Synopses & Reviews
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).
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. That woman was Fannie Davis, Bridgett M. Davis's mother.
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. 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. Living takes guts."
A 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.
Review
"The World According to Fannie Davis is a daughter's gesture of loving defiance, an act of reclamation, an absorbing portrait of her mother in full." Jennifer Szalai, New York Times
Review
"Bridgett M. Davis draws a loving portrait of her unforgettable mother who gamed the system and won.... Davis' love letter to her mother lights a bold new path, because sometimes leaning in is not enough." Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage
Review
"The author candidly and poignantly transports readers to her formative years in Detroit, where her mother, Fannie, successfully ran numbers — right from the family's dining room table — with class, determination and dignity to spare." Bridgette Bartlett Royall, Essence Magazine
About the Author
Bridgett M. Davis is Professor of Journalism and the Writing Professions at Baruch College, CUNY, where she teaches creative, film and narrative writing and is Director of the Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence Program. A graduate of Spelman College in Atlanta, and Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, she is the director of the award-winning feature film Naked Acts, as well as the author of two novels, Into the Go-Slow and Shifting Through Neutral. She lives in Brooklyn, NY with her family.