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 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. 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. Davis has started running with some very fast company.As seen on the Today Show: 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). But such slips do nothing to dull the luster of this important book. A competent copy editor would have caught such slips, but that doesn’t mitigate the damage they do to a writer’s authority. And she describes trips across the Ambassador Bridge to eat at Chinese restaurants in Quebec, while the Ambassador Bridge connects Detroit and Windsor, Ontario.
Davis writes that her mother drove a Pontiac Riviera, while GM’s Buick division produced the elegant Riviera.
This book, for all its abundant strengths, does have flaws. Davis doesn’t try to sugarcoat her hometown’s exhaustively documented ill. 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.
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