Finding Me: A Memoir

“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.”

Viola describes her attempts at getting her mother to open up about her deepest desires and feelings. She reflects on how it is difficult to do so, as Mae has suppressed her hopes and desires owing to the trauma and lack of opportunity she experienced growing up. It is a conscious choice on Viola’s part to break out of the cycles of trauma that have existed in her family. Her journey also leads her to eventually make peace with who her parents are and how they did the best they could with what they were given; this passage points to that understanding.

“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.”

At age 14, Viola stands up to Dan for the first time and yells at him to stop beating Mae. This is partly driven by the protective instinct ignited in Viola by the birth of her youngest sibling, Danielle, who is present during the fight and is in danger of being accidentally hurt. Besides showcasing Viola’s protective side, the moment also sparks a realization in her that if she can stand up to Dan, the most frightening figure in her life, then she also has the inner strength to overcome her circumstances with enough hard work and perseverance.

“Achieving, becoming ‘somebody,’ became my idea of being alive. I felt that achievement could detox the bad shit. It would detox the poverty. It would detox the fact that I felt less-than, being the only Black family in Central Falls. I could be reborn a successful person.”

Dianne sparks in Viola the desire to achieve something and become somebody in order to lead a better life than her parents. This idea is life-changing for Viola, and she clings to it for hope and strength through the toughest of circumstances and experiences throughout her childhood and adolescence. It points to the theme of Breaking Patterns and Reconciling Identities, which will come to define Viola’s journey.

“[N]o 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.”

Viola describes how, despite the numerous fires that break out at 128 Washington Street, no authorities from the local governmental bodies bother to look into the situation or help the family improve their living conditions. She sees this experience as an intersection of being Black and poor, where the latter experience is reinforced, or left unalleviated, because of the former.

“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 anything else. You just believe you’re the leftovers.”

Viola describes how it felt to her growing up being both Black and poor. The weight of these combined experiences is almost too much to bear, and it highlights just how much Viola and her sisters have had to fight to overcome their circumstances. It points to the theme of Race and Adversity, which intersects with that of Patterns and Identities, in that the experience of the former leads Viola to work toward breaking out of the latter.

“We were all in a war, fighting for significance. Each of us was a soldier fighting for our value, our worth. We were all in it together; we all needed one another. None of us could fight individually […] our commitment was to the whole. It was a together-or-nothing ethos.”

Viola and her sisters band together to lend each other strength and support, which helps each of them survive the different kinds of trauma they individually and collectively experience growing up. Viola repeatedly credits a great deal of her early success and achievement to her sisters and the strength she derives from her relationships with them. Later in the book, she also describes how her youngest sister, Danielle, ends up repeating some of the unhealthy patterns of the family, becoming a young mother at 17 following a bout of teenage rebellion. Danielle’s eventual journey highlights the kind of emotional buffer Viola’s sisters provided to each other growing up. Danielle, being the youngest, possibly did not have her sisters' consistently present at home the way Viola and her older sisters had each other.

“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 […] steeped in shock, hurt, guilt, recognition of her own abuse.”

Viola confesses to Mae that she and her sisters were all abused by their older brother John. Mae’s reaction points to two things: firstly, how despite being a loving and protective mother, she did not have the emotional resources or bandwidth to register this unspeakable trauma that her children were experiencing right under her roof; secondly, how this is a pattern that exists within the family, with Mae and Dan both having undergone abuse themselves in their respective childhoods.

“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?”

Viola describes how, as a young Black girl, she experienced a sense of emotional abandonment or loneliness within larger social systems that displayed no interest or investment in her well-being. This, combined with the higher standards of perfection for Black women, sets up Black girls to fail and contributes to a skewed self-concept and compromised self-esteem. It also points to the theme of Race and Adversity, where the struggles of being Black are compounded by a lack of resources.

“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.”

Viola describes how she feels when she learns that Danielle was molested as a young girl. Danielle evokes deep, protective instincts in Viola, and she spends considerable energy and investment in trying to keep Danielle safe, even when Viola is at college and does not live at home. However, Danielle’s experience makes Viola realize that it is impossible to protect anyone, including oneself but especially someone else, from every instance of pain.

“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.”

Ron Stetson is Viola’s acting coach at the Upward Bound program and has a huge impact on her with respect to her conviction about acting being her calling, as well as personal sense of self-worth. Viola further credits him with awakening her imagination and allowing her to believe that she can transform herself into someone else entirely—the first weapon in her arsenal as an artist.

"Free from the chains of my excuses, I was handling my business and exercising my agency, instead of sitting around doing nothing. And claiming that agency was a win in and of itself.”

With the help and encouragement of her mentor at Upward Bound, Viola applies to the Arts Recognition and Talent Search in Miami. She feels the thrill of taking action and is rewarded for her efforts when she is selected as one of 30 from among thousands to attend the competition. This experience reinforces her belief that, with enough hard work and perseverance, she will be able to rise above the challenges of her circumstances, in keeping with the theme of Patterns and Identities.

“Working hard is great when it’s motivated by passion and love and enthusiasm. But working hard when it’s motivated by deprivation is not pleasant.”

Viola describes needing to work multiple jobs to be able to afford her life in college, despite the scholarship she won. A hard worker by nature and choice, Viola draws the distinction between the grind of doing something you love versus working to survive. This distinction comes back once again when Viola begins work as an actress and is left with far fewer choices of roles than so many others because of her race and skin tone. This privilege of choice is highlighted in the theme of The Paradoxical Nature of Acting as Craft and Profession.

“It’s those moments that you study in life that get injected into your work. You’re creating human beings. You’re not just creating a different walk, a different manner of speech, and a different emotional life.”

During her time at Circle in the Square, under the tutelage of Alan Langdon, Viola realizes how much emotional investment is required for one to truly become a great actor. This learning is what propels her to greatness as an actor and arguably leads to her eventual Oscar win, as she taps into her experiences of working on How to Get Away with Murder and becoming a mother to deliver her award-winning performance in Fences.

“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.”

Viola reflects on her relationship with her first boyfriend, David. Despite the professional success that she is experiencing, there are still other areas in her life that need growth and healing, and self-love is one of them. The fact that Viola did not believe herself worthy or deserving of a good partner played out in her relationship with David; she never set down expectations or boundaries, and David was unfaithful the entire time he was with her, in addition to never treating her well or even telling her that he loved her. It takes Viola many years, therapy sessions, and conversations with friends to eventually be able to expect and find a worthy partner.

“When I opened the door, I stood in that doorway for twenty minutes. […] It was a traumatic experience, like having dissociative disorder.”

Upon first entering the apartment that Viola is subletting from Susan Lawson during her first year at Juilliard, Viola has a flashback to the trauma of her childhood—the apartment is in deplorable condition and infested with mice, reminiscent of “128,” which she and her sisters regarded as “hell.” The apartment a 128 Washington Street is an important symbol in the book, highlighting the adversities Viola and her sisters experienced and signifying all the challenges of her upbringing that she had to work to overcome as an adult.

“We felt racially and individually neutered by a philosophy built on forgetting about ourselves and birthing someone artistically acceptable. Someone whites could understand. Nevertheless, our passion and will to perform matched the lack of acknowledgment of our contribution to the school. In other words, their ignorance made us fight harder for ourselves and our craft.”

Viola’s experience at Juilliard, while beneficial with respect to learning craft and technique, is nevertheless a dissatisfying one for her soul, because she constantly experiences an erasure of her Black identity in the school’s academic approach. Her time at Juilliard brings her closer to her Blackness, leading her to think deeply about and embrace this aspect of her identity, both personally and artistically.

“I had lost every bit of potency and belief in my work since entering Juilliard. In The Gambia, in the midst of my people, I found it. I found the party inside me. The celebration that needs to happen to combat the pain and trauma of memory. I found that there is no creating without using you.”

Viola’s trip to The Gambia is a life-changing one. It puts her in touch with her racial and ethnic identities and opens her eyes to the limitations of a Eurocentric approach to art and craft. Reminiscent of her lessons from Alan Langdon, Viola rediscovers the importance of investing herself in her craft and finds a way to do so with respect to a specific aspect of her identity: her Blackness.

“In finding my way, the great role was not the biggest objective. Waiting tables to make ends meet until that awesome role came along was not the objective. I had to live: that was the objective.”

Viola highlights the distinction between working hard for the sake of passion and working hard for the sake of survival, something she is faced with when she begins her career as an actress. She is not as fazed by the difficulties of the industry because her goal is survival, and she cannot afford to have qualms about compromising artistic sensibilities for the sake of money. For her, earning a living is the objective, and her means to do so happens to be her craft; she does not have the privilege of choice, unlike others hailing from different circumstances.

“Broadway […] lives up to everything you ever believed about what this business could be. It fulfills both the glamour and the work. It fulfills the community and comradery. It’s the stuff of dreams. More than Oscars. More than Emmys. Each of those has its own disillusionment. Broadway is everything; it lives up to every bit of that dream.”

Viola describes the headiness of her first brush with Broadway, in a production of August Wilson’s Seven Guitars. Besides being a complete experience in itself with respect to the satisfaction of the work and the fanfare surrounding it, Viola’s first time on Broadway also earns her her first Tony nomination.

“As soon as he came into my life, my life got better because I created a family with him, with someone who loved me. I was no longer solely defined by the family that raised me and my childhood memories. […] I could create my own family and I could create it intentionally with what I had learned.”

Viola’s life changes drastically for the better upon Julius’s arrival. He becomes her avenue to create a new and different life than the one she has grown up living, and in doing so, she is able to reshape the part of her identity defined by family. Family and home mean different things to her with Julius, and this is an integral part of Viola’s journey and healing.

“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.”

Dan undergoes a radical transformation when he becomes a grandfather, his alcoholic rages subsiding as he becomes a true partner to Mae at this stage in their lives. Viola attributes Dan’s transformation to the responsibility of caring for his young grandchildren and the unconditional love they, in turn, afford him. This is reminiscent of Viola’s own growth upon the birth of her younger sister, Danielle.

“Forgiveness is giving up all hope of a different past. They tell you successful therapy is when you have the big discovery that your parents did the best they could with what they were given.”

Viola eventually comes to forgive her parents for what she saw as their mistakes and inadequacies during her childhood years. In keeping with the theme of Patterns and Identities, Viola doesn’t just leave her past behind; she reconciles with it. She understands and accepts that her parents were a product of their circumstances and did the best they could with the resources at their disposal at the time.

“My career mirrored my childhood. My Blackness was as much an issue on the stage and screen as it was in my childhood.”

Viola describes how the experience of being Black, and the limitations placed upon her by others because of this, pervades all aspects of her life: from when she was a young girl in a poor family in Central Falls to when she is a feted actress who has achieved global success and fame. Viola continues to face discrimination for being a certain kind of Black woman, even after a Tony win and two Oscar nominations, an idea that is explored in the theme of Acting as Craft and Profession.