September 12, 2019 • 37 mins
Bridgett grew up in Detroit in the '60s in a vibrant house with a mother who was genius with numbers. But for most of her life, Bridgett kept her mother's genius a secret.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets as a production of I Heart Radio. One day,
I decided to organize mama's number running materials and went
through the house, gathering everything together into one shallow cardboard box.
I was enamored of my own organizational skills and decided
(00:21):
to add one final touch on the side of the box.
Using bright pink nail polish, I carefully painted in boxing
letters Mama's numbers. I probably showed this to my mother,
impressed with myself for remembering the possessive apostrophe. She took
one look and said, you can't put my business out
(00:43):
in the street like that. Looking back, this was the
moment when I became consciously aware that I must keep
my admiration from my mother's work a private experience. Before
I had known to keep her livelihood of secret, but
hadn't yet formed an opinion of feldny pride in when
(01:05):
Mamma actually did for a living. Now I understood that
my pride for her also had to be kept a secret,
as did all the evidence of her work. That's Brigette M.
Davis reading from her memoir The World according to Fanny Davis.
(01:28):
Fanny is Brigette's mom, and Fanny was a numbers runner
in Detroit in the nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies. This
is how she supported her family in style and provided
for their future. And Brigette grew up knowing one thing
for sure. Never ever was she to breathe a word
to a soul about what her mama did for a living.
(01:59):
I'm Danny should euro and this is family secrets, the
secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we keep
from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves. At
the time I was experiencing it, I thought it was
normal my childhood because there were many rituals that happened regularly.
(02:21):
I could listen to my mother on the phone every
day taking her customers beds, and it was like a
daytime lullaby. I loved it. It didn't seem odd to
me at all to hear this recitation of numbers right
by her, and then every evening we were all going
to wait to hear what the day's winning numbers were.
And that's how it worked if you were in a
(02:43):
household where your parents, in my case, my mom was
actually a numbers runner. It was simply a precursor to
the lottery, and it existed decades before the state got
around to taking it over, So that was the way
that you lived in that kind of elsehold. And I thought,
in an odd way, the structure was comforting because I
(03:05):
knew it. To count on, Let's go all the way back,
literally though, to Detroit the house here. We were in
this home that was a colonial, four bedroom brick house.
It was very traditional looking and for us, extremely spacious.
(03:28):
There was seven of us and all the sisters shared
a room. My brother had his own room, and then
there was my parents room, so we all had our space.
And what I loved about it as a child is
that it really did have this incredibly fascinating addict where
I could go up and just play and imagine all
(03:52):
kinds of things. I was as many writers as a child,
I was very caught up in my own imagination. I
could spend hours in my own head, and the attic
was a great place to do that because I could
look out that window and see everything in front of me,
the entire goings on of the street. But the basement
(04:12):
was the same way. It was this gorgeous space that
it turns out my mother had uh she renovated it
so it became like a lounge. And it was the sixties,
so there was wood paneling, there was a wrap around
bar that was you know, necessary back then. And because
I had all these siblings who were teenagers, there were
(04:35):
what I thought was parties every night. When I looked back,
it couldn't have been every night, but in my memory
it was. It was all of my siblings friends coming
in the side door and running down the steps and
listening to lots of Motown. You know, we were in Detroit,
so Motown was our soundtrack, and those records were spinning
(04:57):
regularly constantly, and I remember laughter and people playing cards
and smoke and you know, this sort of sense that
it was a social hub. So that was happening, and
at the same time, my mother was also inviting lots
of people into the home because she was a magnet
(05:18):
for people. They loved being around her. She really was
what we call a pillar of the community, but no
one used that term. She was just Fanny, Miss Fanny,
and her doors were open, so people who were really
wanting to come over and have a meal knew they
could do that at Fanny's house. If they needed advice,
they could come to her. If you know, a young
(05:39):
woman was struggling in her marriage and things were a
little crazy. My mother would say, why don't you stay
here a few days until things cool off. So there
were always these people in the house. My sister used
to call a Grand Central station. The doorbell was always ringing,
the doors were swinging open, the phone was going off
all the time. Describe Fanny for me, I mean, what
(06:04):
did she look like, what did she wear, what was
her style, what her voice sounds. So my mom was
really pretty. I often say that everyone thinks their mother
is beautiful, but mine really was. And we would say it.
The girls would say, Mama is prettier than any of us.
You know. She got the looks, but she wasn't in
(06:26):
any way arrogant or vain. She was just self assured
and she was pretty simple in her style in the
sense that my mom really only wore makeup if she
was going somewhere special. She wasn't someone to wear makeup.
She had this beautiful, naturally long, thick hair, which some
days she would comb and some days she wouldn't. And
(06:47):
the days she didn't want to comb her hair as
she put an Aramis scarf around it and cover it up.
She didn't shy away from luxurious things. She loved minx
and she liked beautiful leather purses before it was a thing.
She also liked to lounge around the house in these
(07:09):
gorgeous I call them ensembles, but they were basically beautiful
gowns and matching robes, and she had an array of them,
and they were so pretty. My favorite was just lace
trimmed with this ribbon woven through it. Gorgeous, you know,
white with pink trim. Yeah, sitting there looking lovely but
(07:33):
taking care of business. Brigette and her family lived in
the heart of Detroit. Fanny bought the house in from
a man named Mr. Prince during a time of white flight.
Whites were leaving the city and droves and they were
selling their homes to blacks. So this was a neighborhood
called Russell Woods, upscale, but not as tony as Gross Point,
(07:57):
where the automagnates lived. In the nine sixties, the auto
industry in Detroit was doing what it was supposed to do,
creating a solid middle class, and much of that middle
class was black, backed by strong unions and able to
buy their own homes. Then, as the sixties progressed, and
the civil rights movement really got a foot. Um. You
(08:19):
could see, you could feel the changes. I was just
a child, but I could feel this thing that was rumbling. Um.
This these tensions that I couldn't have given a name to,
but they were there, these racial tensions happening in the city.
And of course it all combusted in ninety seven with
(08:42):
the race riots, as they've called them in the media.
Detroitters called the uprising or the Great Rebellion. But that
was the moment when um, things really as in many
other cities, urban centers, in the city, in the country, Uh,
things really came to a head. And there were riots
that lasted across five days. And you have memories of this.
(09:06):
I have memories. You were a little kid. I was
a kid, but I definitely remember it. It was sixty seven,
forgive me, you know, King was assassinated and the rise
of sixty seven, and those years collapsed for me because
they were both traumatic, and I was seven and eight,
and I remember them almost as though they merge in
my mind. One long year of just trauma. Yeah, that's
(09:31):
what trauma does. We're going to pause for a moment.
So there's a story about the way Fanny was able
to buy that house from Mr Prince, a story that
Brigette really only learned when she began to do research
(09:52):
for her book. It says something about the way our
parents present our lives to us, and the way as
children we don't tend to question this stories we received.
In Brigette's case, all her life, what she knew was
that her mother bought their beautiful family home on contract,
as it was called. She essentially went into this arrangement
(10:13):
one on one with the seller Mr Prince, and didn't
involve a bank, and essentially bought it from him that way,
so that she paid him a mortgage. Every month paid
on the mortgage, and when she was done paying for it,
it was hers. And it seemed to me that she
was making that choice because she had this unorthodox profession.
(10:38):
I always thought, well into my adulthood that well, she
couldn't show a pay stuff. My dad wasn't able to work,
he was disabled, so she had to figure out this
creative way to buy home. It was only years later,
while working on this book that I found out that,
(10:59):
in fact, because she was a quote unquote Negro woman,
she wasn't allowed to get a mortgage in the ways
that most Americans can because there was this thing called redlining,
and it it enabled the Federal Housing Authority to impose
these boundaries around so called high risk communities and neighborhoods.
(11:24):
What made it high risk? If one black family lived
in that community, it was high risk. So what did
that mean? They wouldn't ensure the loans that banks were lending.
So banks could say, we're not lending to you because
we can't get this loan insured by the f h A.
It's too risky. And so it trickled throughout the real
(11:45):
estate community. Right realtors wouldn't show homes just two blacks
and certain communities, or sell their homes to them, sell
certain homes to them. And so imagine having the means,
but not being able to buy a house only because
of the color of your skin. You know, this thing
that is the symbol of your American dream. It really
(12:07):
is your foothold into the middle class. And so that
infuriated me when I learned it. Never did I hear
my mother talk about it that way or in that context.
But I have to tell you, it's pretty predatory because
it is essentially like renting your home, so you have
all the risk of renting and none of the none
(12:27):
of the benefits of owning. You put a huge deposit
down and you never actually build equity in the home.
The seller continues to hold the title and you don't
get the d to the property until you've completely paid
for it um And so if you, for instance, can't
(12:50):
make one payment, if you're late one month, the seller
can take the house back. So in fact, Fanny was
creating this, there was tremendous risk, and what she was
doing it was the only thing she could do to
buy a house. But there was this tremendous risk, and
(13:10):
yet you and your siblings I didn't know it. We
didn't know it was. It was there somewhere, you know,
thrumming in the underbelly of it all. Yeah. I suspect
my older siblings understood more because they were older. Now,
what I felt was Mr Prince coming to our home
(13:33):
every month to collect his mortgage payment. And I look
back on that and I thought, did he not trust
her to send him a check, you know, or he
was still checking on his investment in a way. While
there you go, there's that possibility too. And I didn't
know why, but I just felt every month that he
came that I was almost holding my breath until he
(13:55):
left to be able to say, okay, everything's all right.
It was serious business. Fanny had bought this home in
a risky manner and she had to trust that Mr
Prince would do right by her. On top of this,
her livelihood was risky when it came to her income.
There were no guarantees and she didn't have the space
(14:15):
to miss a single payment or she could lose everything.
Describe what running the numbers is for the uninitiated. Running
the numbers is a a way of being engaged in
this entirely underground but sprawling lottery business that proliferated throughout
(14:41):
much of the country underneath the radar, and it generated
millions of dollars in many cities throughout the country. It
was literally exactly like today's lottery in that today you
can go and play a lottery at any corner bodega
and you can say, here's three digits, I want to
(15:03):
play nine too, and I want to play them for
a dollar, And if those numbers come out, it's all
electronic now, so they just randomly choose those numbers. If
the number comes out, you could win five dollars because
the payoff is five one. Here's how it worked back then.
(15:23):
The winning numbers were arrived at using a convoluted system
involving the racing forms from certain race tracks like the
fair Grounds in New Orleans or Aqueduct in New York.
Once the winning numbers were determined, someone high up in
Detroit's racket received it through a long distance call from
the numbers service boss in Chicago. The winning numbers hit
the streets and spread by word of mouth. Numbers men
(15:46):
told their bankers, who told their bookers, who told their customers,
who told other customers, and so on. One of Brigette's
jobs was to call her mother's customers and give them
the winning combination. That system, which either way in New
York they called numbers, is exactly what my mom was
doing back in Detroit as a numbers runner. She and
(16:10):
many many others were basically engaged in and sort of
unofficial knows. I like to call it an informal lottery system.
You know, there was a precursor to even the numbers.
There was a game called Policy that was completely invented
by and run by whites, and it proliferated throughout the
(16:33):
country prior to this new game that was introduced by
one man in Harlem who came up with an elegant system,
a lot less complicated than what had come before it.
So this black man creates the numbers, and it thrives
in Harlem, and it moves across the country, and yes,
within a very short amount of time, others wanted in
(16:57):
because it generated millions of dollars. We saw it as
this communal business that was turning dollars over in the
community many times, right, and providing all of these legitimate
services through that money. Um. So it's like I knew
that it was. I now know that it was happening
(17:18):
everywhere and in many communities. Before they moved to Detroit.
Before the numbers running and began, Brigette's parents, like millions
of other blacks, migrated north as part of the second
wave of the Great Migration. This was the mid nineteen fifties,
and at that point they had three small children. When
they arrived in Detroit from Nashville. Brigette's father thought he'd
(17:42):
find work in the factories, which he did, but it
was difficult, inconsistent. Eventually he became disabled and couldn't work regularly.
So what was Fanny to do. My mom has these
young children, she's left her home. You know, all they've
ever known was in Nashville, air she her family had
been for generations. My mom's grandfather was born into slavery
(18:05):
in Nashville. That's how far back their roots went. So
she's in this new northern city, tough place. The discrimination
has its own flavor, and she's not prepared for it.
And she checks out the landscape and realizes that se
Detroit's black women are either doing day work, which means,
(18:26):
you know, cleaning white women's homes, or they are in
really low wrong jobs in these factories, making less than
the men, or they're cleaning offices at night. And as
she used to say, it seemed risky to her to
not figure out something else, because the idea of leaving
(18:48):
her children at home while she took one of these
jobs for very low pay and letting them raise themselves
was not an option. And so she started looking for
something else to do. And she didn't have to look
that far actually, because my mom was pretty observant. She
was a quick study, and everywhere around her her neighbors
(19:08):
were playing the numbers, you know, betting their fifty cents,
their quarter, their dollar, not a lot of money, but
she saw that it was a brisk business. So as
a child, you I know your mom is running numbers,
and it's not remotely hidden from you or your siblings.
(19:28):
It's it seems like it's almost sort of command central
of the home. You know she's there and and this
is her job, and she's not remotely ashamed of it.
Um none of you are, but you also know that
it must be kept a secret. Yes, I've been asked,
how is it that your mother never got caught? And
(19:50):
I don't have an actual answer for that. I think
she was lucky. But also my mother was really cautious
and really smart, and I think there were a few
things that she did to really mitigate, you know, the
risk of exposure. And one of them was my mother
only had customers through word of mouth, so she'd only
(20:13):
take your business if you came highly recommended. There was that,
and even though we had a household that felt like
grand central station, my mother was actually careful about who
came into the house. So there was that piece as well.
And also she wasn't flashy. She loved beautiful things, but
she was understated. I think that was really important too,
(20:34):
and then she had to take some very practical measures.
My mother had a lovely I say it's lovely because
I thought it was safe that she kept in her
bedroom closet. It was a metal safe with the combination lock,
and that's where she kept the day's proceeds. That's where
she kept the business. The cash was all in that
(20:55):
combination lock in her bedroom closet. She also carried a
pistol in her purse, and there was another one that
remained in the house in the linen closet underneath the
islet trimmed table claws and the lace napkins, and we
all knew it was there, and we understood. We actually
(21:17):
felt safer knowing it was there, because my mom was
not only worried about exposure and risk that could lead
to arrest, she also had to worry about being in
a cash business and and it getting out that that
maybe there's a lot of cash and family's house, and
so there was that precaution as well. You know, she
(21:39):
was really constantly trying to safeguard against a lot of
different things. We're going to take a quick break. We'll
be back in a moment. Brishette grows up in a
mixed race neighborhood and goes to a mixed school. She
(21:59):
lived on the street that's around the corner from Diana
Ross and the Supremes. They've all just begun to rise,
to start them, and all three of the supremes decided
to buy homes on the same block. Diana Ross gets
the big corner home. So it's a neighborhood of contrasts
and also of tensions simmering beneath the surface. I was
in first grade and I was just in my class,
(22:23):
showing my teacher and assignment, and she said to me,
literally out of nowhere, you sure do have a lot
of shoes. And the thing that was striking is that
the week before, she had asked me what my father
did for a living. I'm six years old. I said
the truth. I said, he doesn't work, which because by
(22:44):
then he really had become disabled. And then she said, well,
what does your mother do? Oh my goodness, Um, I
told her I didn't know, which wasn't true, but I
knew enough to not tell her the truth. But I
was nervous. So when she mentioned these shoes the next week,
(23:07):
you know, you know, even as a child, you have
a sense of things. Something's not right here. I thought,
all right, just not and you don't know what else
to do, Just not when she tells you that. And
then she really surprised me and said, before you sit down,
I want you to name every pair of shoes you have,
and you know, trying to be a good girl. I thought, well,
(23:30):
this is a test and I don't want to get
it wrong. I'm so anxious. Let me just really try
to picture all the shoes that line my closet shelf.
And I started listening them, all of them, the black
and white, polka dotted once with the bow tie and
the buckle ruby red ones, you know, And I managed
to come up with I recall ten pears. That teacher
(23:53):
Ms Miller said to me, what tim pears is an
awful lot. And then she just told me to take
my seat. But I could hear that thing in her voice.
I didn't know what to call it then, but it
was totally disdained, you know. I thought that was it.
And the next day she called me back to her
desk and she said to me, you did not tell
(24:16):
me you had white shoes. I looked down at my feet,
and sure enough, I was wearing a pair of white
shoes that I had forgotten to mention, and I thought,
I've been calling a lie. I thought, I have so
disappointed my teacher, and I hope I'm not in trouble.
I was really worried, and that's why I went home
and told my mother what happened. I just thought I
(24:39):
have to let her know. And I confessed, that's what
it felt like. I was confessing that I forgot to
tell miss Miller about the eleventh pair of shoes. My mom,
I had never seen her get this angry. I mean,
I mean her eyes flashed with anger like I had
never seen, and I thought I'm about to get a spanking.
But that's not what happened. She looked at me and said,
(25:02):
that's none of her damn business. Who does she think
she is? So I'm relieved that I'm not in trouble.
But then she said to me, get your code, let's go.
I thought, please God, I hope we're not going back
to school to come front miss Miller. But we weren't.
My mom put me in the car and drove me
(25:23):
to Saxoforth Avenue and then took me to the children's
shoe department and pointed to the most beautiful pair of
like yellow patent leather shoes that I've ever seen in
my life. She pointed to them and said, those are pretty,
and then she bought them for me. She pulled out
a one dollar bill and pay for those shoes. And
(25:45):
I still remember how the saleswoman looked at me and
her that saleswoman looked at my mom the way that
that Miss Miller I looked at me. My mom didn't
seem to even notice. She just said to me, you're
gonna wear these school tomorrow, and you better tell that
damn teacher of yours that you actually have a dozen
pair of shoes. You hearing me, So what could I do?
(26:07):
I did what I was told, and as nervous as
I was, I walked up to Miss Miller's desk. I
had chosen a beautiful little yellow knit dress to match
the shoes, and I said, Ms. Miller, I have twelve
pairs of shoes. Oh my god. She looked down at
my feet, she looked at my face with those blue eyes,
(26:30):
and she told me to sit out. And you know,
she never said another word to me ever again the
rest of the school year. How did that feel to you?
I mean, you're six years old, you're in first grade.
You again something you don't have language for, right, you
recognize disdaining, but you know you don't have that word. Um,
(26:54):
you recognize it in the saleswoman at sacks for your mother.
You don't have that word. But what your mother does
is models for you. UM, dignity, Yes, that's it. If
she had played that any other way, you know, I
think about that now because it's still stuck with me.
(27:16):
Look how it has stuck with me my whole life.
I still remember as much as I tell people that story,
I can recall how I felt as a six year old.
It was traumatizing. And if my mother had, you know,
handled it any other way, said we'll just ignore her,
or well, you don't have to wear all your shoes
(27:36):
as cool. If she had done any of those things,
I think the shame would have come rushing down onto me,
all that shame that she had kept at bay. You know,
I think it would have really been really a very
different outcome. Um. So I'm grateful that she had to
wherewithal to handle it that way, because I knew right
(27:58):
then that no one could tell me what I was
entitled to. That was the thing that I quickly grasps
from that situation. There are stories that stay with us
and stories that we need to rediscover and re understand
as adults once our childhood's become clearer to us, especially
when our childhoods have involved a secret. Brigette is already
(28:21):
deep into her adult life. She's in her fifties, a journalist,
a professor, a wife, and a mom. Before this secret
she has kept her whole life starts to sit less
comfortably within her. Fanny's gone. The risks of what she
did are long past, and yet still the secret remains.
Why I was so used in not telling it was
(28:45):
all I ever knew. I inherited that way of life
that I never struggled with the idea of wanting to
tell of Oh oops, I'm gonna share this and I shouldn't.
I never did. It was incredible because as my best
friend since fourth grade, Diane Um, was being interviewed by
(29:07):
me as I was researching the book and now we're
in our fifties, and she thought, I just wanted to
talk about my mom, and she thought, well, that's a
great subject, because we all loved your mother. And we
all have stories of how she helped us. So yeah,
I'd love to talk to her, talk to you about her.
And then my final question to her was did you
(29:28):
know that my mom had this whole business? And and
she was like, what are you talking about? What it's like?
That's when I realized, Wow, I really did keep this
secret pretty well, and that we all did, and that
my mother did. And you know, I could see it
in my friend's face. She was like, wait a minute,
(29:50):
I I did know your mom was running something. I
just didn't know what. Like I could tell she was
in charge, I just didn't know what she was in
charge of. So it was both a revelation but not surprising.
But that was my way of understanding for myself that yes,
we did keep that secret, solidly kept it um across
(30:12):
many years. But here's the thing I came to learn
to just because it wasn't a dark, shameful secret didn't
mean it wasn't weighing on me. It was because a
secret morse, it ultimately becomes something that attaches shame to itself,
to itself. Right, It's like I call shame a secret
(30:35):
country cousin because they're not far from one another inevitably,
and in my case, I started feeling bad about not telling.
I started thinking, I'm acting like I'm ashamed of my
mother because I'm not telling anyone, and that felt awful.
At what point did you start feeling that way? It
(30:58):
really became a hute once I had a child, and
once my son got older and actually asked me one
day when he was like ten years old. This was
nine years ago, and he very innocently looked at a
photo of my mom and said, what was she like? Oh?
(31:21):
I managed to answer him. I said, oh, she was amazing.
But in my heart, I thought, Jesus, what have you done?
You know you have really now reached gone into a
territory that's unhealthy. You kept the secret longer than you
had to. Why are you still keeping the secret now?
Your own children don't know who their grandmother is, what
(31:42):
she did, what she accomplished. Then I thought, get it together.
Your mom died when you were thirty two. Yes, when
were your children born? So my son was born seven
years later. Okay, so you died before, right, So they
never knew her. They never knew her. I, as an aside, thought,
maybe I'll never have children. Um, I totally waited till
(32:06):
the last possible moment because I thought, you know, I
thought it was because I could never be the kind
of mother I had. And I wonder now, you know,
was that whole business of the secret implicated in there somehow?
I don't know how, but maybe something about children requires revelation.
And maybe I was hesitant about that too. I don't know,
(32:30):
but I definitely felt an urgency once he was asking
about her. That was the trigger. What has it been
like for you after a lifetime of that being so
(32:53):
embedded as a secret, Not only to have it stopped
being a secret um to your children or to your
inner circle, but um really shining a light on Fanny
and on everything that had been kind of kept in
the dark, kept quiet. What what what's that been like
for you? Oh? My, Sally, And emotionally and psychologically, it
(33:16):
is incredible. It's life changing. I can't put it in
any other way. It's a relief. It's such a relief,
and it's so validating. All that time I was stopping
a lot from happening, from my children knowing who she was,
from myself being able to brag about her, from all
these people who loved her, and had been touched by her.
(33:38):
They weren't really able to talk about her. Is as
though I gave everyone permission, and then I gave permission
to all these people who didn't know Fanny but had
similar stories. It dawned on me I hadn't thought about it.
Everyone was keeping the number secret. Well. One of the
things about secrets, too, is the way that they they
(34:02):
beget secrets. That begets secrets, that begets secrets, and so
everybody is walking around holding some version of a secret,
and they think that they're the only one, right, right,
that's it. I thought that I thought that I, um,
I didn't have any friends who had, you know, mother's
(34:24):
doing what my mom did, so it felt like I
was the only one. But of course now I'm not kidding.
Almost everyone I talked to wants to tell me an anecdote.
Not just about I had a friend who was in
the numbers, though I remember that family down the street
or my uncle was doing that, but people who want
to tell me about their grandfather who bet on horses,
(34:49):
or you know, the history of bootlegging in their family,
or you know like that, to me is the quintessentral
American story. It's something. It's really something. Here's Bridgette reading
a passage from the World according to Fannie Davis, in
(35:09):
which the love of this remarkable daughter for her remarkable
mother shines through as a family secret finally blossoms into
the light of day. My mother gave us a good
life a great expense. I thought I knew her skills
as a number runner, that she used her facility with numbers,
(35:31):
good judge of character, winning personality, and dose of good
luck to build and maintain her business for three decades.
But I had no idea just how much of a
gambler she was, or the kind of psychological work it
took to keep our world afloat. Scariest of all, is
(35:52):
this The only way for me to tell Mamma's story
is to defy her by running my mouth. Many thanks
(36:13):
to my guest, Brigette M. Davis. She is the author
of the World according to Fannie Davis, and you can
find out more about Brigette at Brigette davis dot com.
Family Secrets is an I Heeart media production. Dylan Fagan
is a supervising producer, Lowell Brolante is the audio engineer,
and Julie Douglas is the executive producer. If you have
(36:36):
a family secret you'd like to share with us, get
in touch at listener mail at Family Secrets podcast dot com.
You can also find us on Instagram at Danny Writer,
and Facebook at Family Secrets Pod and Twitter at fami
Secrets Pod. For more about my book, Inheritance, visit Danny
Shapiro dot com. Yeah for more podcasts. For my heart radio,
(37:09):
visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets as a production of I Heart Radio. One day,
I decided to organize mama's number running materials and went
through the house, gathering everything together into one shallow cardboard box.
I was enamored of my own organizational skills and decided
(00:21):
to add one final touch on the side of the box.
Using bright pink nail polish, I carefully painted in boxing
letters Mama's numbers. I probably showed this to my mother,
impressed with myself for remembering the possessive apostrophe. She took
one look and said, you can't put my business out
(00:43):
in the street like that. Looking back, this was the
moment when I became consciously aware that I must keep
my admiration from my mother's work a private experience. Before
I had known to keep her livelihood of secret, but
hadn't yet formed an opinion of feldny pride in when
(01:05):
Mamma actually did for a living. Now I understood that
my pride for her also had to be kept a secret,
as did all the evidence of her work. That's Brigette M.
Davis reading from her memoir The World according to Fanny Davis.
(01:28):
Fanny is Brigette's mom, and Fanny was a numbers runner
in Detroit in the nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies. This
is how she supported her family in style and provided
for their future. And Brigette grew up knowing one thing
for sure. Never ever was she to breathe a word
to a soul about what her mama did for a living.
(01:59):
I'm Danny should euro and this is family secrets, the
secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we keep
from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves. At
the time I was experiencing it, I thought it was
normal my childhood because there were many rituals that happened regularly.
(02:21):
I could listen to my mother on the phone every
day taking her customers beds, and it was like a
daytime lullaby. I loved it. It didn't seem odd to
me at all to hear this recitation of numbers right
by her, and then every evening we were all going
to wait to hear what the day's winning numbers were.
And that's how it worked if you were in a
(02:43):
household where your parents, in my case, my mom was
actually a numbers runner. It was simply a precursor to
the lottery, and it existed decades before the state got
around to taking it over, So that was the way
that you lived in that kind of elsehold. And I thought,
in an odd way, the structure was comforting because I
(03:05):
knew it. To count on, Let's go all the way back,
literally though, to Detroit the house here. We were in
this home that was a colonial, four bedroom brick house.
It was very traditional looking and for us, extremely spacious.
(03:28):
There was seven of us and all the sisters shared
a room. My brother had his own room, and then
there was my parents room, so we all had our space.
And what I loved about it as a child is
that it really did have this incredibly fascinating addict where
I could go up and just play and imagine all
(03:52):
kinds of things. I was as many writers as a child,
I was very caught up in my own imagination. I
could spend hours in my own head, and the attic
was a great place to do that because I could
look out that window and see everything in front of me,
the entire goings on of the street. But the basement
(04:12):
was the same way. It was this gorgeous space that
it turns out my mother had uh she renovated it
so it became like a lounge. And it was the sixties,
so there was wood paneling, there was a wrap around
bar that was you know, necessary back then. And because
I had all these siblings who were teenagers, there were
(04:35):
what I thought was parties every night. When I looked back,
it couldn't have been every night, but in my memory
it was. It was all of my siblings friends coming
in the side door and running down the steps and
listening to lots of Motown. You know, we were in Detroit,
so Motown was our soundtrack, and those records were spinning
(04:57):
regularly constantly, and I remember laughter and people playing cards
and smoke and you know, this sort of sense that
it was a social hub. So that was happening, and
at the same time, my mother was also inviting lots
of people into the home because she was a magnet
(05:18):
for people. They loved being around her. She really was
what we call a pillar of the community, but no
one used that term. She was just Fanny, Miss Fanny,
and her doors were open, so people who were really
wanting to come over and have a meal knew they
could do that at Fanny's house. If they needed advice,
they could come to her. If you know, a young
(05:39):
woman was struggling in her marriage and things were a
little crazy. My mother would say, why don't you stay
here a few days until things cool off. So there
were always these people in the house. My sister used
to call a Grand Central station. The doorbell was always ringing,
the doors were swinging open, the phone was going off
all the time. Describe Fanny for me, I mean, what
(06:04):
did she look like, what did she wear, what was
her style, what her voice sounds. So my mom was
really pretty. I often say that everyone thinks their mother
is beautiful, but mine really was. And we would say it.
The girls would say, Mama is prettier than any of us.
You know. She got the looks, but she wasn't in
(06:26):
any way arrogant or vain. She was just self assured
and she was pretty simple in her style in the
sense that my mom really only wore makeup if she
was going somewhere special. She wasn't someone to wear makeup.
She had this beautiful, naturally long, thick hair, which some
days she would comb and some days she wouldn't. And
(06:47):
the days she didn't want to comb her hair as
she put an Aramis scarf around it and cover it up.
She didn't shy away from luxurious things. She loved minx
and she liked beautiful leather purses before it was a thing.
She also liked to lounge around the house in these
(07:09):
gorgeous I call them ensembles, but they were basically beautiful
gowns and matching robes, and she had an array of them,
and they were so pretty. My favorite was just lace
trimmed with this ribbon woven through it. Gorgeous, you know,
white with pink trim. Yeah, sitting there looking lovely but
(07:33):
taking care of business. Brigette and her family lived in
the heart of Detroit. Fanny bought the house in from
a man named Mr. Prince during a time of white flight.
Whites were leaving the city and droves and they were
selling their homes to blacks. So this was a neighborhood
called Russell Woods, upscale, but not as tony as Gross Point,
(07:57):
where the automagnates lived. In the nine sixties, the auto
industry in Detroit was doing what it was supposed to do,
creating a solid middle class, and much of that middle
class was black, backed by strong unions and able to
buy their own homes. Then, as the sixties progressed, and
the civil rights movement really got a foot. Um. You
(08:19):
could see, you could feel the changes. I was just
a child, but I could feel this thing that was rumbling. Um.
This these tensions that I couldn't have given a name to,
but they were there, these racial tensions happening in the city.
And of course it all combusted in ninety seven with
(08:42):
the race riots, as they've called them in the media.
Detroitters called the uprising or the Great Rebellion. But that
was the moment when um, things really as in many
other cities, urban centers, in the city, in the country, Uh,
things really came to a head. And there were riots
that lasted across five days. And you have memories of this.
(09:06):
I have memories. You were a little kid. I was
a kid, but I definitely remember it. It was sixty seven,
forgive me, you know, King was assassinated and the rise
of sixty seven, and those years collapsed for me because
they were both traumatic, and I was seven and eight,
and I remember them almost as though they merge in
my mind. One long year of just trauma. Yeah, that's
(09:31):
what trauma does. We're going to pause for a moment.
So there's a story about the way Fanny was able
to buy that house from Mr Prince, a story that
Brigette really only learned when she began to do research
(09:52):
for her book. It says something about the way our
parents present our lives to us, and the way as
children we don't tend to question this stories we received.
In Brigette's case, all her life, what she knew was
that her mother bought their beautiful family home on contract,
as it was called. She essentially went into this arrangement
(10:13):
one on one with the seller Mr Prince, and didn't
involve a bank, and essentially bought it from him that way,
so that she paid him a mortgage. Every month paid
on the mortgage, and when she was done paying for it,
it was hers. And it seemed to me that she
was making that choice because she had this unorthodox profession.
(10:38):
I always thought, well into my adulthood that well, she
couldn't show a pay stuff. My dad wasn't able to work,
he was disabled, so she had to figure out this
creative way to buy home. It was only years later,
while working on this book that I found out that,
(10:59):
in fact, because she was a quote unquote Negro woman,
she wasn't allowed to get a mortgage in the ways
that most Americans can because there was this thing called redlining,
and it it enabled the Federal Housing Authority to impose
these boundaries around so called high risk communities and neighborhoods.
(11:24):
What made it high risk? If one black family lived
in that community, it was high risk. So what did
that mean? They wouldn't ensure the loans that banks were lending.
So banks could say, we're not lending to you because
we can't get this loan insured by the f h A.
It's too risky. And so it trickled throughout the real
(11:45):
estate community. Right realtors wouldn't show homes just two blacks
and certain communities, or sell their homes to them, sell
certain homes to them. And so imagine having the means,
but not being able to buy a house only because
of the color of your skin. You know, this thing
that is the symbol of your American dream. It really
(12:07):
is your foothold into the middle class. And so that
infuriated me when I learned it. Never did I hear
my mother talk about it that way or in that context.
But I have to tell you, it's pretty predatory because
it is essentially like renting your home, so you have
all the risk of renting and none of the none
(12:27):
of the benefits of owning. You put a huge deposit
down and you never actually build equity in the home.
The seller continues to hold the title and you don't
get the d to the property until you've completely paid
for it um And so if you, for instance, can't
(12:50):
make one payment, if you're late one month, the seller
can take the house back. So in fact, Fanny was
creating this, there was tremendous risk, and what she was
doing it was the only thing she could do to
buy a house. But there was this tremendous risk, and
(13:10):
yet you and your siblings I didn't know it. We
didn't know it was. It was there somewhere, you know,
thrumming in the underbelly of it all. Yeah. I suspect
my older siblings understood more because they were older. Now,
what I felt was Mr Prince coming to our home
(13:33):
every month to collect his mortgage payment. And I look
back on that and I thought, did he not trust
her to send him a check, you know, or he
was still checking on his investment in a way. While
there you go, there's that possibility too. And I didn't
know why, but I just felt every month that he
came that I was almost holding my breath until he
(13:55):
left to be able to say, okay, everything's all right.
It was serious business. Fanny had bought this home in
a risky manner and she had to trust that Mr
Prince would do right by her. On top of this,
her livelihood was risky when it came to her income.
There were no guarantees and she didn't have the space
(14:15):
to miss a single payment or she could lose everything.
Describe what running the numbers is for the uninitiated. Running
the numbers is a a way of being engaged in
this entirely underground but sprawling lottery business that proliferated throughout
(14:41):
much of the country underneath the radar, and it generated
millions of dollars in many cities throughout the country. It
was literally exactly like today's lottery in that today you
can go and play a lottery at any corner bodega
and you can say, here's three digits, I want to
(15:03):
play nine too, and I want to play them for
a dollar, And if those numbers come out, it's all
electronic now, so they just randomly choose those numbers. If
the number comes out, you could win five dollars because
the payoff is five one. Here's how it worked back then.
(15:23):
The winning numbers were arrived at using a convoluted system
involving the racing forms from certain race tracks like the
fair Grounds in New Orleans or Aqueduct in New York.
Once the winning numbers were determined, someone high up in
Detroit's racket received it through a long distance call from
the numbers service boss in Chicago. The winning numbers hit
the streets and spread by word of mouth. Numbers men
(15:46):
told their bankers, who told their bookers, who told their customers,
who told other customers, and so on. One of Brigette's
jobs was to call her mother's customers and give them
the winning combination. That system, which either way in New
York they called numbers, is exactly what my mom was
doing back in Detroit as a numbers runner. She and
(16:10):
many many others were basically engaged in and sort of
unofficial knows. I like to call it an informal lottery system.
You know, there was a precursor to even the numbers.
There was a game called Policy that was completely invented
by and run by whites, and it proliferated throughout the
(16:33):
country prior to this new game that was introduced by
one man in Harlem who came up with an elegant system,
a lot less complicated than what had come before it.
So this black man creates the numbers, and it thrives
in Harlem, and it moves across the country, and yes,
within a very short amount of time, others wanted in
(16:57):
because it generated millions of dollars. We saw it as
this communal business that was turning dollars over in the
community many times, right, and providing all of these legitimate
services through that money. Um. So it's like I knew
that it was. I now know that it was happening
(17:18):
everywhere and in many communities. Before they moved to Detroit.
Before the numbers running and began, Brigette's parents, like millions
of other blacks, migrated north as part of the second
wave of the Great Migration. This was the mid nineteen fifties,
and at that point they had three small children. When
they arrived in Detroit from Nashville. Brigette's father thought he'd
(17:42):
find work in the factories, which he did, but it
was difficult, inconsistent. Eventually he became disabled and couldn't work regularly.
So what was Fanny to do. My mom has these
young children, she's left her home. You know, all they've
ever known was in Nashville, air she her family had
been for generations. My mom's grandfather was born into slavery
(18:05):
in Nashville. That's how far back their roots went. So
she's in this new northern city, tough place. The discrimination
has its own flavor, and she's not prepared for it.
And she checks out the landscape and realizes that se
Detroit's black women are either doing day work, which means,
(18:26):
you know, cleaning white women's homes, or they are in
really low wrong jobs in these factories, making less than
the men, or they're cleaning offices at night. And as
she used to say, it seemed risky to her to
not figure out something else, because the idea of leaving
(18:48):
her children at home while she took one of these
jobs for very low pay and letting them raise themselves
was not an option. And so she started looking for
something else to do. And she didn't have to look
that far actually, because my mom was pretty observant. She
was a quick study, and everywhere around her her neighbors
(19:08):
were playing the numbers, you know, betting their fifty cents,
their quarter, their dollar, not a lot of money, but
she saw that it was a brisk business. So as
a child, you I know your mom is running numbers,
and it's not remotely hidden from you or your siblings.
(19:28):
It's it seems like it's almost sort of command central
of the home. You know she's there and and this
is her job, and she's not remotely ashamed of it.
Um none of you are, but you also know that
it must be kept a secret. Yes, I've been asked,
how is it that your mother never got caught? And
(19:50):
I don't have an actual answer for that. I think
she was lucky. But also my mother was really cautious
and really smart, and I think there were a few
things that she did to really mitigate, you know, the
risk of exposure. And one of them was my mother
only had customers through word of mouth, so she'd only
(20:13):
take your business if you came highly recommended. There was that,
and even though we had a household that felt like
grand central station, my mother was actually careful about who
came into the house. So there was that piece as well.
And also she wasn't flashy. She loved beautiful things, but
she was understated. I think that was really important too,
(20:34):
and then she had to take some very practical measures.
My mother had a lovely I say it's lovely because
I thought it was safe that she kept in her
bedroom closet. It was a metal safe with the combination lock,
and that's where she kept the day's proceeds. That's where
she kept the business. The cash was all in that
(20:55):
combination lock in her bedroom closet. She also carried a
pistol in her purse, and there was another one that
remained in the house in the linen closet underneath the
islet trimmed table claws and the lace napkins, and we
all knew it was there, and we understood. We actually
(21:17):
felt safer knowing it was there, because my mom was
not only worried about exposure and risk that could lead
to arrest, she also had to worry about being in
a cash business and and it getting out that that
maybe there's a lot of cash and family's house, and
so there was that precaution as well. You know, she
(21:39):
was really constantly trying to safeguard against a lot of
different things. We're going to take a quick break. We'll
be back in a moment. Brishette grows up in a
mixed race neighborhood and goes to a mixed school. She
(21:59):
lived on the street that's around the corner from Diana
Ross and the Supremes. They've all just begun to rise,
to start them, and all three of the supremes decided
to buy homes on the same block. Diana Ross gets
the big corner home. So it's a neighborhood of contrasts
and also of tensions simmering beneath the surface. I was
in first grade and I was just in my class,
(22:23):
showing my teacher and assignment, and she said to me,
literally out of nowhere, you sure do have a lot
of shoes. And the thing that was striking is that
the week before, she had asked me what my father
did for a living. I'm six years old. I said
the truth. I said, he doesn't work, which because by
(22:44):
then he really had become disabled. And then she said, well,
what does your mother do? Oh my goodness, Um, I
told her I didn't know, which wasn't true, but I
knew enough to not tell her the truth. But I
was nervous. So when she mentioned these shoes the next week,
(23:07):
you know, you know, even as a child, you have
a sense of things. Something's not right here. I thought,
all right, just not and you don't know what else
to do, Just not when she tells you that. And
then she really surprised me and said, before you sit down,
I want you to name every pair of shoes you have,
and you know, trying to be a good girl. I thought, well,
(23:30):
this is a test and I don't want to get
it wrong. I'm so anxious. Let me just really try
to picture all the shoes that line my closet shelf.
And I started listening them, all of them, the black
and white, polka dotted once with the bow tie and
the buckle ruby red ones, you know, And I managed
to come up with I recall ten pears. That teacher
(23:53):
Ms Miller said to me, what tim pears is an
awful lot. And then she just told me to take
my seat. But I could hear that thing in her voice.
I didn't know what to call it then, but it
was totally disdained, you know. I thought that was it.
And the next day she called me back to her
desk and she said to me, you did not tell
(24:16):
me you had white shoes. I looked down at my feet,
and sure enough, I was wearing a pair of white
shoes that I had forgotten to mention, and I thought,
I've been calling a lie. I thought, I have so
disappointed my teacher, and I hope I'm not in trouble.
I was really worried, and that's why I went home
and told my mother what happened. I just thought I
(24:39):
have to let her know. And I confessed, that's what
it felt like. I was confessing that I forgot to
tell miss Miller about the eleventh pair of shoes. My mom,
I had never seen her get this angry. I mean,
I mean her eyes flashed with anger like I had
never seen, and I thought I'm about to get a spanking.
But that's not what happened. She looked at me and said,
(25:02):
that's none of her damn business. Who does she think
she is? So I'm relieved that I'm not in trouble.
But then she said to me, get your code, let's go.
I thought, please God, I hope we're not going back
to school to come front miss Miller. But we weren't.
My mom put me in the car and drove me
(25:23):
to Saxoforth Avenue and then took me to the children's
shoe department and pointed to the most beautiful pair of
like yellow patent leather shoes that I've ever seen in
my life. She pointed to them and said, those are pretty,
and then she bought them for me. She pulled out
a one dollar bill and pay for those shoes. And
(25:45):
I still remember how the saleswoman looked at me and
her that saleswoman looked at my mom the way that
that Miss Miller I looked at me. My mom didn't
seem to even notice. She just said to me, you're
gonna wear these school tomorrow, and you better tell that
damn teacher of yours that you actually have a dozen
pair of shoes. You hearing me, So what could I do?
(26:07):
I did what I was told, and as nervous as
I was, I walked up to Miss Miller's desk. I
had chosen a beautiful little yellow knit dress to match
the shoes, and I said, Ms. Miller, I have twelve
pairs of shoes. Oh my god. She looked down at
my feet, she looked at my face with those blue eyes,
(26:30):
and she told me to sit out. And you know,
she never said another word to me ever again the
rest of the school year. How did that feel to you?
I mean, you're six years old, you're in first grade.
You again something you don't have language for, right, you
recognize disdaining, but you know you don't have that word. Um,
(26:54):
you recognize it in the saleswoman at sacks for your mother.
You don't have that word. But what your mother does
is models for you. UM, dignity, Yes, that's it. If
she had played that any other way, you know, I
think about that now because it's still stuck with me.
(27:16):
Look how it has stuck with me my whole life.
I still remember as much as I tell people that story,
I can recall how I felt as a six year old.
It was traumatizing. And if my mother had, you know,
handled it any other way, said we'll just ignore her,
or well, you don't have to wear all your shoes
(27:36):
as cool. If she had done any of those things,
I think the shame would have come rushing down onto me,
all that shame that she had kept at bay. You know,
I think it would have really been really a very
different outcome. Um. So I'm grateful that she had to
wherewithal to handle it that way, because I knew right
(27:58):
then that no one could tell me what I was
entitled to. That was the thing that I quickly grasps
from that situation. There are stories that stay with us
and stories that we need to rediscover and re understand
as adults once our childhood's become clearer to us, especially
when our childhoods have involved a secret. Brigette is already
(28:21):
deep into her adult life. She's in her fifties, a journalist,
a professor, a wife, and a mom. Before this secret
she has kept her whole life starts to sit less
comfortably within her. Fanny's gone. The risks of what she
did are long past, and yet still the secret remains.
Why I was so used in not telling it was
(28:45):
all I ever knew. I inherited that way of life
that I never struggled with the idea of wanting to
tell of Oh oops, I'm gonna share this and I shouldn't.
I never did. It was incredible because as my best
friend since fourth grade, Diane Um, was being interviewed by
(29:07):
me as I was researching the book and now we're
in our fifties, and she thought, I just wanted to
talk about my mom, and she thought, well, that's a
great subject, because we all loved your mother. And we
all have stories of how she helped us. So yeah,
I'd love to talk to her, talk to you about her.
And then my final question to her was did you
(29:28):
know that my mom had this whole business? And and
she was like, what are you talking about? What it's like?
That's when I realized, Wow, I really did keep this
secret pretty well, and that we all did, and that
my mother did. And you know, I could see it
in my friend's face. She was like, wait a minute,
(29:50):
I I did know your mom was running something. I
just didn't know what. Like I could tell she was
in charge, I just didn't know what she was in
charge of. So it was both a revelation but not surprising.
But that was my way of understanding for myself that yes,
we did keep that secret, solidly kept it um across
(30:12):
many years. But here's the thing I came to learn
to just because it wasn't a dark, shameful secret didn't
mean it wasn't weighing on me. It was because a
secret morse, it ultimately becomes something that attaches shame to itself,
to itself. Right, It's like I call shame a secret
(30:35):
country cousin because they're not far from one another inevitably,
and in my case, I started feeling bad about not telling.
I started thinking, I'm acting like I'm ashamed of my
mother because I'm not telling anyone, and that felt awful.
At what point did you start feeling that way? It
(30:58):
really became a hute once I had a child, and
once my son got older and actually asked me one
day when he was like ten years old. This was
nine years ago, and he very innocently looked at a
photo of my mom and said, what was she like? Oh?
(31:21):
I managed to answer him. I said, oh, she was amazing.
But in my heart, I thought, Jesus, what have you done?
You know you have really now reached gone into a
territory that's unhealthy. You kept the secret longer than you
had to. Why are you still keeping the secret now?
Your own children don't know who their grandmother is, what
(31:42):
she did, what she accomplished. Then I thought, get it together.
Your mom died when you were thirty two. Yes, when
were your children born? So my son was born seven
years later. Okay, so you died before, right, So they
never knew her. They never knew her. I, as an aside, thought,
maybe I'll never have children. Um, I totally waited till
(32:06):
the last possible moment because I thought, you know, I
thought it was because I could never be the kind
of mother I had. And I wonder now, you know,
was that whole business of the secret implicated in there somehow?
I don't know how, but maybe something about children requires revelation.
And maybe I was hesitant about that too. I don't know,
(32:30):
but I definitely felt an urgency once he was asking
about her. That was the trigger. What has it been
like for you after a lifetime of that being so
(32:53):
embedded as a secret, Not only to have it stopped
being a secret um to your children or to your
inner circle, but um really shining a light on Fanny
and on everything that had been kind of kept in
the dark, kept quiet. What what what's that been like
for you? Oh? My, Sally, And emotionally and psychologically, it
(33:16):
is incredible. It's life changing. I can't put it in
any other way. It's a relief. It's such a relief,
and it's so validating. All that time I was stopping
a lot from happening, from my children knowing who she was,
from myself being able to brag about her, from all
these people who loved her, and had been touched by her.
(33:38):
They weren't really able to talk about her. Is as
though I gave everyone permission, and then I gave permission
to all these people who didn't know Fanny but had
similar stories. It dawned on me I hadn't thought about it.
Everyone was keeping the number secret. Well. One of the
things about secrets, too, is the way that they they
(34:02):
beget secrets. That begets secrets, that begets secrets, and so
everybody is walking around holding some version of a secret,
and they think that they're the only one, right, right,
that's it. I thought that I thought that I, um,
I didn't have any friends who had, you know, mother's
(34:24):
doing what my mom did, so it felt like I
was the only one. But of course now I'm not kidding.
Almost everyone I talked to wants to tell me an anecdote.
Not just about I had a friend who was in
the numbers, though I remember that family down the street
or my uncle was doing that, but people who want
to tell me about their grandfather who bet on horses,
(34:49):
or you know, the history of bootlegging in their family,
or you know like that, to me is the quintessentral
American story. It's something. It's really something. Here's Bridgette reading
a passage from the World according to Fannie Davis, in
(35:09):
which the love of this remarkable daughter for her remarkable
mother shines through as a family secret finally blossoms into
the light of day. My mother gave us a good
life a great expense. I thought I knew her skills
as a number runner, that she used her facility with numbers,
(35:31):
good judge of character, winning personality, and dose of good
luck to build and maintain her business for three decades.
But I had no idea just how much of a
gambler she was, or the kind of psychological work it
took to keep our world afloat. Scariest of all, is
(35:52):
this The only way for me to tell Mamma's story
is to defy her by running my mouth. Many thanks
(36:13):
to my guest, Brigette M. Davis. She is the author
of the World according to Fannie Davis, and you can
find out more about Brigette at Brigette davis dot com.
Family Secrets is an I Heeart media production. Dylan Fagan
is a supervising producer, Lowell Brolante is the audio engineer,
and Julie Douglas is the executive producer. If you have
(36:36):
a family secret you'd like to share with us, get
in touch at listener mail at Family Secrets podcast dot com.
You can also find us on Instagram at Danny Writer,
and Facebook at Family Secrets Pod and Twitter at fami
Secrets Pod. For more about my book, Inheritance, visit Danny
Shapiro dot com. Yeah for more podcasts. For my heart radio,
(37:09):
visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets News
Host
Dani Shapiro
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