Bridgett M. Davis says her mother was both extraordinary and typical.
After reading her memoirThe World According to Fannie Davis, youll see just how much that description fits.
She lifted the community around her, too.
Credit: Nina Subin; Little, Brown
It just so happened that her lottery-adjacent enterprise was illegal.
Read on below.The World According to Davispublishes Tuesday and isavailable for pre-order.
What was she like?
It opened the floodgates, as they say.
I realized this thing Id been feeling was really me wanting to finally tell her story.
That was actually 10 years ago, that I committed to it in a real way.
You combine a biography of her with a deep foray into her Detroit community and the time period overall.
The argument, implicitly, is that her story reflects her place and time.
It felt to me that itd be harder to understand her outside of that.
I think of things in that way.
Im sure my old background as a journalist plays a part in that.
Im a history buff.
And I actually love research.
So all of those things came to bear.
And then you could decide.
But those things were inseparable for me: her story and the world in which she found herself.
I knew that lots of people within our midst liked to play the numbers, as theyd say.
It was just part of that thing that seemed normal.
It was just part of that world.
I had no idea what role the numbers played in the black community.
I had no clue about that: their history or their importance, what they were really supporting.
Thats how I processed it.
By 1972, the lottery was legal in Detroit.
So how did your perception of her change?
As youre researching all this, your relationship to your own mother is changing.So deep.
I appreciate her on a level beyond what I ever imagined.
I imagine that changed the shape of the book as well.Oh, absolutely.
I was researching it constantly, and largely that meant interviewing family and friends.
I didnt know what they were going to tell me.
That definitely shapes the narrative.
Youre taught as a journalist not to predetermine the story before you go in.
This was clear for me from the beginning.
You know you have family lore.
But beyond that, I wasnt sure what I would find.
I really had to allow the story to be what it needed to be.
With that, to go back to my question earlier: Whatdidit need to be?
What does your mothers story have to teach us?I think my mom was both extraordinary and typical.
I think that she really embodied that way that so many African-Americans moved through the world.
She made a way out of no way.
But I know thats the life I grew up in: that culture, that community.
And I hope people just appreciate this black woman who values beauty and who believed in a rich life.
I mean that in every sense of the word.
Who felt it was a good thing to indulge her children.
And that everyone, black folks included, has the right to that pursuit of happiness.
But do you wonder or worry at all about peoples reaction?
I was so concerned about being judged.
And most of all, I was concerned about my mother being judged.
That took a while.
