Finding Me: A Memoir

School continues to be Viola and her sisters’ “salvation,” and all of them become overachievers, excelling academically; Deloris and Dianne make the National Honor Society. However, Viola often finds it difficult to stay awake in school because she struggles to sleep at night: The middle of the night is when most of her parents’ fights happen. She is also a bedwetter, something that continues until the age of 14, and not having any hot water or soap at home means that Viola often goes to school smelling of urine.

Deloris, an avid reader and model student, comes home one day excited about a science test. She prepares in earnest for it, dreaming of becoming an archaeologist one day. On the day of Deloris’s test, Viola gets reprimanded by a teacher she loves, who tells her that her mother needs to wash her with soap and water because “the odor is horrible” (87). Viola is summoned to the nurse’s office, where she discovers Deloris, who has been called there for the same reason. The girls are lectured by the school nurse about their hygiene, as numerous teachers have complained about the same; after being given instructions on how to wash up, they are sent home. Despite the complaints about their hygiene, the girls are never asked about their home environment or if anything is wrong there. Embarrassed by the incident, Viola ensures that she is washed and clean as per the nurse’s instructions before going to school the next day; however, her teacher does not even notice.

Years later, when reliving the incident, Deloris reveals to Viola that she earned an A on her test that day, but a classmate who used to bully her told the teacher that Deloris had cheated, and the teacher immediately and unhesitatingly changed her grade to an F. The incident inspired Deloris to become a teacher so that other children would not go through the kind of heartbreak that she did.

Viola reflects on how the dual experiences of being Black and poor were incredibly difficult for her and her sisters to surmount; these were compounded by constant hunger, which left her without enough energy to focus at school. The stress, anger, and pain from those years often led her to lash out and get into fights at school. Furthermore, Viola and her sisters experienced blatant racism at school, where they were called names and taught that Black people were illiterate in the past. Viola and her sisters survived these experiences together: “We were a girl-posse, fighting, clawing our way out of the invisibility of poverty and a world where we didn’t fit in” (92).

Danielle, the youngest Davis sibling, is born when Viola is 11 years old. Having always been the baby of the family, now having to be a big sister elicits a positive transformation in her. An otherwise “awkward, angry, hurt, traumatized kid” (95), Viola experiences Danielle’s arrival as almost a “cure,” and her love for Viola becomes an everyday joy. Dan and Mae’s constant fights lead Viola to stay home often to protect Danielle. Despite the fact that Viola doesn’t have many tools to protect Danielle and needs protection and guidance herself, Viola attempts to nurture and love Danielle as best as she can.

Between Viola’s first and second years of college, she is called home because something has happened to eight-year-old Danielle. Viola finds Mae crying and screaming at a man sitting handcuffed in the back of a police car, with Danielle crying in Mae’s arms. The man, who frequently visited a corner store and attempted to molest young girls there, offered Danielle money in exchange for allowing him to touch her. Unable to understand what the man said, Danielle accepted the money. When he proceeded to touch her, she skated home, terrified. A furious Mae flagged down the police and identified the man. The man ends up only being fined, and Danielle receives nine dollars a month for the next few months as compensation for having been molested.

Viola remembers the “excruciating revelation” from the incident that, try as she might, she would not be able to protect her little sister from all the pain in life. Danielle found it difficult to heal from that incident; more than four decades later, she is still in the process of doing so.

At 14, Viola attends Upward Bound, a federally funded program that allows her to take classes on a college campus for six weeks in the summer. The cohort she is part of includes college-bound teenagers like her from a variety of challenging backgrounds, including language barriers, family conflict, and political abuse and genocide in their home countries. Students come from a variety of races, all extremely poor but with a shared passion for education and high achievement; they are all the first generation in their families to experience either. For the first time in her life, Viola feels like her situation and the problems she faces with her family are small in comparison to someone else’s; she enjoys this feeling.

Viola pursues drama as an extracurricular activity in the evenings, for which Ron Stetson is her acting coach. He is “cool,” a young man with “different views of the world, people, race,” who “spoke his mind” (103). In the very first class, Ron asks the group how many of them want to be actors, stressing how difficult the job is and how hard and consistently one needs to work at it. Initially, everyone in the group raises their hands, but as Ron goes on to describe the rejections and hardships inevitable in this line of work, the only one left with their hand in the air is Viola. She becomes convinced that acting is her calling.

Ron has a huge positive impact on Viola’s self-esteem. He overhears a conversation between Viola and Deloris in which they refer to themselves as not pretty and immediately jumps in to negate this, emphasizing that they are both beautiful and that he has always thought so. Experiencing this kind of appreciation for the first time validates Viola’s experience of her own femininity. He also provides Viola and her fellow students a space to share their secrets without fear or judgment, encouraging them to let go and appreciating their attempts at doing something bold and unique. Her experience at the program teaches her the importance of “open[ing] your mouth and own[ing] your friggin’ story” (108).

Just before Viola’s senior year of high school, Mr. Aissis, her ninth-grade science teacher and the musical director at her school, gives her a pamphlet about Arts Recognition and Talent Search. It is a national competition in five visual and performance arts disciplines. From among the applicants, 30 students in each category will be chosen for an all-expenses-paid trip to Miami, where the competition will take place. Winners receive scholarship money. Mr. Aissis encourages Viola to enter the competition for drama, telling her that as soon as he saw the pamphlet, he thought of her.

Viola tells her Upward Bound counsellor, Jeff Kenyon, about the competition and her doubts about entering it. Jeff helps her procure the VHS tape for her taped drama audition, an application fee waiver, and a space for her to record her monologues, negating all her excuses and propelling her to enter. Walking home from school one day, Viola sees Mae wildly sprinting toward her with Viola’s acceptance into the competition.

Viola travels to Miami the summer before 12th grade. Despite feeling out of place in many ways, she does extremely well, especially with the performance of her prepared monologues. Her talent is beginning to be recognized, and though she doesn’t win any scholarship money, she is named a “Promising Young Artist” and is lauded at City Hall back home (118). Despite this, she continues to feel lingering feelings of unworthiness: “My talents and the recognition that came with it were far more evolved than me, Viola” (118).

Viola gets into Rhode Island College with the Preparatory Enrollment Program scholarship, a sister program of Upward Bound. Despite her lifelong love of acting, the worry of being able to do something that will earn a steady income propels Viola to take a number of English courses instead, with the aim of becoming a teacher. However, this leads her to fall into a deep depression, feeling that she is “trading in [her] dream” (120).

Other incidents, rooted in her home life, continue to prevent Viola from having an easy or stress-free college experience. A heavily pregnant Anita, along with a bloodied Mae and a urine-soaked Danielle, turns up at Viola’s dorm one night. After yet another violent attack by Dan, Mae needed to get out of the house for her safety, and Anita brought her and Danielle here. Despite having barely any resources herself, Viola takes Danielle in that night. Danielle eventually returns home but calls Viola multiple times during the next week, begging her to take her away from home.

Viola continues to experience an overwhelming pressure to achieve at the highest level. Part of this comes from Dianne’s driving it into her younger siblings that not only were they going to college, they were going to succeed at it. The drive to break away from her parents’ reality instills in Viola the sense that if she is not excellent, she is a failure and will sink back into poverty. The lack of any gray area between excellence and failure becomes an added pressure. Under constant encouragement from Deloris, Viola finally decides to change her major to theater with the aim of becoming an actor; much of her depression finally falls away, and she realizes that the cure was the “courage to dare, risking failure” (124).

College is an interesting mix of experiences for Viola. She makes a number of friends and becomes extremely close to her suitemates. However, she has the distinct feeling that she does not entirely fit in with either the white students or the Black ones: She is too dark-skinned to assimilate with the former but has none of the cultural or social behaviors to fit in with the latter, having grown up in a predominantly white neighborhood. Viola also works numerous jobs throughout college to afford basic necessities, including food. She feels like she’s constantly on a “treadmill,” working so much alongside focusing on her studies and an eventual college degree.

Nevertheless, Viola focuses on acting classes, auditioning and winning roles in two Main Stage Productions, Hot L Baltimore and Romeo and Juliet; she is nominated for the Irene Ryan Award for her work in the former. Viola also creates a one-woman show featuring 17 different characters as part of her senior thesis project, showcasing her range. Viola truly comes into her own when she goes on a national student exchange to California Polytechnic University in Pomona; she does very well academically, makes a number of friends, and flourishes in that one semester. She comes back home renewed for her final semester and finishes strong, making the Dean’s List for the fourth time. Viola graduates in 1988 with a degree in theater, and her entire family attends her graduation ceremony, including her maternal grandmother. They applaud loudly when she receives her diploma, and her grandmother in particular expresses her deep pride in Viola.