“It was like a hand reached for mine and I finally saw my way out.”
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 Tyson 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. MaMama was addicted to game shows. In our game show, contestants would come on and share their story about saving another person’s life. Whoever had the best lifesaving story would win the contest. Deloris played a Monty Hall–type talk-show host character. I played the Ooh-Wee Kid—that’s Ted Lange from the television show That’s My Mama. Dianne was Fred Sanford from Sanford and Son. Anita was Aunt Esther from the same show. We wrote our skit over the span of two and a half weeks, and we started early.
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 oversized. 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.
Finally, the day came. We had researched the skit to an inch of our lives. I had massive stage fright. Massive. I could barely perform in private with my sisters. My throat would constrict. My stomach would be in knots. I would just . . . freeze. But my sisters threatened me not to flake out or else. That’s how important this was. 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.
When it finally started, and the group of kids who were favored to win were introduced, the whole park screamed in excitement. When they finished, it was to thunderous applause, with the knowledge that they had found their winning group. I remember my sisters and I looking at one another, pumping each other with confidence.
And then they all sat back down and Dianne said, “Okay, you know we got to do it like we practiced. We’re up.”
We did our little chant, which consisted of “We’re gonna win! We’re gonna win!”
Dianne looked at me and saw my fear. “We’re not freezing today, Viola. Right?” I nodded reluctantly. The butterflies in my stomach were overwhelming, but so was the desire to not destroy what we created.
When they introduced us, there was clapping but nothing near the ovation for the previous group. That group stood near the stage with their arms crossed. We were the last group of the day. We started off by all singing our own rendition of the jingle from The Tonight Show. Deloris came on first and said, “Welcome everybody to ‘The Life Saver Show.’ I’m your host, Monty Hall. And I’m here to tell you that we have a show where everyone is asked to share your lifesaving stories. We’ve got the ultimate $1 million prize for each of you. Wait a minute. Wait a minute.”
There was an interruption.
The interruption was me. I came on as the Ooh-Wee Kid and mimicked Ted Lange, the town gossip as best as I could: “Ooh-Wee. I got it. I got it. I’m here to report it.” Then nine-year-old me said, “Fred Sanford is coming on the show. He’s coming on the show. And he, and he’s about to mess things up. You’ve got to watch out for him.”
Dianne as Fred Sanford came on and shared his story that he saved a bunch of lives when he saw a group of people fall off a bridge and jumped into the water to rescue them. Anita as Aunt Esther came out and Fred said, “Aunt Esther, I should put your face in some dough and make some gorilla cookies,” and he and Aunt Esther started fighting, the way they did on the TV show.
Fred finally ends his lifesaving story by saying, “I jumped into the water to save Aunt Esther.”
Aunt Esther, played by Anita, was so moved she said, “You went in to save me, Fred?” To which he replied, “No, I went in to save the fish because you so damn ugly.”
They began to fight even more, and Fred tore off Aunt Esther’s wig, revealing her bald head underneath. The skit ended with a standing ovation. But nostalgia is powerful. The memory of the winning. The applause. The acceptance is my takeaway. But my lack of self-love and my complete inability to open up to anyone about my one driving fear—“My father is going to beat my mom to death one day”—couldn’t be voiced. The adoration is as powerful as that curtain was in The Wizard of Oz. It hid a lie that gave me temporary asylum. That’s what winning was . . . an instant protection and smoke screen to hide the fact that I was simply scared all the time. I felt like an “outsider” all the time.
We won! We got first place and I’ll 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.
