CHAPTER SIX

DETROIT RED

Every day, I would gamble all of my tips-as high as fifteen and twenty dollars-on the numbers,
and dream of what I would do when I hit.
I saw people on their long, wild spending sprees, after big hits. I don't mean just hustlers who
always had some money. I mean ordinary working people, the kind that we otherwise almost
never saw in a bar like Small's, who, with a good enough hit, had quit their jobs working
somewhere downtown for the white man. Often they had bought a Cadillac, and sometimes for
three and four days, they were setting up drinks and buying steaks for all their friends. I would
have to pull two tables together into one, and they would be throwing me two-and three-dollar tips
each time I came with my tray.
Hundreds of thousands of New York City Negroes, every day but Sunday, would play from a
penny on up to large sums on three-digit numbers. A hit meant duplicating the last three figures of
the Stock Exchange's printed daily total of U.S. domestic and foreign sales.
With the odds at six hundred to one, a penny hit won $6, a dollar won $600, and so on. On $15,
the hit would mean $9,000. Famous hits like that had bought controlling interests in lots of
Harlem's bars and restaurants, or even bought some of them outright. The chances of hitting
were a thousand to one. Many players practiced what was called "combinating." For example six
centswould put one penny on each of the six possible combinations of three digits. The number
840, combinated, would include 840, 804, 048, 084, 408, and 480.
Practically everyone played every day in the poverty-ridden black ghetto of Harlem. Every day,
someone you knew was likely to hit and of course it was neighborhood news; if big enough a hit,
neighborhood excitement. Hits generally were small; a nickel, dime, or a quarter. Most people
tried to play a dollar a day, but split it up among different numbers and combinated.
Harlem's numbers industry hummed every morning and into the early afternoon, with the runners
jotting down people's bets on slips of paper in apartment house hallways, bars, barbershops,
stores, on the sidewalks. The cops looked on; no runner lasted long who didn't, out of his pocket,
put in a free "figger" for his working area's foot cops, and it was generally known that the numbers
bankers paid off at higher levels of the police department.
The daily small army of runners each got ten percent of the money they turned in, along with the
bet slips, to their controllers. (And if you hit, you gave the runner a ten percent tip.) A controller
might have as many as fifty runners working for him, and the controller got five percent of what he
turned over to the banker, who paid off the hit, paid off the police, and got rich off the balance.
Some people played one number all year. Many had lists of the daily hit numbers going back for
years; they figured reappearance odds, and used other systems. Others played their hunches:
addresses, license numbers of passing cars, any numbers on letters, telegrams, laundry slips,
numbers from anywhere. Dream books that cost a dollar would say what number nearly any
dream suggested. Evangelists who on Sundays peddled Jesus, and mystics, would pray a lucky
number for you, for a fee.