Finding Me

by Viola Davis

Who am I? I was quiet, and once again that indestructible memory hit me. Then I just blurted it out. “I’m the little girl who would run after school every day in third grade because these boys hated me because I was . . . not pretty. Because I was . . . Black.”

Memories are immortal. They’re deathless and precise. They have the power of giving you joy and perspective in hard times. Or, they can strangle you. Define you in a way that’s based more in other people’s tucked-up perceptions than truth.

One of the beauties of getting older is really getting to know a parent.

I had two parents who were running away from bad memories. Both had undiscovered dreams and hopes. Neither had tools to approach the world to find peace or joy.

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.

There are not enough pages to mention the fights, the constantly being awakened in the middle of the night or coming home after school to my dad’s rages and praying he wouldn’t lose so much control that he would kill my mom.

There were so many times that we would see droplets of blood leading to our apartment and we just knew what was happening. It was chaos, violence, anger, and poverty mixed with shame.

The invisibility of the one-two punch that is Blackness and poverty is brutal. Mix that with being hungry all the damn time and it becomes combustible.

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.

I already knew fear. My dreams were bigger than the fear.

wheeled over

But the other train leaving the station tracked back to the place of trauma I came from, a place where I was bruised, did not believe in myself, had no sense of self. I could not understand self-love. I never felt like I was enough.

That reaction when you miss someone so much, and finally they’re right in front of you.

We talked about life all the time and she just kept saying she wanted to get better. Better from what I didn’t know. But even I wanted to know where she lost her voice, and why she always looked scared, jittery. Showing intense emotion, she finally said softly, “My father would hold me down on the bed when I was nine and beat and rape me. He would cover my mouth.”

Whether you have an education or not, the ugliness of racism comes down like a hammer. It enveloped my life when I was eight and at twenty-three, I was still bullied by it.

As much as I would love to romanticize that part of my life, I can’t. I was so unfinished. I asked God for a boyfriend, professional acting status, and the experience of traveling overseas. But I didn’t ask for wisdom. I didn’t ask for self-love. And it showed.

Everybody has secrets. Everybody. I guess the difference is that we either die with them and let them eat us up, or we put them out there, wrestle with them (or they wrestle with us) until we . . . reconcile. Secrets are what swallow us.

Anton Chekhov, the great Russian playwright, once said, “The same time you’re laughing hysterically, your life is falling apart.” It is the definition of living.

The great South African actor Zakes Mokae had joined the cast and little did we know, he was in the beginning stages of Alzheimer’s. He was a beautiful man but could not remember his lines. It was so bad in Boston that the production had four people with scripts stationed at various points near the stage ready to scream lines. And I mean scream.

But opening on Broadway on March 28, 1996, absolutely lived up to the hype. Perfect. It was everything that I dreamed it could be.

In the middle of the conversation, I just threw out a random statement, “I wonder why I keep meeting assholes?” She looked right through me and said, “Did you ever think it could be you?”

A whole other layer of pain settled on our family. It just came like bullets. One more tragedy to overcome. And once again, life continues. It keeps moving. It moves through deaths, tragedies. It doesn’t wait for you to recover or heal before hitting again.

You have a lifetime with someone, memories—good, bad, devastating, filled with love, every freaking kind of memory—and then you see a body.

“Basically, Viola, the book is about your child coming into your life to teach YOU a lesson. They’re completely different from you and act as a mirror.”

As Black women, we are complicated. We are feminine. We are sexual. We are beautiful. We’re pretty. There are people out there who desire us. We are deserving.

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 have a great deal of compassion for other people, but mostly for myself. That would not be the case if I did not reconcile that little eight-year-old girl and FIND ME. 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.”