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Johnisha Matthews Levi - Number's Up: Cracking the Code of an American Family - with Dine Watson
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 the 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 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 under-explored history of how they survived through their own ingenuity as it asks: Is forgiveness the sole means of moving forward.
Born and raised in Washington, DC, Johnisha (she/her) brings a critical eye to her writing based on her experiences as a development professional for social impact nonprofits, a former litigation attorney, and a culinarian. Johnisha graduated from Harvard University, New York University School of Law, and Johnson & Wales University. Her writing has appeared in Yes! Media, Wildsam, the kitchn, and Northern Virginia Magazine.
Johnisha will be in conversation with Dine Watson. Bernardine (Dine) Watson is a nonfiction writer and poet who lives in Washington. She has written on social policy issues for many major foundations, nonprofit organizations, and for the Washington Post Health and Science section and She the People blog. Her poetry has been published in numerous journals and anthologies. Dine is a member of the 2015 class of the DC Commission on Arts and Humanities Poet in Progress Program and the 2017 and 2018 classes of the Hurston Wright Foundation’s Summer Writers’ Workshop for Poetry.
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