A piece of paper with a previously undisclosed truth has the power to bring you to your knees. 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 Correctional Complex. 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 the Black institutions and communities in Washington, DC. 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 people. Number's Up offers a unique but quintessentially American story of survival through ingenuity as it asks: Is forgiveness the sole means of moving forward?
"In her extensively researched memoir, Johnisha Matthews Levi widens the aperture on her life to uncover painful family threads. The panoramic view revealed is an evocative conversation starter on crucial matters of our times."
Michele Harper, New York Times bestselling author of The Beauty in Breaking
"This engrossing account of a daughter's relentless search for facts about her family reveals fundamental facets of the human condition. Number's Up is a provocative book that will transform its readers. A moving testimony, it presents one family's history as the history of what America was, is, and can be-if the nation's inhabitants have the collective will."
Neil Roberts, coeditor of Creolizing Hannah Arendt
"Johnisha Matthews Levi turns a personal story into social history in this gripping, essential memoir. I loved Levi's precise, swift, unsentimental prose style, her unshowy devotion to the truth."
Karan Mahajan, author of the National Book Award finalist The Association of Small Bombs
