Finding Me

by Viola Davis

It is hard to process how pervasive it was. What made us sitting ducks was our lack of supervision and lack of knowledge. It was a different time.

The abuse spanned from random old men on the street telling us, especially me because I was the youngest, how adorable we were. Then came, “I’ll give you a quarter if you give me a kiss.” I wanted the quarter. I would take it, give the old man with a cane a kiss on the cheek. He would linger there. Staring. Waiting for s...

“Ha! Ha! You got caught! That was nasty!” I was absolutely devastated. Making matters worse and even more confusing, I was the one being humiliated, not the man who felt me up in front of everyone. I was just eight but felt dirty, spoiled.

Even more insidiously painful, I was ashamed at how I felt, not just what happened. Think about that for a minute—ashamed at myself for feeling violated by a grown-ass, perverted violator.

We were left with older boys, neighbors who would “babysit” us and unzip their pants while playing horsey with us. My three sisters and I (Danielle wasn’t born yet) were often left unsupervised with my brother in our apartment—sexual curiosity would cross the line. He would chase us. We would lose. And eventually other inappropriate behavior occurred that had a profound effect. I compartmentalized much of this at the time. I stored it in a place in my psyche that felt safely hidden. By hiding it I could actually pretend it didn’t happen. But it did!

Once again more secrets. Layers upon layers of deep, dark ones. Trauma, shit, piss, and mortar mixed with memories that have been filtered, edited for survival, and entangled with generational secrets.

Somewhere buried underneath all that waste lives me, the me fighting to breathe, the me want...

As we talked, a knot in my stomach bubbled up and showed itself. It’s that familiar feeling I get before I do something risky or uncomfortable, like when I’m in social environments where I feel I don’t fit in.

“Deloris, Anita, Dianne, and I were sexually abused,” I told her as I uttered my brother’s name in that same breath. “He chased us in the apartment. He was aggressive. We were scared. We were so young, Mom. There was penetration with Anita and Dianne. Me and Deloris were touched.”

There was silence. She didn’t move. It’s ironic that she was sitting in my beautiful kitchen of marble and porcelain, with the subzero refrigerator and high ceilings, and it meant absolutely fucking nothing compared to the largeness of the truth of what was happening. Success pales in comparison to healing. Not just the truth of the abuse but the decision to love, to forgive . . . what I knew the reaction would be . . . which was silence. Silence.

Heavy silence. The silence that’s steeped in shock, hurt, guilt, recognition of her own abuse. The silent desperation of trying to negotiate the complexity of being a mother. The only sign that...

he looked at the cat, stroked it almost lovingly, and then calmly broke its neck. Blood oozed out of the dead feline’s mouth. Its head hung, although it seemed like it was still trying to live. The man held the bloody cat up, let its blood drip down his face, and licked it. He flung the cat down and smeared the blood on his face ritualistically, like war paint. We were absolutely still. Not believing what we were seeing. Traumatized.

Suddenly, like a switch turned on, he finally registered us, his childish tormentors, growled, and charged at us full speed.

We later found out that he had just come back from Vietnam where he spent months in the woods eating all kinds of rodents . . . and cats. His PTSD was so bad that his wife had thrown him out of the house that day.

“That’s okay, Viola. That was the day I decided to be a teacher. It devastated me so much that I didn’t want another kid to go through what I went through.”

Deloris has been a brilliant teacher for the past thirty-five years. It’s funny that with the complaints about hygiene, no one ever asked us about our home environment. No one asked us if we were okay or if anything was wrong. No one talked to us. There was a lack of intentional investment in us little Black girls.

There was an expectation of perfectionism without the knowledge of emotional well-being. What it left in me was confusion. How do I get to the mountaintop without legs? But we constantly push it with kids now and when you’re a poor kid growing up with trauma, no one is equipping you with tools to do “better,” to “make a life.”

It’s funny that I loved my fourth-grade teacher so much and wanted her to love me with the same intensity. As traumatizing as it was to be told I smelled, it was worse feeling the shame.

pretty. I felt she liked me. This, unfortunately, was an illusion. I created a phantom to survive.

“Miss, it’s not true, is it? Black people could read and write? They could, couldn’t they?” She shook her head sadly and said, “No. I’m sorry, honey. They couldn’t.”

I left with my head down. She never explained to me or to the class that it was illegal during slavery to teach the enslaved to read and write. It was a way to keep them subjugated.

I was looking for something or someone to define me. To infuse in me self-love, acceptance. To show me how to l...

I held on to what I had, all that I had, the team effort with my older sisters. That preserved me. We were a girl-posse, fighting, clawing our way out of the invisibility of poverty and a world where we didn’t fit in. The world was our enemy. We were survivors. Until another squad...

I was the baby of the family before this time, but now I had a role of big sister. A type of transformation began to take place. At the time, I had no words to describe the shift to loving someone more than myself, seeing beyond myself.

I changed diapers, put her to sleep, babysat, gave her medicine when she was sick. And held her tight when my parents fought. She was our cub and we accepted her into the pride.

I was eleven and had already had my period for a year but was by no means grown. I had attitude for days. When I was at home, that attitude stopped cold. I was too terrified of my father.

I was unsettled. I was an awkward, angry, hurt, traumatized kid. I couldn’t articulate what I was feeling and nobody asked. I didn’t believe anybody cared. I was saturated in shame.

My baby sister was a cure at this point. Not for the bed-wetting, but she was day-to-day joy because she loved me. She saw me.

My mom looked like a frightened animal or child. She didn’t want to go back there alone and with her arms outstretched she screamed,

“Vahla! Come with me! Don’t leave me.” I just stood there and couldn’t move. All I saw was the paramedics mouthing, What happened to her?

It wouldn’t occur to me until much later that this moment was not just about shame, value, or protection. It was about inheritance. . . . I was given her blood, her eyes, her survival skills, her pain. My world was a constant train of imprinting.

I didn’t have words to explain our poverty, dysfunction, trauma to Danielle, but I could hold her. I could love her; and that’s it. I didn’t have the tools to protect. I didn’t know that I needed protection and guidance just as much as Danielle. I didn’t know, nor could I admit, that I was broken.

Danielle told my mother and MaMama put on the first shoes she saw, ran down to Dexter Street, and yelled, “You, motherfucking son of a bitch, touched my daughter! There’s a man in this store who touched my daughter. I’m going to call the police.”

The guys who owned the store tried to calm my mom down by saying, “Ma’am, he does that to all the little girls. It’s not a big deal.” My mom said, “It is a big deal, you motherfuckers,” and then ran out of the store, into the middle of the street, flagged down the police, and identified the old man.

My sister got $9 a month for the next few months from the man who molested her. Nine dollars a month. That was the fine. No charges were ever pressed.

Danielle was our baby. Your first instinct when you love a child is to protect her from the pain of the world . . . and life. The most excruciating revelation is when you realize you can’t. To be human is not to be God. What that man was allowed to do is destroy souls.

To this day, almost forty years later, she is still figuring out how to do that. Only thing I could do was love her . . . and I did and do. She is a reflection of me.

The summer program was meant to mirror college so that we could learn how to make that transition from high school to college: the classes, living with people from different backgrounds, being on your own. We were all first-generation, higher-education-bound students.

Our cohort was a mixed bag of college-bound kids, each with their own crosses to bear. Some had huge language barriers, others challenging family environments, and still others with absolutely horrific stories of political abuse and genocide from their respective countries.

The fear factor was minimized for me. I already knew fear. My dreams were bigger than the fear.

It’s that life-changing thing that happens when you’re seen, valued, and adored. Adoration for girls validates our femininity. When you are a dark-skin girl, no one simply adores you. They laugh with you, tell you their secrets, treat you like one of the boys . . . but there’s no care given to you, no devotion given to you. The absence of that becomes an erasure.

I learned so much from Ron that first summer of my drama training. He said, “Theater awakens the imagination.”

He gave me the first ingredient I needed to be an artist, the power to create. The power of alchemy, that magical process of transformation and creation to believe at any given time I could be the somebody I always wanted to be.

Upward Bound was a melting pot of races. What we shared, besides all being desperately poor, was a passion to be the first generation in our families to get an education and be high achievers.

Most had language barriers or severe health concerns, but all were exceptional students. All had a willingness to share.

Drama provided an escape. The emotional release acting allowed gave me great joy.

But regardless, she then had to come back to herself and her life. As an actor, you become a soul searcher. A thief. After the curtain call, you are left with you.

My lesson from Upward Bound was you have to open your mouth and own your friggin’ story. That terrified me more than rats.

was the classic theater kid who needed a creative outlet and couldn’t find one, so I created it for myself, inappropriately, in class. In other words, I acted out. Literally.

As white as he was, Jeff taught us a lot about Black history. He heard me and my sister talk one day in his car and picked up on our ignorance about our own history. That was it. That was all the impetus he needed to spring into action. He would pick us up in the middle of the week, take us to get some food, talk to us to see how we were doing.