Finding Me

by Viola Davis

Juilliard’s academic approach did not connect the work to our lives. It missed the true potency of artistry, which is that it shifts humanity. Art has the power to heal the soul.

“Of course I love him, Anita.” “How do you know? Viola, how many boyfriends have you even had? You don’t know what love is.”

It was an exchange I wished I had had before I started dating. I never knew love had to actually serve the two people involved, establish boundaries and communication. I thought all that just happened.

A group of girls braided my hair one day. They laughed, giggled while doing it. They couldn’t have been older than fifteen, and there were nine of them.

All they wanted to hear about was my sister Danielle and our relationship. They didn’t want to hear about Juilliard, New York, being an actress. They didn’t want to hear about what I wanted to become. They wanted to hear about me. Just me. They would squeal, laugh, and clap when I told them the most inconsequential detail about me, like the day Danielle was born.

All around me were women vomiting in bowls and screaming or moaning in pain. One woman kept crying, “I couldn’t keep this one! I couldn’t! I already have five and no money!” Another girl who looked fifteen kept screaming, “MOMMY!!!! MOMMY!! I want my MOMMY!!!” Me? I just cried . . . and vomited . . . and cried through the pain until it was gone. I went home and bled profusely for two weeks and fell into a life-altering depression.

Hell, I remember calling my boyfriend, yelling at him, “Where are you! Why aren’t you here?” He thought what I did was wrong, and yet there was every probability that he wouldn’t be there for me or the baby.

My mom started having children when she was fifteen, and I wanted my life to be different. This baby didn’t fit into my dreams. Who was I without my dreams?

We consume them and, having no way into the reality of the acting business, we take it in as truth. If you hit big when you’re young and turn down a six-figure salary, You. Are. Privileged. That’s not throwing shade. Hell, anyone would love it if that were their path.

But struggle is defined by not having choices, and the actor who takes the Geico commercial to get their insurance has just as much integrity as someone who doesn’t take it waiting for their Academy Award–winning role.

I could go to cheap clinics, but fibroids, anemia, alopecia required comprehensive care. Ongoing help from qualified ob-gyns and dermatologists. It would be years before I made enough to qualify for Plan 1 health insurance or Equity insurance.

My other “aha” moment was the power, potency, and life force of the one-two punch of colorism and sexism.

I was twenty-eight and waking up to reality. I was waking up to being an adult and taking care of myself but also navigating feeling fulfilled in my craft.

family, they’ll ask for $20, $25. When you’re on Broadway, they’ll ask for $100 and $200. Family starts counting your money because they always feel like you’re making more than you are.

They had gained custody of my brother’s sons. John, my brother’s firstborn, was born with withdrawal symptoms. His mom, my brother’s girlfriend, gave birth while she was on the street and high on crack cocaine. It was literally subzero weather and she was prostituting and went into labor.

All of a sudden, the same people who didn’t cast you look at you and say, “Where have you been?”

I thought, One thing I will not have to worry about is this man calling me. I do not have to wonder where this man is.

Toni Morrison in The Bluest Eye says that “a person’s love is only as good as the person; a stupid person loves stupidly, a violent man loves violently.”

My father was radically transformed—docile, loving. Every time I talked to him, he’d say, “I love you so much, daughter. I love you so much.” He turned the corner when

I began to glimpse it in those moments when he wasn’t drinking. Somewhere, inside, he was really trying to make amends. I think my dad just got tired of the anger, the rage, as an answer to his inner pain.

I believe he changed as a way of asking for our forgiveness.

A part of me felt that my mom had already been made to feel accountable for every burden that wasn’t hers. I wanted to calm that internal storm of guilt and anger inside of her.

I wasn’t thinking of the fights, the abuse, the cheating . . . I was thinking this is the man who participated in giving me life. This is my daddy and I love him.

Viola, who was the most shy, had the most social anxiety, used to have the smallest voice, was suddenly at the funeral home with my mom, filling out the death certificate, giving all the information, picking out the casket.

When my dad passed, part of my heart went with him that’s never coming back.

Jack Nicholson’s quote in A Few Good Men describes it best, “You can’t handle the truth.”

In the past we’ve been used as chattel, fodder for inhumane experimentation, and it has evolved into invisibility.

It is a widely held belief that dark-skinned women just don’t do it for a lot of Black men. It’s a mentality rooted in both racism and misogyny, that you have no value as a woman if you do not turn them on, if you are not desirable to them. It’s ingrained thinking, dictated by oppression.

That beautiful moment of finding out that I got the lead role in How to Get Away . . . was mixed with a fucked-up moment of feeling that I didn’t deserve it.

There are 327 million people in this country and only blond, petite, white girls are sexual?

You bring memory, you bring triumphs, you bring pain, you bring insecurity. That is what makes a character human.

The depth of the emotional life she was able to convey is what I have to work on.

It was a basic understanding that your lot in life was to fight off sexual predators—including babysitters and neighbors, even before you knew the term.

You can’t replace my authentic story with a racist one. So who I am at the end of the day is absolutely in stark contrast with what society dictated I am. At the beginning of my career I didn’t have much power, but now I do.

And with each slap, as God would have it, I thought of my mom. I thought of the difficulty of motherhood. Reconciling your pain. Fulfilling your needs and at the same time sacrificing, juggling the huge task of binding the family together.

Shelving your dreams and hopes. I felt her. Fully . . . and it was beautiful.

I am surprised that one of my most powerful memories involves me getting on my knees. It’s what happens when there are no answers in this world and no access to getting the answers.

“He took me on his terms, Edwina,” I said as if discovering it for the first time.

I’m holding her now. My eight-year-old self. Holding her tight. She is squealing and reminding me, “Don’t worry! I’m here to beat anybody’s ass who messes with our joy! Viola, I got this.”