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    Mama Was a Number Runner: On The World According to Fannie Davis

    by Bill Morris Mar 26, 2019 4 minutes

    Louise Meriwether’s 1970 novel, Daddy Was a Number Runner, is an unflinching portrait of life in Harlem in the starkest year of the Great Depression. Seen through the eyes of a remarkably buoyant 12-year-old girl named Francie Coffin, it’s a world of violence and tenderness, indignities and joys, where despair lives alongside the dream of a big score. In a foreword, James Baldwin, a son of Harlem, wrote that the black-owned daily numbers game that animates the novel “contains the possibility of making a ‘hit’—the American dream in blackface, Horatio Alger revealed, the American success story with the price tag showing!”

    Weird words. Yet weirdly apt, I realized while reading ’s scintillating new memoir, . The book chronicles borrowed $800 from his family to start a record label that would become Motown.

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