Finding Me

by Viola Davis

She had feelings for a man who cared for her. As stubborn as a bull, as innocent as a child, and loyal even when she has been abandoned.

When I was young, I thought, perhaps arrogantly, that I could do better than my mom. I was going to slay dragons. Be stronger and more confident. I wasn’t going to run from bad memories. I would be a “hero,” an overcomer.

But you know the saying, “Show me a hero and I’ll show you a tragedy.”

As a theater geek, I learned that tragedies always end with the downfall of the hero. Everyone who was influenced by them, who benefits from them, who relies on them is crushed in their downfall. Heroes always cause their own downfall, like Oedipus. I didn’t want to cause my own downfall. I didn’t want to move through my life and not be accountable for recklessness. I wanted to be aware of my Achilles heel. I beli...

In one of my mother’s episodes of dropping spontaneous and extremely important facts, w...

The woman I tried so hard not to be was the muse sitting on my shoulder in How to Get Away with Murder.

As much as I try to chisel into MaMama to get at the core of who she is, I never can. There are decades of suppressed secrets, trauma, lost dreams and hopes. It was easier to live under that veil and put on a mask than to slay them. Unlike my mother, my father was a simpler man.

I will never know what demons caused him to run away from his home at fifteen. As much as I love my father, I know those demons haunted him his entire life. They embedded themselves deep within him and boiled into rage and alcoholism. That rage was usually released on payday.

I’ve always been an introvert, and when I was young, I was extremely shy. At an early age, I became a keen observer of the world around me. I blended into the wall in almost every setting, and I was able to see without saying a thing.

What I saw in my father was a man who, alone and single, could’ve kept his check and spent it all on women ...

Even with the hard labor, enduring the disrespect from white horse owners, it was never enough. So, he raged. He had open affairs.

“Oh, Dan! Is this your baby?” I wanted to say, Heifer, I’m MaMama’s baby! Not yours! I hated her.

Ironically, Patricia wrote my mom a letter explaining what a “no good asshole” my daddy was. She kept the letter under her mattress for a long time and would pull it out to read. It would always make her depressed. My sisters and I would read it as well.

In my fantasy, I always imagined her exploring what the hell to do with this information. I wish that MaMama could have acquired the tools to imagine a life free from that sort of pain. Rejecting everything her family had instilled in her about marriage and never giving up, never leaving your man even if he cheats, putting up with abuse. I imagined that if she had the language and the wherewithal, she would’ve simply said, “Help me.” “Guide me.”

But even grown with multiple children, she was still that little fifteen-year-old Black girl from the backwoods of South Carolina who got pregnant an...

Abuse elicits so many memories of trauma that embed themselves into behavior that is hard to shake. It could be something that happened forty years ago, but it remains alive, present.

Like I said, Mae Alice has a heart that simply is loyal. It attaches and asks for nothing in exchange. She shows her claws only when those she loves need protection or to protect who she feels belongs to her. She never raises her fist for . . . her. There is a very flimsy barrier between the asshole predators, abusers, and my mom. She is a “self-sacrificer” at the expense of her own joy.

We just stood there and I remember waiting for him to die. I imagined what our lives would be like without him. I imagined a life with no more drunken rages and the constant abuse of my mom. I secretly felt how much better our lives would be. The next day, he was better. Death wouldn’t come until 2006, and man, my prayers at that time were different. Every last breath he took, I took with him.

Daddy’s haint rituals reminded us to hold ourselves accountable. They bridged spaces that helped us learn to navigate life. They were interesting guideposts, of which I was never skeptical, until I was a teen.

I bought into haints 100 percent until it didn’t make sense to me anymore. As I grew away from my parents, I tried to be my own person, dispelling what I’d been taught.

I had two parents who were running away from bad memories. Both had undiscovered dreams and hopes. Neither had tools to appro...

MaMama worked sporadically in factories and...

My father was an ...

He loved me. That I know. But his love and his demons were fighting for space within, and sometimes the demons won.

Most of the time the fights just started because my dad wanted to vent.

the glass on the side of my mom’s head and I saw the glass slice the upper side of her face near her eye and blood just squirted out. A lot of blood. I couldn’t anymore.

I just couldn’t passively stand by as he lifted his hand to swing again. I yelled, “Stop! You just stop right now, Daddy! Give me the glass! Give it to me!” I saw my hand shaking uncontrollably. My heart was in my throat. I was immersed in fear.

He stood staring at my mom, wanting to swing again. My dad never looked at me. He kept his hand gripped on the glass, staring at my mom. His eyes bloodshot wanting so bad to hit her again. I screamed, “Give it to me!” Screaming as if the louder I became the mor...

I had to stand up to my father, the authority figure. The one who should be taking the glass from ME, teaching ME right from wrong. The most frightening figure in my life and the first man we all ever loved. Frightening? Without knowing, I had already been imprinted, stamped by their behavior and all that they were.

As much as I wanted my life to be better, the only tools I had to navigate the world were given to me by them. How they talked. How they fought. How my mom made concessions. How they loved and who they loved shaped me. If I didn’t bust out of all that, would this exhaustion and depletion be what I would feel after every fight in my life, even the small ones? That fight marked the beginning of my shift. Looking back on that night when I stood up to my dad and wiped up my mom’s blood, I knew my life would be a fight. And I realized this: I had it in me.

Dianne told us, “Because I’m the oldest, everything that I learn, I’ll teach you guys when I get home so you’ll be ahead.”

Dianne had another gift. She was a fantastic storyteller, like our dad, and could transport you to another reality simply with the power of her words.

“You need to have a really clear idea of how you’re going to make it out if you don’t want to be poor for the rest of your life. You have to decide what you want to be. Then you have to work really hard,” she whispered.

“What do I want to be?” The first seed had been planted. Was there a way out?

person. I wanted to achieve more than what my mother had. From age five, because of Dianne, re-creation and reinvention and redefinition became my mission, although I could not have articulated it.

She simply was my supernatural ally. Much later, after college, Juilliard, Broadway stages; after first being nominated for awards—Emmy, Oscar, Tony—I could finally actually articulate what that big moment was, prompted by my sister that day. It was the catalyst or agent that provoked a larger question: “Aren’t I somebody NOW?” What do I have to do to be worthy? That moment, that revelation, was the true beginning to my call to adventure.

For the most part, we went to St. Vincent de Paul. We loved going there because it was an adventure sorting through everybody else’s used stuff. Everything seemed to have a story: books, old toys, roller skates, Skippy’s sneakers, even fur coats and furniture.

But the most humiliating part of this was coming back the next day to find my desk in a back corner of the classroom with the same big puddle of urine still in my seat. It stayed there until it slowly dried up. What? My six-year-old piss was too disgusting for even the janitor to clean.

But in my mind, no one cares about the conditions in which the unwanted live. You’re invisible, a blame factor that allows the more advantaged to be let off the hook from your misery.

Still, in the midst of the life shitstorm, there was one teeny, tiny light. A guide. A whisper. A voice. That one question from my Dianne. “What do you want to be?”

I absolutely loved to witness any kind of fight outside of our apartment. It was better than prime-time television.

We were just ensnared in the trap of abuse. The constantly being beaten down so much makes you begin to feel that you’re wrong. Not that you did wrong, but you were wrong.

It makes you so angry at your abuser, the one that you’re too afraid to confront, so you confront the easiest target. Those you can. Until your heart gets tired. No one ever, up until that point, talked to us, asked us what our dreams were, asked us how we were feeling. It was on us to figure it out.

There is an emotional abandonment that comes with poverty and being Black. The weight of generational trauma and having to fight for your basic needs doesn’t leave room for anyt...

Many years later, my mom saw Lisa, the meanest of the mean ones, and Lisa apologized. She told my mom, “Mrs. Davis, I’m so sorry for how I act...

They had taken me from her. They took all of us and were committing welfare fraud. That’s why we had two different homes. All those girls were not my sisters, and the boys weren’t my brothers. Plus, those women were sexually and physically abusing us. They even accused you o...

I would retreat to the bathroom, put something against the door so no one would come in, and I’d sit for an inordinate amount of time staring at my fingers and hands and try to erase everything in my mind.

I wished I could elevate out of my body. Leave it.

It was how we escaped. We transformed into people we felt were “better.” People who existed in a world we only dreamed of; women who were not us. We played for fun and out of desperation. Jaja and Jagi were our pretend protection.

Sexual abuse back in the day didn’t have a name. The abusers were called “dirty old men” and the abused were called “fast” or “heifers.” It was shrouded in silence and invisible trauma and shame.