Bridgett M. DavisRezensionen

The author recounts her childhood with a comfortable middle-class lifestyle that came from a very unconventional source: her mother ran a cottage betting business that used results from horse races as the "numbers" that customers could bet on. These games were once a common hobby of black communities, and were in their waning decades as Mrs. Davis kept hers going. This was a fun and occasionally dramatic memoir about the young author spending much of her life trying to reconcile this very illegal practice with the security and independence that her mother could provide with it. In that sense, I found it similar to Dilla Time as an important contribution to books chronicling everyday life in Detroit, this one a little earlier with most chapters set in the 1960s and 1970s.

From the late 1950s onward, Davis' mother Fannie built a business in the Numbers--the illegal lottery game.

It's a fascinating story of entrepreneurship and the role of the Numbers in the community. By the time I was growing up, well after New York had established a lottery, numbers were known to me only as something that appeared in news stories about the Mafia. I was unaware of its history in the black community, and Davis does an excellent job of explaining it, especially within Detroit. The Numbers kept the Davis family afloat, but stability was never assured, and class barriers within the black community still existed. Meanwhile, around them, Detroit was beginning its slow decline. Fannie was able to keep her family materially comfortable, but was unable to buy everything for her children.

This combination memoir of a woman growing up in 1960s Detroit, and biography of her mother, who supported the family by running a numbers operation out of the family home, suffers badly from its dual focus.

Fannie's story alone would have been utterly compelling -- how a young wife and mother transplanted from Nashville in the 1950s found a way to survive and thrive has drama and daring and verve.

Her daughter's story -- that of growing up spoiled and indulged in an African-American household at a time when many of her peers dealt with very different issues -- is also an unusual tale, and has its own charm.

But trying to mix the two thins the focus of each.

At bottom, the most compelling component of the book is its revelations about the shadow economy of the African-American community, much of it financed by the illicit "numbers" game which ultimately morphed into legal, state-sponsored lotteries. It's a valuable portrait of a particular time and place in American history, and as such, well worth reading.

As the story of a young woman growing up and coming to terms with her relationship with her mother, it is less singular and therefore less compelling.½

A daughter's loving biography of her mother, a mother who happened to be a numbers runner in 1960s and 1970s in Detroit. Her business afforded them a middle class lifestyle but was always in danger of being revealed since it was illegal. There are nuggets of empowerment: Fannie kept her own bank and collected her own numbers at a time when the "biz" was dominated by Italian mafia and/or black men. She was generous (sometimes to a fault) and a good mother. It is a great look at Detroit before and after the riots and the rise of black political power, Still, Fannie was a flawed person (her ex-husband and son spent a winter without heat while she was "rich"). And this white, middleclass reader wanted Fannie to create a college fund, not buy her daughter a new hotrod. Of definite history to Detroiters and those interested in the numbers business (still a real deal as an alternative to the daily lottery).

Angie has just graduated from college, but, still mourning the death of her older sister, Ella, she has no clear plan for what to do next. Her mother is ready to move on, away from a declining Detroit and into a new life, but Angie fears that leaving Detroit means leaving behind memories of Ella. She sets out for Nigeria, hoping to find peace and her own direction by retracing Ella’s steps in the last weeks of her life.

The story within Into the Go-Slow by Bridgett M. Davis is intriguing. As an eldest sister, I found Angie’s difficulty in defining herself separate from her relationship to her elder sisters interesting. I admit, I’ve always been too mired in the responsibility of being the Little Mom to put much effort into imagining what my younger siblings’ experience of me as their Big Sister was. Seeing this experience through Angie’s eyes was an interesting shift of perspective for me.

Another shift in perspective came when Angie arrived in Lagos and experienced for the first time being surrounded by people who looked like her. Of course, I’m not surprised that the majority of people in Lagos are black, but for some reason it really struck me this time just how much I take for granted the experience of being surrounded by people of my own race here in the US. (I think if Angie had been willing to visit Atlanta with her other sister, she’d have had a similar experience of race, but Nigeria’s a much more interesting destination and has the benefit of having a history that feels less personal for someone who's grown up in the US than the South does, which allows Angie to feel the joy of being in a black culture without the automatic awareness of its history and the failures of the government in which it exists. She feels this joy and can find out the other stuff later, whereas in Atlanta, her knowledge of the history of the place might have influenced her experience from the beginning.)

I also enjoyed the ways in which Davis juxtaposed the negatives of Nigeria with those in the United States. I particularly smiled at this reference:

“The first time Shagari had gotten into office, the whole thing had to be handled by the military and they used some convoluted vote-counting system that no one could figure out. Court ended up deciding who won the election. Can you imagine that shit happening in the US? Judges deciding who gets to be president?” (276)

Of course, the downside of these comparisons is that I’m already in a fairly perpetually crappy mood about the US, and it really doesn’t help my frame of mind to be reminded that the situation isn’t necessarily any better in most of the rest of the world.

As much as I liked the story, though, Davis’ execution lacked the subtlety I prefer in my fiction. An example, from when Angie first arrived in Nigeria:

“All she had to do was wait, be patient, and Ella would return---as she did back in the old days at the racetrack. Even when Angie could barely see her, a dot on the other side of the stretch, Ella always came back round.” (137)

I want that kind of thing to unfold more quietly and in a way that invites me to put the pieces together myself rather than having them handed to me. Instead the references were direct, the metaphors blatant, and that left me disappointed as a reader.

That said, I enjoyed reading this book, especially the Nigeria half. Davis really did a solid job describing Lagos and Kano. I felt immersed in the heat and the chaos and how they influenced Angie’s frame of mind. I think the book might have been stronger if Ella’s story had been interspersed with the Nigeria parts, but it also might have been more clunky, so I’ll refrain from any more armchair editing.