Many of us had existential thoughts during the blockade and calmed them down with new hobbies. We made puzzles from thousands of pieces. We knitted and knitted. We learned new songs on our guitars, sang overly zealously, and connected with our plant life. For Viola Davis, who is fucking at her $ 5 million mansion in Toluca Lake, Los Angeles, it was writing, though it was less reassuring than looking at the coals of an existential crisis. Who am I? What should my life mean? If that’s not it – winning an Oscar, a great track record of recognition, gorgeous baths and a saltwater pool – then what is?
“I lost my mind during the pandemic,” she tells me from her bedroom, wearing a gray sweatshirt and a wide wool hat before the photo shoot. I just wandered around this house like Mary Tyrone in The Journey of the Long Day into the Night. She laughs at this (she has a deep laugh and a deep, strong voice inherited from her grandmother), but the memoirs stemming from the time in writing, are anything but light. It has a story to tell, a captivating, emotional, at times numbing spine, with pathos and pain, triumph and redemption, setting a new standard for the celebrity confessional. Finding Me is a tool for turning pages, written with narrative know-how and stylistic competence.
For several months – interrupted by the photos of “The First Lady”, in which she plays Michelle Obama, and “The King Woman”, a historical drama that takes place in the Kingdom of Dahomey (now South Benin) in West Africa, both projects by her company JuVee Productions – she encountered on the page the ghost of her poor childhood and her subsequent thorny climb to the top, a place that turned out to be less comfortable than we imagined.
Viola Davis as Michelle Obama and OT Fagbenle as Barack Obama in her new series “The First Lady”. Photo: Jackson Lee Davis / Showtime
“When you are still, when you are quiet, when you leave everything, then everything in your life comes into full focus. It comes to you like a hammer, ”she says of the big Covid-induced pause. But it wasn’t just the pandemic that brought her to the blank screen. The crisis was already underway. “I think this has been happening since my status began to rise,” she said. “When you first rise, it is nothing but excitement, nothing but understanding that this is the culmination of your hard work, your talent. You just feel that God has blessed you – I still feel it.
And then it moves: what no one tells you about being “on top” are the subtleties, its price, the pressure of it, the responsibility, and finally the disappointment. You feel like you’ve found something you love to do and you’ve achieved it, your whole life is sewn up – and then you hit it and it’s just a level of emptiness, wondering what your life means and then crashing and burning . I had to go back to the source and reconsider my life, reconsider my stories, to eject me into something, to be able to find a home – find me. I was lost in all this. “
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In 2016, with her Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role in Fences, based on a play by August Wilson, Viola Davis became the first African-American to win an Oscar, Tony and Emmy triple crown for acting (Tony was for the role of Broadway in Wilson’s King Hadley II; Emmy for the television legal thriller How to Get Out of Murder). She is the most nominated black woman in the history of the Oscars (received nominations for Ma Rainey’s “Black Bottom”, another Wilson adaptation, and “Help and Doubt”) and is ranked in the top 10 of the New York Times “list of the greatest actors of the 21st century. Her performance of her roles is both demanding and generous, always insightful, possessing captivating integrity that makes each character look deeply familiar, tangible and self-possessed.
The perfect humble artist, she believes that fame and fame are secondary to work; she is modest about her trophies and ignores the efforts of her husband of an actor, nearly 19 years old Julius Tennon, and their adopted daughter, Genesis, to spray them around the house. “If it was up to me, all the prizes would be in the garage,” she said. “I mean, it’s just not my style – it’s a little too much. Listen, it’s not like I haven’t seen an Oscar or anything, and I thought, wow, that’s pretty cool. I’m very grateful, but, you know, you can’t live there. As soon as you get it, you get off the stage, you’re an Oscar winner, but then it’s like, so what now? And then you have to move on to the next job and start over with this cheater syndrome.
Davis is wearing a coat, Haney. Earrings, Soko. Style: Elizabeth Stewart. Hair: Jamica Wilson. Makeup: Autumn Moultrie. Set design: Natalie Shriver. Photo: Mary Rosie / Guardian
The memoir begins with a cheeky eight-year-old Viola, a “cheeky mess” with torn socks and oversized shoes, who is haunted every day by a group of racist boys throwing stones, bricks, tree branches and pine cones. To help protect herself, her mother, May Alice Davis, who worked as a maid and factory worker and was active in the civil rights movement, gave her a shiny blue crochet needle to stab them with. and tells her to walk, not run. They are the only African-American family in the densely populated, drug-stained town of Central Falls, Rhode Island, after moving there from South Carolina. They live in a closed building, often without hot water, gas or electricity, and the rats are so bad and brave that they eat the faces of Viola’s dolls and jump into her bed at night in search of food. She never enters the kitchen because of them. She wets the bed until she is 14; limited to wiping with cold, soap-free water, she and her four sisters regularly attend odorous school.
I have an understanding of poverty that many people do not have. I know what deprivation feels like, and the most important thing it has given me is compassion
There are also fires – they become “experienced climbers on fire ladders” and there is a case when Viola’s mother makes a superhuman jump to save her when she is afraid to jump – but this fire trap remains their home for two more years. “No one cares about the conditions in which the unwanted live,” Davis wrote. “You are an invisible, guilty factor that allows the more favored to be freed from your misery.
Part of the legacy of that time is that Davis refuses to fulfill his daughter’s wish for a domestic rat. Again, she laughs at her characteristic humor and friendliness, while at the same time being seriously serious about the impact on her identity of growing up, not just poor, but “on”, extreme beyond. “I have an understanding of poverty that many people probably don’t have, so I don’t romanticize it,” she said. “I know what deprivation feels like and the most important thing it has given me is compassion. There is something about knowing the path, having it difficult and being baptized with fire, that you are beginning to really realize what this means for people living in poverty and how difficult or impossible it is to get out. This made me see the other side of life, instead of just sitting at a cocktail party and talking about poverty in the same way – I mean, I don’t know, in the same way you would talk about a Picasso painting. I have a front row seat. ”
In addition to “garbage diving,” food stamps, and constant hunger, there was her father’s alcoholism and violence, which she had to contend with by turning the family home into a “war zone.” Dan Davis was a horse racer on racetracks, and he was “pretty good” at guitar and accordion. Davis writes with love that he went with him to the stables, for his fierce defense of his family and his enthusiasm for the holidays; he was big on Valentine’s Day and put up a Christmas tree every year. But she is candid in her memoirs about his frequent beatings of his children and especially his wife. Viola and her older sister Deloris would escape the trauma of “our mother being beaten and screaming in pain” by playing role-playing games of “rich, white matrons from Beverly Hills, with big jewelry and small chihuahuas.”
Davis on stage at Intimate Apparel in 2001. Photo: Los Angeles Times / Getty Images
Her mother still bears the scars of violence, which may include stabbing her leg or neck with a pencil or chasing a bloodied neighborhood and running for her life, leaving a blood trail leading to the front door. Davis writes: “Sometimes her head or arm would be split. He would have a swollen face, a cleft lip. I was always afraid when she picked up something like a piece of wood, because it would hit her as hard as she could and keep beating. Sometimes all night. ”
Dan Davis died of pancreatic cancer in 2006 after later becoming an adored, apologetic husband and host to suffering relatives, including other addicts. It is the great story of the memoir of redemption, depicted bedridden in his kitchen at the end of his life, weighing 86 pounds and calling on May Alice, repeatedly praying for forgiveness, a state of prostration and obedience, which Davis believes not everyone capable. “I’m giving him a lot of props for that,” she says. She herself forgives, exposing her father as a perpetrator and perpetrator, while acknowledging that he is locked up in a system of historical racial and economic oppression that has crippled him.
“I think at one point I had to make a choice – to see my father just as a demon or a monster, or to see him as a man, as a man who fights who knows what secrets, what kind of violence, what kind …
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