Number's Up

A piece of paper with a previously undisclosed truth has the power to bring you to your knees in ways that even a person may not.

For four decades, Johnisha Matthews Levi believed a conventional story about her birth, picturing her happy parents at the hospital together. While sorting through her late mother's belongings, however, she discovered a document indicating that her father was instead serving time in Lorton Reformatory until she was three months old. This revelation, along with rumors about an FBI investigation of her deceased parents' "private business," leads Levi to unearth the hidden history of her family. She ties this story to public policy, demonstrating how state lottery legalization and the War on Drugs disrupted Washington, DC's Black institutions and communities.

Levi's stirring memoir centers on her brilliant but troubled father, a Black World War II radioman who, facing economic barriers after his naval service, reinvents himself as a "numbers man" for an underground gambling operation. The job enables John Matthews to provide for his loved ones and to achieve a level of success far beyond his childhood dreams in the impoverished Jim Crow South. In the process, he becomes an indirect target of law enforcement.

By examining the circumstances of her father's incarceration, Levi explores how multiple generations of the Matthews family have been haunted by the specter of violence against Black Americans. Number's Up contributes to the underexplored history of how they survived through their own ingenuity as it asks: Is forgiveness the sole means of moving forward?