The World According to Fannie Davis: My Mother's Life in the Detroit Numbers

To be clear, she always admired hard workers: she just didn't see the point of laboring to benefit someone else. "If you're going to work hard," she used to say, "you might as well work hard for yourself.

My mother's message to black and white folks alike was clear: It's nobody's business what I do for my children, nor how I manage to do it.

That was my mother's policy: Feel free, feel welcome. Be happy.

...she had little use for separate but so-called equal. My mother understood from her Southern roots a basic principle that still rings true; where there's a white presence, there will be amenities. She wanted grocery stores with quality produce, and roads that got repaired and streeetlights that came on magically at dusk and garbage that got collectd on time.

The FHA adopted a racial policy that could well have been culled from the Nuremberg laws,” Charles Abrams, the urban studies expert, wrote in 1955, the year my parents arrived in Michigan from Tennessee.

She also loved beautiful things, and seems to have embraced early a philosophy penned by the writer Toni Cade Bambara: "Beauty is care, just as ugly is carelessness.

The word secret is so loaded, suggests its country cousin shame; but I wasn't ashamed of anything because our family secret wasn't dark and my mother acted neither apologetic nor embarrassed.