Living takes guts."Ī daughter's moving homage to an extraordinary parent, The World According to Fannie Davis is also the suspenseful, unforgettable story about the lengths to which a mother will go to "make a way out of no way" and provide a prosperous life for her family - and how those sacrifices resonate over time. She did not want her children or her husband, who at one point could no longer work, to go without. She created a loving, joyful home, sent her children to the best schools, bought them the best clothes, mothered them to the highest standard, and when the tragedy of urban life struck, soldiered on with her stated belief: "Dying is easy. Fannie Davis did what she had to do to feed, clothe, and provide a nice roof over her family’s heads. The World According to Fannie Davis is partly a love letter to a larger-than-life woman and partly an explanation and defense of the lucrative shadow economy of the numbers game, which was an ingenious way for African Americans to circumvent the economic barriers white society had placed in their path.
Part bookie, part banker, mother, wife, and granddaughter of slaves, Fannie ran her numbers business for thirty-four years, doing what it took to survive in a legitimate business that just happened to be illegal. In 1958, the very same year that an unknown songwriter named Berry Gordy borrowed $800 to found Motown Records, a pretty young mother from Nashville, Tennessee, borrowed $100 from her brother to run a numbers racket out of her home.
This true story of an unforgettable mother, her devoted daughter, and their life in the Detroit numbers of the 1960s and 1970s highlights "the outstanding humanity of black America" (James McBride).
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