Top Quotes: “Finding Me” — Viola Davis

Childhood

“A boy in my class who was Cape Verdean, from the Cape Verde Isles off the coast of West Africa, was Black and Portuguese and as Black as I was. But he didn’t want to be associated with African Americans, a mindset I later learned was very common among Cape Verdeans in Central Falls. More often than not, they self-identified as Portuguese. They would kill you if you called them Black.

So my “Portuguese” classmate and eight or nine white boys in my class made it their daily, end-of-school ritual to chase me like dogs hunting prey. When that end-of-school bell rang, it was off to the races, running literally to save my life. For the gang of boys, it was sadistic-fun time. Every day it was the same madness. The same trauma. Me, taking off like Wilma Rudolph or Flo-Jo, and them tight on my heels.

While chasing me down, they would pick up anything they could find on the side of the road to throw at me: rocks, bricks, tree branches, batteries, pine cones, and anything else their devious eyes spied. But running me down and throwing projectiles at me wasn’t enough for them. Their vitriolic screams were aimed at the target of their hate. They threw, “You ugly, Black nigger. You’re so fucking ugly. Fuck you!”

Thank God I was fast. I had to run my ass off down Eben Brown Lane, the route I would take because it was a shortcut to get home, an idyllic road that looked like a scene from The Brady Bunch. At times, the boys would hide behind houses on that street and I would have to duck and dodge and crisscross. I was being hunted. By the time I got home, I was a snot-dripping, crying mess ... every day.

One day after a snowstorm the snow was piled so high in the streets anyone could hide behind the giant mounds that seemed to be everywhere. My shoes had huge holes on the bottoms, which meant I couldn’t run fast in them because they would make my feet hurt worse than they did already. Because of this, during my daily runs for my life, I would usually take my shoes off, hold them in my hands, and run in bare feet. But with mountains of snow everywhere, I couldn’t this time.

As a result, they caught me. And when they did, they held my arms back and took me to their leader, the Cape Verdean boy. I don’t mention names because, well . . their race is way more important in telling this story.

“She’s ugly! Black fucking nigger,” he said. My heart was beating so fast. I kept silently praying for someone to come and save me.

And the other voices sounded around me, “What should we do with her?” “Yeah!” “You’re, you’re, you’re fucking ugly!” “You’re ugly!” “You’re ugly!”

“I don’t know why you’re saying that to me,” I pleaded to the ringleader, the Portuguese boy. “You’re Black, too!” And when I said that, everyone froze and fell deathly silent. For a split second, we were all in a movie, as all the now silent white boys looked at the Portuguese boy, eager to respond to anything he said.

“You’re Black, too.” I yelled it this time, calling him by name. The gang remained silent. So quiet.

He looked and looked and looked from one white boy to another, frightened and struggling to find a way to hide the truth of what I had just said. The kind of truth that’s rooted in a self-hate that we would rather take to our graves. Finally, he screamed in intense anger, “Don’t you ever call me fucking Black! I’m not Black! I’m Portuguese!!!” And he punched me in the arm, really hard. He looked down, ashamed at being called out. As if I exposed the ugliest, most painful truth.

“Get outta my face!” Then they threw me in the snow and kicked snow on me. My arm stiffened. It was in pain. I walked home, completely humiliated.

The next day I didn’t want to go to school. My mom was doing the laundry in one of those old washing machines where you had to pull the clothes through the wringer.

“What’s wrong with you,” she asked.

“Mama, those boys want to kill me! They chase me every day after school.” After keeping it from her for months, I finally told her about my ongoing daily trauma.

“Vahla” – the southern pronunciation of my name – “don’ you run from those bastards anymore. You hear me? Soon as that bell rings you WALK home! They mess with you, you jug ‘em.”

“Jug” is country for “stab.” But if you know what a crochet needle looks like, my mom was actually being ethical. They are not sharp at all! She gave me a crochet needle and told me to keep it in my pocket. It was her shiny blue one.

“Don’t come back here crying bout those boys or I’ll wop yo’ ass.” She meant it. This was a woman with six kids. She didn’t have time to go to school every day and fight our battles. She absolutely needed me to know how to defend myself. Even if she had to threaten me into doing it.

The next day, it took every bone, muscle, and cell in my body to walk after that bell rang. I could hear the voices of the boys behind me. I could feel their rage. The hate. But I walked extra slow. So slow I barely moved. My fingers were wrapped around that shiny blue crochet needle in my pocket. The voices got louder and closer. Finally, I felt one grab my arm violently, and an anger, a finality, an exhaustion came over me. I whispered, “If you don’t get your hands off me, I’ll jug you.” He looked at me terrified, searching my face to see if I meant it. I did. He let me go and the rest of them walked away laughing. The ritual of chasing the nappy-headed Black girl had suddenly lost its luster.”

“MaMama tells me that she was about four or five years old and had the mammoth responsibility of taking care of her younger siblings. As she tells it, she would take the Binky from her own mouth to put in her brother’s mouth. That was how young she was. Like most children at that time, while the adults worked in the fields, the children were left home alone, unattended. Often, they cooked, cleaned, and changed diapers.

She was playing with matches one day in the open fireplace of their wooden shack, and the rug caught fire. It scared MaMama tremendously. She had the presence of mind to grab her younger brother Jimmy and run out of the house. As the house went up in flames, she couldn’t reach her younger sister, who was in the back room. When Deloris was found, she was perfectly, beautifully intact, but she had died of smoke inhalation.

“She was a beautiful baby, like a doll,” moaned MaMama. Unfortunately, MaMama was blamed for Deloris’s death and subsequently beaten by both her father and mother. She says she still has problems to this day with the arm that was beaten.”

“I know MaMama will never forgive herself, even though years later we saw the death certificate that shows MaMama couldn’t have been more than three years old, not four or five, when her baby sister died.”

“I think about her bravery in fighting for welfare reform in the 1970s. Getting arrested. Holding us with one arm and waving her fist with the other as we were herded into wagons. Her speaking at Brown University: “I may have had an eighth-grade education and I was nervous, but I spoke.” I think of the woman who survived horrific sexual abuse only to marry my dad who was an abuser, yet after many years became a true partner.”

“She was telling a story of when I was about two years old.

“You was at Memorial Hospital. You was just a baby. They had you all hooked up to machines and all that crust and matter like that in tha around ya eyes and nose. Ya daddy went there to see you and it was the first time I seen him cry like a baby. I knew I had bad milk. The doctor said you weren’t going to develop like, you know, normal.”

MaMama was visiting my house in Los Angeles telling this story. It was on a day off from shooting How to Get Away with Murder. We were in the backyard. I knew the story by heart, but listened anyway.

“He wanted to experiment on you. He said he was gonna break ya legs to see if they grew straight. But I saw how he was looking at me. I ain’t dumb. He saw that I was poor and Black. I took you from that hospital. That doctor kept sayin, ‘Mrs. Davis, you’re making a big mistake!’ But I told him he wasn’t gonna experiment on my baby. I took you to Miss Cora’s house and she made you some lima bean soup, and you ate the whole bowl and drank a big glass of cold water and that was it.””

“In one of my mother’s episodes of dropping spontaneous and extremely important facts, without warning or context, she told me that although she has gone by Mary Alice Davis for most of her life, her real name is actually Mae. “M-A-E,” she always says, “not M-A-Y.” She renamed herself Mary early in life because all the girls in the country were named Mae, and she didn’t want to be like everyone else. How badass is that!”

“Daddy says his education went as far as fifth grade, but evaluating his penmanship over the years, I would say my father’s formal education ended closer to second grade. He may not have been educated, but he was not a dumb man. Illiterate at fifteen, he learned to read because his friend taught him by looking at billboards on the side of the road.”

“We would get to Patricia’s apartment and she answered the door naked, which absolutely traumatized me. Shut me right down. She in no way attempted to cover up, neither her naked ass nor her ill intentions with my father. Rather, she ran into my father’s arms, kissing him and giggling. “Oh, Dan! Is this your baby?” I wanted to say, Heifer, I’m MaMama’s baby! Not yours! I hated her. My father would just say, “Go downstairs and wait for ya daddy.” Patricia would then close the door in my face, giggling.

I hated going downstairs. They wanted me to play with this little girl who was my age. She had the best toys, but she never wanted to play with me. She never wanted me to touch her toys, and her mom would come out and shoo me away. I ended up just sitting there by myself, wanting my mom more than ever.

My father would emerge after a long time and repeat, “Don’t tell ya mama where we been.”

As soon as we got home my mom asked, “Where y’all been?”

“We were at Patricia’s house! Daddy gave me seventy-five cents to not tell,” I blurted.

My daddy would roll his eyes and all hell would break loose.

The affair with Patricia ended when MaMama found out he was at the local bar with her. She told us that she would be right back. She left our apartment and went down to the bar and slapped the piss out of Patricia, who fell right off the barstool. My father was livid and slapped my mom.

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.”

“Picked me up from school during lunch breaks before we had lunch in school. He would take me to a great mom-and-pop restaurant for wieners, hot dogs with ground meat, onions, and celery salt on top. He would put a quarter in the mechanical horsey machines and let me ride and smile from ear to ear and then drive me back to school. He loved me. That I know. But his love and his demons were fighting for space within, and sometimes the demons won.”

“He just swung his hand and smashed 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 more my fear would be released. And he gave me the glass and walked away. I took the glass and hid it, and my body felt like I had just been beaten up or ran thirty miles.”

“One of our first apartments was 128 Washington Street.

My sisters and I ominously refer to it as “128.” “128" is code for “Hell”! When we first moved in, it was a normal apartment. I was five years old at the time. There was a tailor on the ground level. And on the third floor where we lived was a nice little porch. The building was old, probably built in the ‘20s or ‘30s, but it had been kept in fairly good condition. But then the tailor moved out, and very quickly the building became condemned.

The tailor’s business was boarded up. Without attention, the wiring became dangerously unstable. There were several fires, and the building soon became infested with rats. In fact, the rats were so bad, they ate the faces off my dolls.

I never, ever went into the kitchen. Rats had taken over the cabinets and the counter. The plaster was constantly falling off the wall, revealing the wooden boards holding the house together.

We had to go to the laundromat to wash clothes. But having no money, five kids, and freezing cold weather meant that most of the time laundry would go unwashed for weeks. That, compounded with the bed-wetting, made for a home with a horrific smell. Closets and space underneath the beds would be stuffed with shoes, dust, miscellaneous items. We were afraid of even cleaning for fear rats would be lurking underneath all the “rubbish.” On the first day of the month food stamps would come and we would make a huge grocery run at BIG G market. In less than two weeks, the food would be gone.”

“It was the dead of winter and we had no heat. Next, the electricity was cut off. And then we had no phone. It just kept escalating. When you have no heat, no gas, you have no hot water. . . . It was subzero weather. Freezing. Absolutely freezing. And the pipes froze, so there was no running water. We couldn’t even flush the toilet.”

“When we walked by the school on our way, the principal of the school, Mrs. Prosser, saw us. She was a great woman, tall and thin, with bright red hair. She always looked so regal to me and was both powerful and kind. She saw me.

Mrs. Prosser would call me to her office, and whenever she did, I would think, Oh my God. What did I do? because I was really a troublemaker. Even when I hadn’t done anything wrong, I would wait for the shoe to drop. But often she would call me to her office and shower me with bags of hand-me-downs that belonged to her daughter, really cute clothes and little purses. I would wear them to school and just stand in the schoolyard during recess and pose in the clothes she had gifted me as if to say, Look at me! It was like I was demanding or begging for attention, positive attention, not wanting anyone to touch my perfectly put together outfit.

Mrs. Prosser knew our situation. When she saw us, she yelled from the window, “Mrs. Davis, Mrs. Davis.” MaMama stopped. We were huddled together, shivering when the principal ran out. She was so desperate to get to us that Mrs. Prosser didn’t even have a coat on. “Mrs. Davis, your kids aren’t in school. What’s going on?”

“We don’t have no heat, no electricity. We ain’t got nothing. And the pipes froze. There’s no running water. They can’t even wash up. We can’t do nothing.”

“Oh, Mrs. Davis, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.” Tears welled in her eyes as she looked at us and she touched my face. “I’m so sorry. I wish there was something we could do.””

“Our apartment building caught fire so many times. The first time it caught fire, I was in first grade.”

“”Dan! Get your kids out! This fuckin’ house is on fire!

You can’t go down the stairs; there’s too much smoke!” My father yelled and woke us all up. Black smoke was coming up the stairs and we were all on the third floor.

“Y’all go to the fire escape!” My father pushed us to the porch and everyone frantically started climbing down.

Now, we were all experienced fire escape climbers. We were experienced climbers in general. We climbed the fire escape when we were locked out of the house. We climbed fences to pick apples, peaches, and pears from neighbors’ yards without permission. But climbing under duress when you are convinced you’re going to die is a different story.

Well, the fire trucks were there and the firefighters had ready taken their hoses out. People lined the street, just oking and gasping. My family jumped off the fire escape ne after another like the Incredibles. Only one, lone family member was left behind on the last landing. Me.

I just stood there crying my eyes out. “Mama!”

My mom, dad, and siblings were all screaming, “Viola! Jump! Just jump!” My mom was in an absolute panic. She tarted crying hysterically, “Baby! Jump to ya mama!” I squatted down with my arms outstretched trying to each her because I was terrified to jump. It was just too nigh. I imagined flames behind me, ready to engulf me at any minute, like Dumbo when he had to jump off that wire, but I just didn’t have those big ears that could help me fly. But, as sure as I’m Black, I saw my mom fly. She took about five big steps back, ran, and just at the right moment, leapt in the air like Michael Jordan, grabbed my arm, and pulled me down. We both fell on the concrete together. She screamed in pain! My father picked her up and we just held on to each other, tight. My sisters just slapped me on the head. “Stupid. You shoulda jumped! It wasn’t that high. Mom almost got hurt.” I just watched my mom limping and saw my sisters and brother looking shell-shocked, lost, waiting for the fire department to clear us to go back into that hellhole. It was just a roof over our heads. Nothing about it was home.”

“The boys would start fires in the basement. The girls waited in a group for one of us to come out of school to terrorize us. We all went to different schools at the time, so we all arrived home alone.

If I saw them lurking in the yard, I simply would hide out until they went inside. The “Bullfrogs” would carry a belt around and herd them inside like animals. We would hear their screams from outside.

One day getting out of school, they saw me from yards away. The two boys whispered to each other and pointed. They got on their bikes and started pedaling fast toward me and I ran. They caught up real fast. I was seven and so terrified I couldn’t speak. I ran and screamed! I knew they planned to run over me.

As soon as they got uber close and it was obvious I wasn’t going to outrun them, I screamed. They had me cornered. I lost it. I grabbed the front wheel of one of their bikes and started screaming and going crazy! I lifted the bike off the ground and just pulled, trying everything in my power to shake this bastard off his bike!

“Stop! Stop!” He and his brother were screaming.

“Leave me the fuck alone or I’lI kill you,” I shouted like a madwoman.

They finally turned back around and left me alone, plotting for their next torturous shenanigans. And there would be many. My sister Anita smashed a brick on a car and made herself drool to get the five girls off her one day. She literally acted crazy. A technique my father taught her. Deloris was slapped a couple of times by them.”

“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 acted back in the day, but I missed my mom. 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 of burning John’s arm. We all knew that was a lie. I’m sorry, Mrs. Davis.””

“Our television set at 128 did not work, but it had another television set that did work sitting on it, one that relied on an aluminum-foil-wrapped antenna. Connected to an extension cord from one of the few working outlets, the TV sat in the next-door apartment. One evening while watching TV, a new world opened up before my very eyes. A woman who looked just like MaMama came on television one night, and something magical happened.

Suddenly, I saw her. I saw her. It was Miss Cicely Tys in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. She had a long neck and was beautiful, dark-skinned, glistening with sweat, high cheekbones, thick, full lips, and a clean, short Afro.

My heart stopped beating. The shame, pain, fear, confusion, all these negative feelings I had about my life and my situation were blasted through a brand-new doorway. It was like a hand reached for mine and I finally saw my way out. The beauty of that moment was that my sisters saw an exit too.

I experienced the true power of artistry. At that moment, I found my calling. How Miss Tyson transformed from 18 to 110 years old was supernatural. I wanted to be supernatural. I wanted my life to mean something, and this was it. I finally found it.

It wasn’t long after, I had my first performance — a skit, with my sisters in a contest at Jenks Park, sponsored by the Central Falls Parks and Recreation Department. It was a big deal. The whole city was buzzing. All the white kids who went to Theresa Landry’s School of Dance for tap dance, acrobatic lessons, and so forth — some of whom very freely called us nigger, nigger, nigger all the time were favored to win. But anybody in Central Falls could create a skit and whoever won got a profile in the paper and a prize. My sisters and I decided we were going to win that damn contest.

Dianne, being the academic high achiever and oldest sister, took the lead and told us: “I studied this. We need a producer. We need a director. We need a writer. We need actors. And we need a wardrobe budget.” Dianne became the producer. I was a writer/actor, and Anita was an actor as well. Deloris was a bit of everything and took on director, actor, and coproducer.

We decided to create our own original skit called “The Life Saver Show” based on Monty Hall’s Let’s Make a Deal.”

“We had a wardrobe budget of $2.50 that we put together by finding loose change, and for things we couldn’t afford to buy, we raided my mom and dad’s closet. They said, “You can take whatever is in our closet and use it.” We took the fur coat she got from St. Vincent de Paul, her straw purse, hat, wig. We got a suit of my father’s, which Deloris and Dianne wore, although it was totally over-sized. The rest we bought from St. Vincent de Paul with the $2.50.

Our rehearsals were intense. We approached the skit like it was Shakespeare. If a line didn’t work, Dianne would stop the rehearsal and tell me “It isn’t landing.” Then, I would go into the closet to focus and come up with something better. To put it in context, this closet was filled with junk and rats, but I braved it for rewrites.”

“It seemed like the entirety of Central Falls was gathered in Jenks Park that day. Reporters and photographers from the Pawtucket Times were there. Kids and their parents were sitting on the grass and on the huge rock that was smack-dab in the middle of the park. Some spectators even brought folding chairs.”

“We won! We got first place and I’lI never forget the faces of the chosen girls from Theresa Landry’s School of Dance when they watched us do our happy dance, too.“We won. We won.”

Some gift certificates, maybe to McDonald’s or a place like that, is all I think we won, along with a softball set. One of those plastic sets with the softball and a hard, plastic, red bat. We weren’t interested in the softball set. We just wanted to win. We wanted to be somebody. We wanted to be SOMEBODY.”

“Whenever we saw a rat, we told Anita, “I saw a rat!” Once she saw the rat, she got the prize we won — that red bat — out. We would all stand behind her, clutching her. Dianne said, “It went under . .. It went under there. Get it. Get it. Get it.” We were all really quiet, waiting for it to slow down. We saw its tail, visible under the couch. Anita waited. She, who, by the way, became an all-star softball player, timed it perfectly. Bam! She actually knocked the tail off the rat. She didn’t kill the rat. She just knocked its tail off.”

“We would be the first ones out trick-or-treating and the last ones home. The goal was to get as much candy as we could. We would fill one bag and go out with another one. We never really had costumes so we would just put my mom’s makeup on our nose, forehead, cheeks, and that would be it. There was no money for anything else.”

“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. 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 something more. I would look around suspiciously until something in me told me to run.

A birthday party at a friend’s house was crowded with hard-drinking, beer-swilling types. The house had a back porch that led onto the rooftop of their garage. It was a great space to play as kids, which is what we did that day. One of the men at the party would pretend to chase us between drinks. We would run and laugh. He chased us until he just about cornered us, but all the kids managed to duck, dodge around him. Except me. I froze and he grabbed me!

All the kids were pointing, laughing at the fact I was caught. He grabbed and said, “You are so cute and pretty..” Then he proceeded to lift my skirt, pull my underwear aside exposing my butt cheek, and begin to rub making sexual noises. The children screamed in horror and ran. I squirmed and punched my way out of his arms and ran. The other kids began to tease me, “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. I was by myself at that party. Alone. Left to fend and navigate the shark-infested waters by myself.

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.”

“I was always so sleepy, hungry, and ashamed. I would arrive to school at 8 a.m. and by 8:30 I was falling asleep. For many years I had problems sleeping through the night; I never slept through the night. At best, I slept periodically, warily, because it was during the middle of the night that a lot of my parents’ fights happened.

If I got two hours of full sleep, I was lucky. We’d be awakened by a scream, a screech. The only hope, the only blessing, was the fight that didn’t last long. But sometimes their conflicts would last all night or night after night, for days. If it lasted all night, we did not sleep. Imagine your father beating your mom with a two-by four piece of wood, slamming it on her back, the screams for help, the screams of anger and rage. That trauma would keep me up at night and make me fall asleep in class.

I wet the bed until I was fourteen. I’d often go to school smelling. Having no hot water sure didn’t help. Try washing up with ice cold water and rarely any soap in the dead of winter. We chose between laundry detergent, soap, or dishwashing liquid. Usually, we substituted one for the other based on our needs. Hauling bags of laundry a mile or two in freezing temperatures, with ice and snow, was no picnic. And having the quarters for laundry was a luxury.

So, usually the night before, we washed our clothes by hand in cold water and soap and hung them to dry. We would hang wet clothes over doors or a chair because a clothesline would be exposed to snow, rain, and/or freezing cold air that would make the clothes turn to ice. The next day, they were almost never dry, but we had no choice. We would put on wet clothes and they would dry as we went through our day. I reeked of urine.”

“I was called to the nurse’s office. When I walked in, I saw Deloris. The nurse hadn’t arrived yet. Deloris was sitting in a chair in front of the nurse’s desk and she was catatonic. She obviously was called in for the same reason. I whispered, “Deloris! Oh my God can you believe …” But I never finished because she told me to shut up and she put her head down again.

The nurse came in and gave a whole lecture of the complaints from teachers about our hygiene. She asked how we washed up. We said nothing. We were trained in the art of keeping secrets and we never, ever shared with anyone what went on in our home. Ever! She then proceeded to tell us how you should never wear the same underwear twice; how to wash up; how to use soap and what areas to wash first. Then we went home.”

“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. A few people would drop what they called useful affirmations like, “Work hard,” “Stay in school and do good,” “Be great,” “Behave and don’t get in trouble.” 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.””

“We were terrified. Finally, my dad came back. Pissed. The night before, I tried to stop him from beating MaMama. He was still angry at me about that. “Get y’all asses out to help me look for ya mama. Soon as we find her, I’m gonna kill her.” Me and Deloris went out to help him look. He kept yelling at me to walk faster. Finally, he veered off to the right and told us to go to the left. Deloris was looking one way. I was looking another. I heard Deloris cry, “Viola! Oh my God, look.” I looked to the left and there was my mom, in the Rexall Drugstore window. Her face was totally bloodied. Her eyes were swollen shut. She had on a dirty turtleneck and pants. She was standing next to the ice cream freezer motioning for us to come in. Deloris ran away to get my dad. I went in. People started gathering around and I heard the ambulance siren.

My mom was crying, “Vahla. Ya daddy’s gonna kill me. I couldn’t take it anymore.” The clerk at the store who was married to our science teacher was leading the paramedics in and kept asking me, “What happened to her? What happened to your mom?” I couldn’t speak. I looked to my mom to tell me what to say. What do I say? Do I expose our dirty secret? The paramedics tried to get my mom to the back room.

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?”

“The only thing the court system did was fine him. 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.”

College

“Ron Stetson, a young actor and coach, came into my life when I was fourteen.

Ron Stetson was my acting coach in the federally funded program Upward Bound. For six weeks in the summer, I would live on a college campus and take classes. Usually there were forty-eight students from various communities in Rhode Island and from many different backgrounds.

Our classes started at 8 a.m. and ended around 5 p.m. 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.”

“The evenings were free time until 8 p.m. or 8:30 p.m. So after dinner they gave us a choice of an extracurricular activity. Drama was one of them.”

“A few years later, he came into one of my classes, and said, “Viola, I have something for you.”

“What is it?”

He said, “I went to a dentist appointment today, and as I was in the waiting room, I see this pamphlet, Viola.” And it was a pamphlet for Arts Recognition and Talent Search, a national competition in Miami, Florida, in five disciplines: drama, visual arts, dance, music, and writing. Each had its own format. Thirty kids in each category were to be chosen for an all-expenses-paid trip to Miami. It was only for kids entering their senior year of high school.

“You can enter in drama,” he said.”

“I could not for the life of me see myself as one of the chosen few, but of the twelve hundred applications, I was one of the thirty. I got an all-expenses paid trip to Miami. I was in.”

“One night during that first year, I got a phone call from my sister Anita who was crying, “We’re at your back door.” I came out to find Anita in tears and almost eight months pregnant with my first niece, Brianna. MaMama was with her, also crying, bloodied in the face, bruised. My little sister, Danielle, reeked of urine.

It returned me to the trauma I’d grown up in, that had catapulted me out of my body. My father had again attacked my mom, and they had to get out of the house. So they drove up to Rhode Island College in Anita’s beat-up car because they had no place else to go.

“You guys, you can’t stay. I can’t have anyone in my room.” I panicked. I had no idea what to do. “TIl get thrown out of the dorm.”

“Then we have to go back home,” Anita said. “He’s out of his mind crazy. He may kill Mom.”

I couldn’t move. Again, I was frozen. Yet I managed to respond. “I don’t have any money. I don’t know what to do?”

MaMama was crying, terrified. “Why don’t you just keep Danielle here for the night?”

Danielle was crying. It was awful. So I took Danielle.

I barely had money to do my laundry downstairs in the dorm, but I took my sister anyway, tried to wash her clothes, let her take a shower. My best intentions did not match my resources. She’d sleep with me in my single bed. She slept on one end, I slept on the other. I barely had money for weekend meals when the dining hall was closed, but I somehow fed her. That’s all I could do. I was trying to find my way, get my foothold, and also throw a rope to my family.”

“1 don’t know specifically how I came into my truth, but I’m pretty sure other caring people had a lot to do with it: counselors in the Upward Bound program and my sister Deloris who constantly asked me, “Why aren’t you acting?” Until finally, one day in my second year, I said, “You know what, I’m just going to do it.” That was when much of the depression fell away. The cure was courage. The courage to dare, risking failure. I decided I was going to be a theater major and I was going to be an actor.”

“I always had a lot of jobs. I worked as an RA and counselor in the Preparatory Enrollment Program during the summer. I always worked. Senior year I had four jobs while in school full-time. I worked in the college library. I worked at the Rhode Island College front desk. I continued working at Brooks Drugs in Central Falls. And I had one other on-campus job.

Working at Brooks Drugs required me to leave campus, get on the bus, and schlep to Central Falls. Envision you have to work full-time but don’t have a car, so you have to take three or four buses one way in subzero weather to get to a damn job that’s four or five towns away from campus, in order to make enough money to eat on the weekend. Then you’ve got to take three or four buses back to your dorm room so you can make your Monday morning classes. You’ve got to graduate; you still have to study. You feel like you’re on a treadmill.

To this day, I don’t like taking the bus. I lived in New York City for thirteen years and took the train all the time, never the bus. During college, I walked in cold, freezing weather, at the very least, a mile and a half to the bus stop off campus. Either that or I’d have to wait for the bus to come to Rhode Island College, and that bus schedule was unreliable. Most times I just walked to the first bus stop in freezing cold weather.”

Acting

“When I graduated from Rhode Island College, a voice somewhere far in the recesses of my psyche, which was always true, honest, and in hindsight, beautifully cognizant, that I didn’t have the courage to always listen to, but when I did, it served me perfectly, steered me to apply to a six-week summer program at Circle in the Square Theatre in New York City. I got accepted after the URTA Audition in New York.

I got a full-tuition grant to the six-week program, but I needed money to live in New York City for those six weeks. A great woman ran the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts at the time, lona Dobbins. She was dedicated to artists and the arts. I cried in her office begging for money. She listened to my sob story, gave me a napkin, and said, “I’m going to get you the money.” And she did. She got me a $1,200 grant.

That incentivized me to earn the rest of the money I needed to go to New York and study at this great theater.

That summer, a month before the program started, I worked in a horrible factory. To actors who say, “Oh, I don’t care, I’m not going to compromise myself artistically, even if I have to live in poverty,” I say, “You’ve never lived in poverty. If you’ve ever been poor, as a child or adult, it’s no joke.”

I worked in factories where those in unemployment offices were sent. You signed up to work in whatever place needed laborers that day. At six o’clock in the morning, you crowded into a van and were driven to a factory. In Central Falls, I knew people who worked in factories – people I grew up with, undocumented immigrants who came with no job skills whatsoever. Even my mother worked in factories.

I worked at a factory where you just made boxes. That’s all you did. You made boxes. All. Day. Long. I worked at another factory and then started working at P-PAC, which is the Providence Performing Arts Center, doing telemarketing work, which is horrific. People scream at you through phones: “Stop fucking calling me on the phone! I don’t want you calling me. Ba-ba-ba-ba.” It was great training for an actress because it’s the height of humiliation, the height of rejection.”

“One day, we went to the Mandinka compound and a group of women came in with clownish makeup on, oversized clothes, shoes, and djembe drums. Chuck said they were comedians. I was fascinated. They were laughing and made funny faces and then would play the drums, loud but not well. When everyone saw them, they would get loud, scream, become animated and laugh in an exaggerated way. People gathered around these women until there was a mob of women hugging, rousing, laughing loudly, singing loudly, “I did not come here for food. My stomach is full. I did not come here for food. I came for much more!” Then they began to pass a calabash around with mush inside. It tasted like peanut butter oatmeal. Everyone dug in, ate some, and passed it down. These “comedians” were actually infertile women.

In The Gambia, to have a child is the greatest blessing. When you couldn’t, the belief was that God did not hear your deepest wish and had passed you by. The intent is to make as much noise as possible so God can hear you in heaven and pour down a blessing. The noise stopped and I looked around at the faces of the women smiling, laughing, screaming in manic desperation. They were trying to wake God up.”

“Mark Schlegel was an agent at a top agency back in the day, J. Michael Bloom. It was the agency everybody wanted to get into. They represented major names. They had Tom Hanks, Alec Baldwin, Wesley Snipes, Ethan Hawke, Sigourney Weaver, Kathleen Turner, and Macaulay Culkin. They had everyone. It was also the hot agency, probably the equivalent of William Morris, CAA, and UTA today. Mark came to see Journey of the Fifth Horse where I played a character who was an older Russian woman. It was part fantasy, part realism. I was in heavy makeup. He saw me in that role and left me a message in the Juilliard office saying that he wanted to meet with me.

I met with him. He said he loved my work, saw something in me. “Viola, it just popped out. Your talent, your power popped out. I wanted to meet you.” Our meeting was one of synergy, kismet, a perfect moment. Sometimes actors meet an agent and the vibe is What can you do for me? You’re a big agent. Just get me auditions for a job. Get me a lot of money. But this was someone who saw me, saw my talent, saw my possibilities. He introduced me to the other agents and said, “We want to sign you.””

“Almost every role I auditioned for were drug-addicted mothers. I auditioned for a few roles that were low budget for a woman of color, but all of them were described as light-skinned. All! The others were soap operas where I would be sitting in the audition waiting room with models.

Black rom-coms were happening. There were awesome shows on TV that displayed the cute Black girl who had autonomy and material wealth. But none of those women looked like me. An agent told me the word all the casting directors used when on the phone: “interchangeable.” That means even if you are a little darker, you have to have smaller, classical (read whiter) features. That wasn’t me.

What made it worse is that it’s not just presented by white executives, but also Black artists and producers.”

“Our profession at any given time has a 95 percent unemployment rate. Only 1 percent of actors make $50,000 a year or more and only 0.04 percent of actors are famous, and we won’t get into defining famous.”

“My first job out of school was understudying Danitra Vance in a play at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater called Marisol by José Rivera. Danitra was the first Black woman on Saturday Night Live and created a famous sketch called “That Black Girl.” It was a parody of Marlo Thomas’s show in the ‘70s, That Girl. Danitra was extraordinary. She wrote, sang, acted. She had metastasized breast cancer when I was brought in to understudy.

Danitra was doing chemo during the day and at night doing the show. The tumors had spread to her spine. I didn’t know until I was chatting with her one day in the dressing room and she took her shirt off. It was the first time I had seen a mastectomy scar.

I made $250 a week and loved it. I never went on the entire four or five weeks I worked. But I connected to Danitra.”

“A mutual friend of ours, Tommy Hollis, told me a story about Danitra. He said he saw a performance art piece of hers called “The Feminist Stripper.” She came onstage and began to take off items of clothing. She had music playing and was cracking jokes while stripping. Everyone was on the floor laughing and egging her on! She got down to her thong and her back turned to the audience, tantalizing them before ripping off her bra. She then turns around and reveals her mastectomy scar; a big X made of tape covered the scar. There was a collective silence, a brutal quiet in the room. They were forced to contend with the woman who was in that body and not just the body itself. Tommy said his heart stopped and he would never forget that experience.

She died about two months later. When she passed, her final words were, “Y’all have a parade.””

“Their burden became my burden. I didn’t know how to say no to requests for food, money, payment for utilities. The needs were so great and began to escalate. I didn’t know that my brother’s problems were not my problems. I had created a life for myself and I would ask God constantly, When do I get to enjoy it fully? Plus, I simply didn’t have the money.”

“I remember being introduced to Jennifer Lopez for the first time. We got along great. She said it was her first big job, too.”

“The benign tumors that had been removed would form scar tissue and adhesions. I would have a small window of time after recovery to have a baby or would be rendered infertile. I had no significant other in my life and was already in my early thirties.”

“I moved to LA a few weeks after I prayed. And three weeks after I moved, I met Julius on the set of City of Angels. Julius Tennon was playing the anesthesiologist Dr. Holly. I was Nurse Lynette Peeler. We were working together in a scene, passing the blood. He was really nice, but he was messing up, playing with the little needle thing during the scene. He punctured his finger, but it wasn’t a big deal. When the scene was over, I was at craft services eating a bagel. I had already said “Bye” to him, “It was nice meeting you,” but he came back to set, to craft services, and said to me, “I overheard you say you don’t know anyone in LA.”

“No, I don’t know anyone in LA,” I said. “I do not like this city. I’m so nervous here and…”

“I understand. Have you ever been to Santa Monica Pier? I’ll take you to Santa Monica Pier!”

“No, I’ve never been to Santa Monica Pier.”

“I’ll take you. Here’s my card. You call me. I don’t want you to be alone here.””

“During this time, what healed completely from my childhood was my relationship with my father. I came to understand him with compassion, as a person, as I beheld Daddy’s turnaround, becoming patriarch to his grandchildren. He’d begun to change, almost imperceptibly, when I was in college as my nieces and nephews were born. He began to be the one who kept it together, even a little bit together, in the house and the family. 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 he had to take custody of my nieces and nephews in the early ‘90s. Somewhere in there was a heart, a very fragile heart. 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. Either you give yourself over to it in a sort of emotional suicide or you simply just get it. What do I think he got? That he was loved. That he was needed. That he mattered. I believe he changed as a way of asking for our forgiveness.

My parents took in my sister Danielle’s three children at that time, one after another. She would later have three more. The last three, my parents couldn’t take on. Some of my other nieces were in and out of their house. At least five of my siblings’ children lived with my parents because my siblings Anita, John, and Danielle couldn’t take care of them because of addiction and/or money issues. MaMama and Daddy raised them as their own. Those five were permanently there. Another three would come in and out at various times. The daily task of now parenting young children, keeping them alive and happy, was bigger than any demons. The fighting just got less and less until it was nonexistent. It was replaced by a bigger task that took every fiber of their being. Daddy was now there with my mom all the time. He went from abusing to living for this woman. She had hip issues and sciatica nerve pain.

He would massage her legs and her feet. He would cook for her. He would take care of the grandkids. MaMama loved to go to Atlantic City. Whenever she wanted to go, she would call me to pay for the trip and he would go with her.”

“Mae Alice Davis decided to invite everyone that she saw at bus stops. She invited everybody that she thought I might have gone to school with, everybody she knew who knew me. Forty extra people, on top of the eighty-five. Laurie Rickell, my best friend in third grade, was at the wedding.

My family had never had a celebration together, a meaningful, joyous ceremony. My sisters Deloris and Dianne were married and neither had a ceremony. Deloris went to Vegas. Dianne said her vows in the courthouse. No one in the family had ever had a wedding, and most had never been to one. I wanted to gift the experience to my family. That’s why I did it. I didn’t have to wear a wedding dress. It was just a party, but I bought the wedding dress because I knew MaMama and Daddy would love it. It was the most unbelievable party celebration any of my family members had ever been to. A college professor of mine was an ordained minister and did the ceremony. One of my nieces said, “Auntie, I wrote a poem for you and Uncle Julius,” so I said, “You can recite the poem.”

My sister Deloris had a student who was an excellent singer who wanted to sing. The flowers were beautiful. We had lots of hors d’oeuvres, then an enormous, sit-down dinner, the best food you could possibly imagine, with different buffet stations, pasta station, salad station, chicken station. We had an open bar — dangerous because we’ve got a lot of addicts in the family. A great DJ played.”

“I always felt the sermons were accessible. I got baptized in that church. On the night of my baptismal, Julius sat in the back because he was rushing from work and had just made it in. I had asked him a few days before, “Uhh Julius? What am I going to do about my hair? I’m going to mess my weave up.”

“Vee! Don’t worry about that shit. Just put a Speedo on your head.”

“Julius ... really? A Speedo? You want me to be bap tized in a Speedo?”

“Vee. God ain’t looking at your Speedo! He just wants your heart.”

That was it. I got baptized in a Speedo . . . in front of a lot of people. And yes, there were some loving laughs, but it was an unforgettable experience.”

“George was and is the nicest human being. At the premiere of Far from Heaven, Julius and I saw him and we told him that we were married. He was so happy for us and he said, “Listen, when you guys are ready, come to my villa in Italy. You can stay for free and I’lI send someone to pick you up from the airport.” What?

“I’m serious. I know a lot of people make promises out here but this is real. The villa is beautiful. It’ll be m honeymoon gift to you.” Julius and I were speechless.

We didn’t know how to call him and ask. This was before me and Julius were savvy in that area. He had even told our agent to contact his assistant. When we finally called, I had done Syriana with him and asked between scenes about that promise of his villa. He made me choose a date and called his assistant.

Well, when Julius and I arrived in Milan, flying over the Swiss Alps, we couldn’t speak. A car picked us up and when we got to the villa, I felt like I was in The Great Gatsby. The tall iron gates. The cobblestone pathway leading to the front door where we were greeted by his staff with umbrellas because it was raining. We tried to get our bags but they told us they would get them. We stood in the entryway of the twenty-two-room, eighteenth-century villa that had frescoes on the ceiling, marble stairs, big overstuffed chairs.”

“The staff told us that breakfast was casual but for the rest of the meals, they would ring the bell. Well . .. me and Julius would get dressed early every morning and sit on the edge of the bed, silent, waiting for that bell to ring like Pavlov’s dog and trying to look dignified running for that food.”

“While it rained, we would sit together. She’d always say, “Oh, come sit with me. Let’s talk. Sit with me.”

Eventually, we had the best conversations. About life, about her kids, and about the work. It was perfection. After a while I could lean forward and say, “Let me ask you about this or that. Did you ever? Do you ever do this with a role?” I was now sharing the screen with Meryl Streep who I’d seen onscreen for so many years in so many different roles. There’s no word to describe it. In between scenes, she’d share a chocolate with me. We ate a lot of chocolate.”

“I had an abscessed fallopian tube. The doctor came in with the diagnosis and said, “We have to operate immediately.” I had already had two surgeries for fibroids, I had nine fibroids surgically removed when I was about thirty years old. Later, I had another surgery where thirty-three fibroids were removed. Now it was a fallopian tube. My sisters Dianne and Deloris both almost bled to death after giving birth and each had to get a complete hysterectomy. Anita had three children and never had surgery, but she has bad periods. It felt like a generational curse. I was anemic. I constantly had issues with my reproductive organs.

I didn’t want to continue to be in and out of hospitals, bleeding during my periods for extended periods of time, sometimes for a month straight. I thought of what that was doing to my life with Julius, my career. I felt I had to make a Sophie’s choice, a transformative decision. I was done with the suffering. As I was about to go under, I said to the surgeon, “I’m going to tell you something right now: I’m not going through this anymore. I’m not doing this anymore. When I wake up, I don’t want my uterus to be there. I want a hysterectomy.”

The doctor began reciting the rhetoric:

“I’m electing to do this.”

“Well, what if.”

He was a very nice doctor, but I said, “Let me tell you something, if I wake up and my uterus is still here, I’m going to kick your ass. Okay? Kick your motherfucking ass.”

“More than twenty Black women have been nominated for that award since Hattie McDaniel first won it in 1939 for Gone with the Wind. Whoopi Goldberg and Jennifer Hudson had won it by the time I was nominated in 2009.

Two years after my surgery and Oscar nomination, we adopted Genesis. We started the adoption process because of Lorraine Toussaint, a fantastic actress I know. She told me that she decided to adopt her child because she didn’t want “series regular” to be written on her tombstone. Denzel always said, “There’s no U-Haul in the back of a hearse.” I wanted my life to be about something more than work.

The process of adopting Genesis was long. It lasted almost a year. Seven social workers, classes, evaluations, home inspections. One social worker ran the water in our sink and stood there for fifteen to twenty minutes with a hand under the faucet making sure the hot water didn’t go past a certain temperature. We put a fence around our swimming pool, covers on all the fireplaces, child safety latches on cabinets, preparing for a baby in the house.

There are no words to describe the paperwork, hundreds of pages in which you revisit how you were raised, what your home environment was like as a child. Were you abused? What was the effect of the abuse? How do you feel about having children? How are you going to discipline? We sat for hours and talked to a social worker about all that. It’s all something that every prospective parent should probably do, but when you are adopting you have to explore whether you are fit to have a child in your life.

I felt more comfortable with the social services in Rhode Island than any place else because so many of my friends were social workers and I had nieces and nephews who had been in the social services system.

I was comfortable navigating that system. It took more time to adopt, but I knew what the process was. I didn’t care about it being hard, in the same way that I didn’t care about acting being hard. Hard was relative to me.”

“I visited Genesis in foster care in Rhode Island and would take her for the day. We would go everywhere together. I would take her to the zoo. She always cried. I would count how long she cried and it was always the same amount of time. By the time I got to twenty-five seconds, she would stop crying and was having the best time. In foster care, you don’t often have a choice, but I identified her. I met her for the first time when she was about five months old. I had to do a lot of paperwork before I could even see her. As soon as she saw me, the smile on her face was like she was inviting me to be her mommy, had accepted me. Every single visit I had with her, she fell asleep in my arms, held on to me and fell asleep.

When I was finally able to take her home to LA from Rhode Island, in 2011, it was awesome watching her running around the house, fearlessly, exhibiting a huge personality. Stacey Snider, one of the producers from The Help, gave a beautiful shower for me at our home, where cutie pie Genesis just held court. Genesis was and is everything to me.”

“I remember picking up the book and thinking it was good, but there was a huge disconnect between what white people thought was great and what Black people thought was great. And I’m one of those people. I already knew what the backlash was going to be. I had a party at my house and a friend of ours told me that a friend of his was looking for me because he wanted me to be in The Help. I said, “I don’t know if I want to do that.” I remember thinking, Oh, but you know what, it’s going to be a big movie. Maybe I can make it work.

I just thought, It’s going to be wonderful with great actors in it. I’d already worked with Octavia and we were all going to live in Greenwood, Mississippi, for three months. Plus, the love and trust I had for the actors and Tate Taylor was enough for me to move forward. Every job becomes about the collaborators involved.

We flew down to Greenwood, Mississippi, and had the greatest bonding experience I’ve ever had. It was pretty much similar to the bonding experiences I had with August Wilson movies Fences and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.

The Help was spectacular because we all had our own houses or apartments in Greenwood and we would visit one another. We didn’t know anyone else in the town; all we had was each other. It was like living in a small town with family members. We’d go to each other’s homes to eat and drink. Tate Taylor (The Help’s director) wanted us all to look like Elsie women, so we were given permission to eat as much as possible. He didn’t want that Hollywood look. That was all he needed to say. We ate our asses off.

That first day in Greenwood, Mississippi, Emma Stone, Octavia Spencer, and I had what must have been a four- to five-hour lunch before we even started filming. I cannot tell you how much food we ordered. I know we ordered at the very least four or five different desserts. I lost track of how many entrees we had. We never laughed so hard in our lives.

Octavia is absolutely hysterical. We were underneath the table laughing. We relaxed, laughed, ate, laughed, ordered more food, and when we said, “Okay, it’s about time to leave,” we ordered more food. I gained so much weight.”

“Baptist Town was the oldest Black community in Mississippi, but it hadn’t had a single high school graduate in five years when we filmed The Help and the unemployment rate was close to 86 percent.”

“We were housed in a fabulous apartment in Greenwood, but Julius was very nervous that something would happen to us in Mississippi while shooting. It was ghosts of history, maybe the heat, but he was so nervous about safety that he booby -trapped our front door. He set chairs underneath the doorknob. He kept a baseball bat and big piece of wood in the bedroom, so if someone broke open the door, you would hear them because of the chair underneath the door knob and we would have enough time to get up and bash somebody’s head in with the bat and wood, or at least that was the plan.

Tate was great, too, because he was open to script changes, completely open to the monologue I suggested in the movie where my character talked about her son. Tate was open to it. He said, we’re going to do it, Viola. And I sat with him and he’s just one of those great collaborators and we wrote it.

Unfortunately, The Help is a movie our culture, our country was not ready for. Jack Nicholson’s quote in A Few Good Men describes it best, “You can’t handle the truth.”

Another narrative took place in The Help that was not explored. That had absolutely nothing to do with the artists involved. It had to do with history and indictments and the fact that Aibileen was a maid. I didn’t have a problem playing a maid; I don’t care about someone’s occupation. My misgiving was playing a character who was unexplored.

I wanted to hear how Aibileen felt about working for racist white women and about the person asking the questions — a young white woman who’s coming to visit at night. Aibileen’s life is on the line. Aibileen is literally almost sacrificing her life to talk to her about what it feels like to be Black in 1963, working for a white household where you can’t even use the bathroom.

My other issue was when Aibileen and the others were offered money and we refused it because we were so honorable; we felt it was more important for us to tell the story than take the money. I disagree. We would have taken the money. Being honorable is fantasy. Survival and how it brings out our nature is human.”

“On TV and in general, womanhood is defined by how “classically” pretty you are, how dainty you are, how close to white you are. Kerry Washington was Olivia Pope, the first Black female lead actor since Diahann Carroll in Julia in 1967. I was not Kerry Washington. I know it’s just a side effect of what we absorbed from systemic racism, but the bottom line is I absolutely was not the definition of a female lead on television, especially to play a character described by all these adjectives sexualized, sociopathic, smart.

A friend of mine was acting in a play in New York. She is Black and the cast had a lot of Black males, other Black females, and whites. It was a mixed cast. When word got out that I would play Annalise Keating, she called me. She was happy for me, but she shared the backstage conversation about my news. Many of the Black males and Black females in the cast were saying, “There’s no way that show is going to work with Viola Davis in the lead. There’s no way that it’s going to work. She’s not pretty enough. She’s not feminine enough. She does not turn me on.” 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.”

“At Shondaland, and on How to Get Away with Murder, I found my tribe. I let myself feel the fear, face the pain of my eight-year-old-ugly-girl self, but I didn’t let it rule me. I used it as fuel, because, after all, you bring everything you are into a character. You bring memory, you bring triumphs, you bring pain, you bring insecurity. That is what makes a character human.

So I arrived on television in a leading actress role. Please note the word I used to describe Annalise: sexualized. Not sexy. There’s a difference. I hate the word sexy, because sexy is a mask that you put on. It lives in women becoming a symbol of male desirability. It’s not authentic. It’s self-conscious. Sexualized is just another facet of you. I’s a part of your self-actualization, maybe even part of your DNA. Black women who look like me are not usually allowed to be sexualized because “we don’t think you’re attractive.”

And if we don’t think you’re attractive, then you aren’t an innately sexual being, you don’t have any anatomical sexual organs. We want to see you strong. We want to see you curse someone out. We want to see you holding a baby. Maybe you can commit a crime. We can see other values in you, but we don’t see your vulnerability and we definitely don’t see you as a woman. That view is perpetuated in our culture, and therefore, it metastasizes in our art. It is a lie, one that I have told in my life when I constantly apologized for my looks, by walking differently (I have very flat feet and a bunion I recently got worked on), by trying to make myself look different with wigs and lashes.

The eight-year-old girl who had never been told “You’re worthy; you’re beautiful” suddenly found herself as a leading lady, and a mouthpiece for all the women who looked like her. I had no weapons to slay those naysayers, to change culture itself. The obstacle blocking me was a four-hundred-year-old racist system of oppression and my own feeling of utter aloneness. My art, in this instance, was the best healing tool to resolve my past, the best weapon that I had to conquer my present, and my gift to the future.”

“What did I advocate? “You have to allow me to take my wig off in the first season.” I knew that if I asked them to write a human being, it could go either way. The TV and film business is saturated with people who think they’re writing something human when it’s really a gimmick. But if I took the wig off in a brutal, private moment and took off the makeup, it would force them to write for THAT woman. Taking off the wig in HTGAWM was my duty to honor Black women by not showing an image that is palatable to the oppressor, to people who have tarnished, punished the image of Black womanhood for so long. It said all of who we are is beautiful. Even our imperfections. With How to Get Away with Murder, I became an artist in the truest sense of the word.”