Bridgett M. Davis writes: 'Mama was the first writer I ever knew, and she is almost certainly the reason I am a writer today.' (via latimesopinion )
Born in 1928 in Nashville, the ninth of 10 children, she had no more than a high school education. She was a mother and wife by age 18, and had three children by 1955, when she and my father joined the Great Migration and moved to Michigan, where I was born. They had lean years while my father couldn’t find steady work in Detroit’s auto plants.
After my mother launched her numbers business, our lives improved and we moved to a four-bedroom brick Colonial house in a good West Side neighborhood. Still, Mama did not, as Virginia Woolf advised female writers to do, create a room of her own in which to write. Instead, she carved out a space at the dining room table, under the crystal chandelier, to run her numbers business — creating for us, her family, what I think of as a blue-collar, black-bourgeois life.
Today, my mother’s soft, black binder sits on the shelf behind the desk where I write. Its back cover is gone and the ink on its stained pages is starting to fade. No matter. Its presence remains more valuable to me than any one of the hundreds of books I’ve read in my lifetime. The magic of what lay within the pages of that black binder set my own course in life: Growing up seeing my mother working on a book gave me permission to become a writer.
Bridgett M. Davis is the author, most recently, of “The World According to Fannie Davis: My Mother’s Life in the Detroit Numbers.” She will be appearing at the L.A. Times Festival of Books on Sunday at noon on a panel titled “Memoir: Voices of the Black American Experience.”A digest of essential news, insight and analysis from L.A. Times editors.
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