Brigette Davis

Well, Fanny, I don't know about that.

I don't really know about what the three wise men says.

Tell me what the red devil says it plays for.

And then the customer might say, okay, I'm feeling lucky.

I'm going to put that number in today.

My mom believed in luck, and she believed in conjuring luck.

And so she had these rituals that she followed.

There, I might add, there was a proliferation of sort of paraphernalia that you could purchase around the numbers business.

There were shops designed to sell all these things to you, and one of them was candles, lucky candles, the kind that can burn for a week, the nice tall ones.

And so my mom often had these candles burning in the household in strategic places.

The idea was that once the candle burned down, there was actually a three-digit number at the bottom.

And there were lucky oils and there was incense that did the same thing.

Once it burned down, there would be a three-digit number at the bottom.

And that's maybe a number to play.

So, yes, in many ways, as a child, I found our home so magical, and I felt that she was at the center of that magic, that she herself was magical.

I went to school one day and my teacher said to me, you sure do have a lot of pairs of shoes.

And it was true.

I did.

I didn't know how to answer her.

I was concerned because the week before she had asked me, what does your father do?