Fannie used her profits to provide for her family, but as Davis movingly shows, the proceeds allowed for something more. The family home wasn’t just a roof over their heads; it became “our armor against a world designed to convince us, black working-class children of migrants, that we didn’t deserve a good life.” Davis remembers how abundance afforded her “the indulgence of daydreams” and a first-rate education. Fannie also put some of her profits into the local community, supporting black-owned businesses and giving out “a little piece of money” when someone needed it.

Davis links her mother’s generosity with the bigger outlays of the established numbers operators, some of whom used their profits to fund Detroit’s civil rights movement. “This makes me wary of the charge that numbers had a negative impact on the black community,” she writes. “If there were disadvantages, if some folks gambled too much, and if others spent coins and dollars on the numbers that could’ve gone to more so-called honorable means, then in my mind that is completely offset by the invaluable ways numbers money was used.”

“Completely offset”? Is such an exacting calculation possible, or even necessary? Gambling can be a source of hope and pleasure; it can also be grinding addiction. Anyone ruined by it, or duped by a proprietor less scrupulous than Fannie, might feel like a discounted item in Davis’s ledger. Not to mention that Fannie herself took risks that were bigger than many people would willingly hazard. She kept a gun in the linen closet and another in her purse. One of Davis’s older sisters became so anxious that she wrote pleading letters to God.

The private philanthropy that Davis commends leaves it up to the people with means to apportion the money as they see fit — an individual solution to what is arguably a structural problem. But then Fannie’s experience taught her not to put much stock in public forms of redistribution. “Black folks,” Davis writes, “had many, many reasons not to trust the government.” She describes her mother’s politics as “a blend of progressive and conservative,” girded by a firm belief in self-reliance. Davis herself calls the Michigan state lottery, legalized in 1972 as a way to bring in government revenue, a “usurping.”

Yet the novelist in Davis knows that Fannie’s whole story was more complicated than a daughter’s protectiveness will allow. The state lottery ended up being a mixed bag for Fannie. It was a competitor, yes, but Davis concedes that it injected new energy into Fannie’s business by taking some of the stigma away from gambling. Fannie started to use the daily lottery as her source for three-digit numbers, shrewdly turning the state into her backup bank; she could offset a customer’s heavy bet by playing the same number in the lottery, which meant she no longer had to depend on the big numbers men for cash flow.

“Nice irony,” Davis writes, though her mother might have called it something else. Like so many other times in her remarkable life, Fannie had found a way beat the odds.