complicated feelings about the fact
00:21:33
that it it was a crime what your mother was doing? I have no complicated feelings around
00:21:39
that because for me it wasn't a crime. This is a country that put a lot of laws in place to keep black people down.
00:21:47
Let's be clear and blunt about it. It was very clear to me intuitively and now literally that
00:21:56
there's a difference between a a legitimate business and a criminal one. It's criminal because, you know, laws
00:22:06
were put in place to say it shouldn't happen. But it was legitimate and that was
00:22:12
proven because the state decided all these states, almost every state in this country now has a lottery. So, obviously
00:22:19
it was a it was a legitimate business. It just happened to be illegal. Well, there are all kinds of laws that
00:22:26
were put in place in this country that were not legitimate. They were not fair. But they were laws, so technically you'd
00:22:33
be breaking the law if you didn't do what you were supposed to. Um so that to me is never a complicated sort
00:22:44
of question. What is the history of the lottery? It was legal and then illegal and then
00:22:51
legal again? It turns out that the 13 colonies had lotteries and they used those lotteries because
00:23:00
they were cash poor and they needed them for capital improvements. Like a precursor to the stock market, in
00:23:07
fact, they proliferated these lotteries. Legal. And in fact, slaves could play these lotteries, too,
00:23:17
and win. And one in particular did just that, a famous slave, Denmark Vesey, who
00:23:23
went on to lead a slave revolt years later. But at the time, 1799, he bought his freedom
00:23:32
from the proceeds of a lottery he won, $1,500. Um so, that was a incredible and extraordinary. However, that and other
00:23:43
incidents like that really prompted the you know, new government and these state
00:23:51
governments to essentially ban lotteries and make them illegal. It was too egalitarian. And so, the
00:24:02
answer was to just outlaw it. And that's what they did. Um for like 100 years, until the mid-60s,
00:24:12
they decided that, you know, state officials decided that there was too much money being made in this
00:24:19
underground lottery business, this numbers business that black folks were running and profiting from, and that
00:24:25
they wanted that money. They wanted in. What was the role of the numbers in the black community? I mean, it's hard to
00:24:34
overestimate how important the numbers were in the black community. But the big thing, besides the social
00:24:41
piece, which is huge, also, it was a communal social experience, and that was important. But also, those big numbers
00:24:49
men were race men, and they believed that they should take their wonderful largesse and reinvest in the community.
00:24:58
That was just what they did. And that was vital because discrimination and segregation had made it so that black
00:25:06
folks had a lot of services that were not available to them. >> [music] >> And numbers men stepped in to provide
00:25:13
them something as important as providing a home loan for you know, a black person or family that
00:25:21
cannot get a traditional mortgage. Numbers men would provide the loan money for that.
00:25:28
Um also numbers men started [music] um insurance companies. They started newspapers. They
00:25:38
>> [music] >> bought and owned and and ran hotels where black folks could stay. >> [music]
00:25:44
>> You could not as a black American go to a Detroit hotel downtown and stay in it.
00:25:52
In the in much of the 20th century in this country. You couldn't do it. >> [music]
00:25:57
>> And so numbers men, one in particular, he basically ran a beautiful hotel in Detroit that was for African Americans.
00:26:05
It was incredible. In 1972, the state of Michigan legalized the state lottery. The Michigan lottery was drawn every
00:26:15
week rather than every day like the numbers. So [music] people played both. But in 1977, a new game was introduced,
00:26:25
the daily. It happened every day. You could choose your numbers. You could get paid the
00:26:31
next day, and the payout was 500 to 1. The same as Fanny's. She kept some of her loyal customers for
00:26:39
a while, but then they started to peel off. And here's why. That state-run lottery did have one
00:26:46
distinct advantage. It had a lot of disadvantages [music] that worked for a while for my mom. You didn't have to pay
00:26:53
taxes if you played with Fanny. You could play on credit and pay once a week with Fanny.
00:26:59
So, there were these things that were an advantage, but the big disadvantage ultimately made it impossible for her to
00:27:05
compete. And that is that the state lottery was able to broadcast its winning numbers on the local TV show every
00:27:14
evening. Local TV stations. Um and people absolutely loved to learn the winning numbers every night publicly
00:27:24
[music] at the same time. And so, that's when my mother really started to try to figure out what can I
00:27:33
do? And she came up with something. She did. She decided, "Hmm, if you can't beat
00:27:40
them, join them. And you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to take those winning numbers that
00:27:45
the lottery provides and make them the winning numbers for my informal lottery business."
00:27:52
And it worked. It worked. The state lottery kept changing. And Fanny Davis kept changing her business
00:28:04
right with it. It was getting tougher to compete. She started holding poker games to help
00:28:10
make up for lost revenue. But when Michigan introduced the lotto, the prizes were bigger than she could
00:28:16
keep up with. Fanny Davis ran her numbers business for 30 years. She died in 1992.
00:28:25
Bridgette says she can still picture her mother seated at their dining room table
00:28:31
working. Of course, everyone thinks that her mother's beautiful, but mine really was.
00:28:37
And I loved watching her work. You know, she was just there and she was doing her
00:28:42
thing [music] and I was just going around, you know, getting ready for school or having my sugar frosted
00:28:47
[music] flakes in the morning and just comforted by her presence and the sight of her doing her business.
00:28:55
It was like [music] all's well in the world. The money Fanny earned put Bridget through college. It allowed her to buy a
00:29:04
home of her own in Brooklyn. She says she plays the numbers >> [music] >> now in the form of the legal lottery
00:29:12
almost every day. She usually plays 313, the area code [music] for Detroit. But sometimes she plays 788,
00:29:24
her mother's favorite. Can you do an impression [music] of what it was like when your mother on the
00:29:45
phone when she would pick up the phone to take a number, what she what she would say? What was the interaction
00:29:50
like? Oh, I loved the sound of her taking numbers. [music] You know, she'd be on the phone and
00:29:56
she'd say, "Hi, Miss Queenie. I'm calling to take your numbers. Are you ready? Okay, good.
00:30:01
All right, I'm ready. Come on. 542 for a quarter, uh-huh. 693 straight for [music] 50 cents. Is this both races,
00:30:08
Miss Queenie? Detroit and Pontiac? Okay. 388 straight for a dollar, uh-huh. 475 straight for 50 cents. 110 box for a
00:30:16
[music] dollar. Hmm, okay. I got it. All right, Miss Queenie. Well, listen. Do you have any more numbers? No? [music]
00:30:23
All right. Okay, I'll take that one more. 684 for 50 cents, uh-huh. And 972 [music]
00:30:30
box for 20. Got it. All right, Miss Queenie. You have a good day." >> [music] [music]
00:30:44
>> Criminal is created by Lauren Spor and me. Nidia Wilson is our senior producer.
00:30:50
Audio mix by Rob Byers. Julian Alexander [music] makes original illustrations for each
00:30:56
episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com where you can also find information
00:31:03
about the book that Bridget Davis has written about her mother. It's called The World According to
00:31:09
Fannie Davis, My Mother's Life and the Detroit Numbers. Criminal is recorded in the studios
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>> [music] >> of North Carolina Public Radio WUNC. We're a proud member of Radiotopia from
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PRX, a collection of the best podcasts around. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.
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Radiotopia >> [music] >> from PRX.