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Chapter 7

William Carter Jr.

Boston, November 1956

For several years, the Carter family had shuffled between residences in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood, where the Black population of the city was concentrated. William Carter Sr. was perpetually searching for a home that he could own, and his obsession meant that the family was pinching pennies for just as long. William Carter Jr.’s father’s mantra was, “You never want to owe. You want to own ,” which actually wasn’t bad financial advice for the time, but it was a philosophy based on emotion.

William Sr. wanted to own because owning felt like safety, and the rest of the Carter family would feel the burden of this owing-to-owning pipeline too. There was never any spare money because all the family’s financial energy was directed toward accruing a down payment and saving for the eventual mortgage. “Can I have seventy-five cents for baseball cards?” from William Jr. was met with a frown from his mother and the words, “Sorry, baby, the house fund is low.”

“We’ll have everything once we have the house we want,” his father would say as an apology. The family’s frugality meant bland generic-brand foods, used books and toys, and sparse opportunities for escape or entertainment. When William Jr. reflected back on his upbringing, these elements actually made him glad, because without the incessant distractions of games or playtime, he really had limited options about what to do with his time. He decided that he would focus on his studies.

His circumstances also enabled his early fascination with money. Every Saturday morning, Walter Carter and William Carter Jr. would accompany their father on a single, very important errand. They would play the lotto. This anecdote was carefully crafted and rehearsed over time as to become central to the family myth, so ubiquitous that it would become something that Kennedy put in her tribute project.

Had the Carters been asked if they had an extra several hundred dollars a year to spend on anything, they would have said no with resolute certainty. Yet there was always money for the lottery. The conceit of the lottery was simple: You play, you could win. You don’t play, you can’t win. “You gotta be in it to win it!” William Carter Sr. would say, and every week he was in it. While they never won enough money to contribute significantly to a down payment, the Carters would win piecemeal sums that were exciting enough to keep them coming back: two hundred dollars here, fifty dollars there. It was always good to have money coming in that you didn’t expect.

Getting a “winner” made everyone feel like one. William Carter Jr. retained distinct memories of what it felt like to hold a winning ticket, the way that his father was congratulated, and the way that endless possibilities of what to spend it on stretched out before them. William Carter Jr. wanted so badly to recapture the feeling around a winner that he began to make careful rituals around ensuring a positive lottery outcome.

He would regulate his actions down to the smallest minutiae. It mattered to him which foot touched the floor first the morning of the lottery (left). It mattered to him whom they might see before their pilgrimage across state lines (Mrs. Johnson, good; Mr. Wilson, bad). They had to drive to New Hampshire to play the legal lotto, which William Sr. came to prefer more than dealing with the Irish mafia. It even mattered what clerk issued the ticket. (Winners only came from CJ Perkins.) This was all very elementary, and the rituals evolved as William Carter Jr. grew older. He was trying to make sense of the patterns that resulted in a win. His first instinct was to control his behavior and minimize external variables. But his second, wiser instinct was mathematics.

If he could estimate the number of entries and calculate the number of outcomes, he could ensure that his father would win the lottery, which he soon realized was a daunting task. But he wanted to win because it was one of the only times that he saw his father so openly express joy. William Carter Sr. was a working-class laborer without much free time, but these precious moments that were dedicated to playing the lottery exposed another side to him. He was full of gregarious predictions about how their lives would change once they hit the jackpot, a looming entity that morphed into this elaborate mythical creature that William Carter Jr. would see in his imagination. Sometimes it would look like a white rabbit dressed in a tuxedo, wielding a cane with a diamond handle. Other times it would just be a sack filled with cash. In the rarest of times the jackpot looked like the house his father wanted so badly to buy. It was a less glamorous apparition than the others, but this one was the most material.

Because William Carter Sr. worked nights, his circadian rhythm was usually out of sync with that of his family. When he would come home, the boys would be eating breakfast before running to catch the bus for school. This didn’t make for the closest of relationships, but William Jr. loved Saturday mornings because he got to spend time with his dad.

One Saturday morning, William Sr. stepped over the threshold of the small second bedroom in the family apartment to see his youngest son, his namesake, flattened out on the floor surrounded by papers covered in equations and diagrams. “Son, I do think that there might be something missing from this math,” he said in his booming voice, picking up a paper.

William Carter Jr.’s face registered panic. The suggestion that he might have missed a critical element in his assessment could really cost him.

“What’s that?” he asked, anticipating the worst.

“Luck,” his father said matter-of-factly.

“Luck,” William Jr. repeated back, turning the word over in his mind.

“Son, luck is one of those things in life that you can’t account for. It’s not going to show up in an equation or on a chart. As you get older, you’re going to see some people will get lucky and some people won’t. That’s what the lottery runs on.”

William Jr. had to ponder this development.

“So when we win the lottery, it will be because of luck?” he asked, the skepticism very apparent in his voice.

His father sighed, clearly sorry that he had to bring this hammer of truth down. “Yes, you’ll see. A lot of things in life aren’t fair. Luck isn’t fair either, but it really helps.”