“If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I am living for, in detail, ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for.”
—THOMAS MERTON
Eventually, I received a full ride to college with the Preparatory Enrollment Program scholarship. PEP, as we called it, was the sister program of Upward Bound. I started in a familiar place, Rhode Island College, and space, housing in the same all-girls dormitory—Browne Hall
—where I’d spent summers in high school and visited my sister Deloris during the school year. I went into college at seventeen, and like a lot of kids, I wasn’t mature, but I definitely thought I was.
I was so excited to leave home. I worked for it and earned it. And once I arrived, I unpacked, settled in, and proceeded to fall into a deep, deep depression, probably the deepest depression I’ve ever experienced. I haven’t had one like that since. Not that deep. I was depressed about being away from my little sister, Danielle, but that separation alone didn’t fully explain its depths.
Since age fourteen I had saturated my life with acting, becoming an artist. But when I found myself in college, I still could not give myself permission to do the thing that I loved. My mind was like a railway station where two trains were leaving at the same time. One train was my academic career life; it was on track to graduate from high school, go to college to get my bachelor of arts degree, and become an artist. But the other train leaving the station tracked back to the place of trauma I came from, a place where I
was bruised, did not believe in myself, had no sense of self. I could not understand self-love. I never felt like I was enough.
I went to college asking myself, as many artists do: How am I going to make money? How am I going to support myself? When I didn’t see a clear path, I thought, I’m not going back home. It’s just not going to work as an artist. I have to be something else. Acting is just something I’m going to do on the side. So I took a lot of English courses, which I loved, and decided I was going to be a teacher. Something inside me, however, must have had different ideas, because I fell deep and hard into a major sadness.
It was a depression about trading in my dream.
My dorm, Browne Hall, was all female. It had suites of twelve rooms, and each had a single bed, a desk, and a little closet. The building had a front door and a back door. Whenever someone was at the front door, whoever was manning the front desk would call you and say, “You have a visitor.” I was settling into my new life, and despite the weight of the depression, happy to be surviving away from home. I had my room, showers, food, heat.
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. “I’ll 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.
It was trying to save someone else when I was drowning. One of my regrets is the trauma Danielle had to endure, and my lack of ability in the moment to do anything about it beyond the temporary Band-Aid of that night. Now that I have a big bank account, resources, I wish I could reach back to that time period. If I could, I would travel back in time and take my sister away from all that, right then and there.
She called me at least fifteen times a day. My suitemate would say, “Viola! It’s your baby sister.” She would almost always be crying, saying, “Come get me, Vahlee.” I always had to say, “Danielle, I can’t come. I’m far away by bus.” She would then begin openly weeping or I would hear my dad’s drunken rages in the background while she wailed, “Please come get me.”
Sometimes, especially on the weekends, Deloris and I would go home to be with her, pool our money to buy Heavenly Hash ice cream, fixings for a Greek salad and pasta shells with red Prego sauce. Danielle would be so happy. She would run out to us like Celie did in The Color Purple when she saw her sister Nettie. That reaction when you miss someone so much, and finally they’re right in front of you. We would eat and watch Fantasy Island or The Love Boat.
Tattoo, the character played by Hervé Villechaize, would run up to this lighthouse when he saw the plane coming toward the island and would ring the bell shouting, “Da plane. Da plane!” Danielle loved that part so much she would say in between bites of pasta, “He’s going to say ‘Da Plane! Da plane.’” We would tease her and say, “No, he’s not. Who told you that?” She would say, “Watch, you’ll see.” He would say it and our jaws would drop. We would look at her in amazement and she would cross her arms as if to say, I told you. That was our ritual. We went home because we absolutely loved our baby sister and she loved us so much. Then on Monday, we went back to school.
My older sister Dianne experienced every accolade imaginable during her journey: National Honors Society, Rhode Island Honor Society, All- State basketball. In addition, she was a great actress and singer. She could
do it all. Successful Black women almost normalize overachieving. That was definitely Dianne.
She started out in acting at Rhode Island College before transferring to Howard University. At Howard she still wanted to become an actress until she found out how hard it was. “I want health insurance,” she told me.
Even though my mom and dad didn’t go to college—didn’t finish high school—Dianne had driven it into us that We. Were. Going. To. College. She instilled in us that if we did not have a college degree, if we did not find something to do, if we did not focus, if we did not have drive, we were going to be like our parents. I felt if I did not go to college, if I did not get a degree, if I was not excellent, then my parents’ reality would become my own. There was no gray area. Either you achieved or you failed.
I love them dearly, but I didn’t want to live a life of poverty, alcoholism, and abuse. I thought I had only two choices: either succeed or absolutely sink. No in-between. I had no understanding that I possessed the tools to dig my way out if I somehow made a mistake. I had no understanding that there would be hard times and then joy would come, or sometimes the shoe would fall, but failing wasn’t permanent. None of that emotionally healthy thinking was instilled in me. I only understood secrets, suppression, succeeding at all costs, overachieving. You make it or you don’t. You either sink or you swim.
I 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 made a lot of friends in college. My suitemates were my crew: Jodi, Chris, Jane, and especially Terri Noya because we lived in the same town, Central Falls. Noya was Portuguese and came from poverty like me. Cheryl the RA, resident assistant, had cerebral palsy, but you almost wouldn’t know it, even though she walked with an apparatus, because she was so beautifully tough.
They were a motley crew of forward-thinking girls God-ordained to be protective of me. I felt like they all believed in me. We loved one another. We were there for one another when parents died, getting married, having
children. One of our suitemates got pregnant while we were still in school and had to drop out, but we rallied around her.
We had good times, but that first year was a rough transition. I drank three times my first year, and every single one of those times I got caught. I’d go out with friends and drink or whatever, but it wasn’t my jam and I should’ve known it. It’s like our parents would say when we were younger, “A hard head makes a soft ass.” That means some lessons you have to learn the hard way.
The drunkest I got my entire life was in college. Some of my suitemates and I went off campus to the east side near Brown University and did shots of tequila and shots of beer at Spats. Before I knew it, I was crawling out of there. I went back to my dorm, threw up, and had a hangover for a week. I don’t know what my jam was, but it wasn’t drinking, and I certainly wasn’t dating or having sex. The moments of fun for me were when the girls in our suite sat in the common room and talked . . . about everything.
College was an interesting experience of not fitting in with the white kids and not fitting in with the Black kids. Harambee was the school’s Black Student Coalition. Even though I knew a lot of the Black folk, went to the Ebony Fashion Fair and all of that, I didn’t fit in with them because I was from Central Falls and those Black kids were from South Providence or Providence or Middletown, areas where there were more Black people. It was as if I didn’t have my Black Card.
I was dark-skinned, didn’t dress worth a damn, and had no “swag.” None. Hell, I was coming from a square-mile city that was predominantly white when I was growing up, but now had more Hispanics. I didn’t even know I had to have a certain behavior to have a sense of belonging with my own race.
Yet my “card” was too Black to get with the white kids. I was lost in that in-between space.
Mine was a journey getting through college, even after surviving that freshman-year depression. I was on my own. There was a food program during the week but not during the weekends. There it is: food again. There was something about the inability to get food that made me feel that I was slipping back into my fucked-up childhood. I always felt like I was foraging for it from Friday evening to Monday morning.
Imagine what it’s like when you don’t have a weekend meal plan? Worse off, you don’t have a family who can send you a care package or a
home where you can drop in for a kitchen/laundry-room raid. Imagine you don’t have one of those little refrigerators in your room packed with food to carry you through those days when the cafeteria is closed. The result: the hunger pains of poverty.
To combat that, 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.
It was especially heinous when it was dark because I had to walk through the back entrance of the college, over the sports field, then up to Smith Avenue where there were very few streetlights, and wait for the bus. That bus would take me to downtown Providence. Then I would wait again at a major bus stop for the bus to take me from downtown Providence to downtown Pawtucket. Usually I didn’t have the money for the last leg of the trip, or sometimes when I had the money, I would miss the bus from Pawtucket to Central Falls because, well, it was unreliable. It was a scheduling nightmare. I would walk a mile or two from downtown Pawtucket to Brooks Drugs in Central Falls. After work, I would go back to my parents’ apartment, sleep on the floor, and go back to school the next morning or take someone else’s shift.
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.
A lot of college for me was great laughter and connection with suitemates and other friendships I began to make, mixed with isolation and fucking pain. I still felt like I had to hide my deepest truths to fit in. I re- created myself as this “other.” I imagined myself as this fabulous, overachieving, funny, quirky theater geek from Central Falls. Every once in a while, I sat with the Black students in our area in the cafeteria, but most of the time, I sat with my tribe, my suitemates, or by myself.
Rhode Island College was less than 1 percent “other” back in the day. “Other” meaning any student of color: Hispanic, Asian, Black, Middle Eastern. The rest were white. There were probably close to nine thousand students. I was a lost girl trying to find my way.
It didn’t help that back then, Rhode Island College (RIC) had fraternities and sororities that were rowdy and all white. Kappa Epsilon was one. I mention this because some of those members were blatantly racists. Many years after my college days, I read where some researchers trace the founding of the Ku Klux Klan to the Kappa Alpha fraternity. In hindsight, some of those RIC Kappa Epsilon members must have been kissing cousins with the brotherhood, emphasis on “hood,” of Kappa Alpha because their acts of blatant racism were a constant narrative perpetuated by its members. I think they believed that whites all gained college admission based on merit while Black and Brown students were all beneficiaries of affirmative action.
There was no cognitive understanding of the real complexity of race at the school or in its admissions process. How do you excel when you’re Southeast Asian, highly intelligent, hardworking but spent two years in a Cambodian jungle, two years in a refugee camp, and watched your family being massacred before coming to the country? Without the Preparatory Enrollment Program, there would have been zero students of color because we were starting with major deficits. Most destructive was the view that we weren’t worthy. It is the foundation built into the DNA of America, and when you couple it with personal challenges like poverty, violence, trauma, and compromised communities, it can become a death knell. Years later, Frank Sanchez was appointed president and totally transformed the demographics of the school.
I focused on acting classes: character study, voice and articulation, creative classes, dramatic criticism, the history of theater—every aspect of theater. The other academic classes, not so much. I had felt the huge malaise until deciding that acting was the path I was going to take. It’s what made me happy. It’s what brought me joy. But there was no way in from Rhode Island to being a working actor. None. How do you even get a job? How do you get an audition or an agent? I was getting closer to starting my life and needed to figure it out.
The area in life that is parallel to work, to academics, is home. Your emotional center is rooted there. For me, the result was being late for class a lot, not being as prepared as I could be. I was always catching up, always a little disorganized. I lacked organizational skills, even in my room. I didn’t know how to dress or present myself. I had the persona of being real because I didn’t know what or who else to be. But being real and being transparent are two totally different things. Being real is wearing fifteen- dollar shoes and being proud to wear them. Being transparent is saying, “I’m always anxious. I never feel like I fit in. I need help.” I wasn’t transparent.
I didn’t feel like I was in my body. People probably felt I was because I never spoke about my father’s alcoholism or growing up poor and hungry. I kept big secrets. I felt like I was the big secret. A huge part of me, my pathology, was a big secret. What I presented to the world was a little Black girl overachiever from Central Falls. And I was.
I immersed myself in theater once I decided that was what I wanted. I woke up one day and said, “Just jump, Viola.” I auditioned and got two roles in Main Stage Productions, Hot L Baltimore by Lanford Wilson and Romeo and Juliet. I was the prostitute April in Hot L and the nurse in Romeo and Juliet. For my portrayal of April, I was nominated for an Irene Ryan Award, the top acting award in college. I also created a one-woman show that I performed for years. It had seventeen different characters. Every character from Celie in The Color Purple to Pilate in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon to St. Joan. I even performed an improvisation piece where I created a comic piece based on words the audience just spontaneously threw at me.
The one-woman show was my senior thesis project, and the purpose was to show that I had range, that I could transform just like my white counterparts. At the time, I felt it was a show that was a true coming-out
event. But in hindsight, the objective of it was fucked-up. How do you create a show to prove you’re worthy?
There’s a bartering, desperation factor attached to that. Let me prove to you that I have talent instead of just, being. Forget about the dark-skinned girl who just walked into the audition room. Let me use my training and technique to make you “forget” that I’m Black. The extent of that obstacle is way more burdensome than the obstacles placed in front of my white counterparts. White students just had to show up and be good. There was no transforming to make you believe that this Rhode Islander could actually be Russian in a play by a Russian playwright. They simply had to be, well, white. This obstacle would be the four-hundred-pound gorilla that would constantly inhabit the various rooms I entered throughout my life.
Rhode Island College was known for its great musical productions, but I was never part of that. In fact, if you asked many of the theater students there during that time, they have very little memory of me. I did find mentors in Bill Hutchinson, Elaine Perry, and David Burr. I did mostly Black Box Productions, Readers Theatre, and off-campus Summer Theatre.
If there is another pet peeve as a theater major there in the ’80s, it’s this: Educational theater should be just that. College should not operate like a Broadway or regional theater whose main goal is profit. Educational theater is for the training and preparation of the student actor. Its purpose is to give them the tools to be able to operate on a professional level. It’s why we pay tuition. There are and were theater majors who have never done a main stage production. How do you learn if you don’t do?
I graduated after five years because it took me a long time to decide on my major. I had to take some courses to catch up. I stayed on campus the whole time.
My last year, I went on national student exchange to California Polytechnic University in Pomona. I went because I wanted to get out of Rhode Island, out of the cold winters. I just wanted a different scene. The greatest surprise of my life is that in one semester, I flourished. I performed in Mrs. Warren’s Profession, a George Bernard Shaw play. I was a part of an improv group. I took a life-changing public speaking class. I did very well academically and made wonderful friends. It was the first time I got a weave, which was a big deal back in the day. At the time, I felt cute; real cute. I kept that damn weave in until string was hanging down my shoulder.
I loved the theater program at Cal Poly. I totally fit in with all the theater geeks. I had a great roommate, Eva Rajna, a tall, wonderful, Jewish woman from Hungary whose father owned a bakery in Sunnyvale, California. The nicest family. He would send her boxes of pastries, which we would devour. I could eat enormous amounts of food back in the day.
I was still painfully shy, uncomfortable, and awkwardly introverted outside of theater. I avoided conversations, avoided dating, still no boyfriend and no sex. It took a lot for me to trust people. To really allow anyone in. My posse was always small because of that.
I came back to Rhode Island College for my final semester, renewed. Going three thousand miles away and throwing myself into the belly of the beast that was California forced me to dig deep to survive. I made the Dean’s List for the fourth time.
A month before graduation, I auditioned for grad programs for theater students. They’re called URTA, University Resident Theatre Association, Auditions. Even though they’re called URTA Auditions, no one ever got any work in regional theaters after these auditions. It’s another example of the brutality and nebulous aspects of the business of acting. However, schools courted me for their master’s programs in theater. Once again, I was a mess of contradiction. I was, on one hand, brave, courageous, able to be independent and out on my own. And at the same time, I was emotionally conflicted, not comfortable in my authenticity, in my own skin.
As brave, courageous, independent Viola, I took the train into New York City for my audition without any instruction or research. I just went and auditioned and it was a great audition. No matter how nervous I was, I could use it as fuel to really attack my monologues, which were Celie from The Color Purple and Martine from the Molière play The Learned Ladies.
It was the Celie monologue that always got me in. It would later get me into Juilliard and into a lot of Readers Theatre competitions in New England. I thought it apropos that Celie was so incomplete, not fully formed. If not for the love from her sister and Shug Avery, she would’ve never seen her value.
When I was on stage, I could bask in the applause, the tears of the audience, and their words of admiration, telling me they had never seen a performance like that before. This external validation offered me a fleeting sense of self-love. However, this kind of affirmation was ephemeral because external validation, by nature, isn’t true self-love. Consequently, I would soon return to my everyday life, where I felt awkward and out of place. I could manage my quirks, pain, and shyness when they were channeled into my characters, as they were accepted in a way that only seemed to highlight my discomfort and lack of acceptance in my own life.
I graduated with a degree in theater in 1988. My entire family came to celebrate my graduation from Rhode Island College—my four sisters, my brother, my mom, dad, and even my grandmother, Mozell Logan, who traveled from South Carolina. They cheered loudly from the bleachers as I received my diploma. My grandmother, who was petite and dark-skinned, repeatedly told me, “I’m so proud of you, baby. Your grandma loves you so much.” I remember being captivated by her presence. Her voice was deep, clear, and melodious, and it seemed to etch itself into my memory. It was a voice many actors would envy, one they would spend fortunes to achieve. It was regal and commanding, and it struck me profoundly. It sounded just like… me.
