“Vahla . . . all ya uncles and aunties was in the house eating, dancing, waiting for you to be born.”
—MAE ALICE DAVIS
When my mom told me my birth story several years ago, I was quite surprised. It was a healthy, happy memory. “MaMama” (as I call her) has a tendency to spontaneously tell shocking stories: relatives messing around with each other; how she started taking care of her siblings when she was four years old; my father’s cheating. Well, buried in the midst of all these fabulously horrid stories, there was a sweet tale—my birth story.
MaMama has two very southern phrases that are a cause of heavy laughter and a source of great comfort for my siblings and me. One is “Ma” which she calls us—her children—as a form of affection. The other is “And stuff like that in tha.” She sprinkles this phrase into sentences liberally.
In her South Carolina accent, she said, “Vahla, when you were born and stuff like that in tha, all ya uncles and aunties and stuff like that in tha, everybody was there. They was drinkin’ and dancin’ and stuff like that in tha, waitin’ for you to come. Miss Clara Johnson and stuff like that in tha was late, so ya gran’mama delivered you. Everybody was happy!”
When she first told me, I allowed a long gulf of silence after she finished. I was waiting for the shoe to drop. I was waiting for some unbelievable, traumatic interjection; something that interfered with the beauty of it. But the horrible never came. It was a normal, beautiful story of family centered around my arrival in the land of the living. To my shock, my birth story didn’t confuse me or induce pain or numbness in the core of my being. It was simply a tale of love and life.
I love that story so much and ask my mom to repeat it often. I mean, a lot. And, every time she retells it, she tops the story off with this wonderful addition: that she ate a sardine, onion, tomato, and mustard sandwich right after she gave birth to me. A disgusting concoction, I know, but she explained, “It was the best sandwich I ever ate.” She named me Viola after my great-aunt on my father’s side.
On August 11, 1965, in St. Matthews, South Carolina, I was born, the fifth of six children, in my maternal grandmother and grandfather’s house on the Singleton Plantation. And yes, it was and still is a plantation. Not a farm. Drive down the long, dusty road leading into the 160 or so acres and you’ll come to the big, white, beautiful plantation home. Drive a little farther and there’s the tiny, one-room church. An even farther venture will deliver you to the doorsteps of the sharecroppers’ houses, outhouses, outdoor showers, and a well.
My maternal grandparents, Mozell and Henry Logan, like the other sharecroppers, had a one-room house with a big fireplace.
Their daughter, MaMama, the oldest of eighteen children, left school after the eighth grade because she got pregnant, but also because she was beaten a lot in school. I mean beaten to where it broke skin and she bled.
My grandmother and my aunt had to go to the school and confront the teacher, who was Black but lighter skinned, and suffering from the all-too- common, intraracial disease of colorism. She was punishing my mom because she was dark-skinned, came from the country, the backwoods, and had nappy hair.
MaMama’s family didn’t have indoor toilets, showers, or bathrooms. That, mixed with the sheer number of kids, and the desperate poverty, meant she often smelled like piss. Another shame that justified the teacher’s fear and anger toward darker-skinned MaMama. Once again, an association of everything that is wrong and negative with skin shade. All I know is, I felt a different level of being heartbroken for my mom when I learned the real driving force behind her decision not to return to school.
My mother pushed on with her life, nonetheless. She was married and had her first child, my brother, John Henry, at age fifteen. She had my sister Dianne when she was eighteen, Anita at nineteen, Deloris at twenty, and me at twenty-two. Years later, at age thirty-four, she had my sister Danielle.
Only eleven of Mozell and Henry Logan’s eighteen children survived, MaMama, obviously, being one of them. Several were stillborn, and one my
mother constantly talks about died in a fire as a newborn. That baby was named Deloris.
MaMama tells me that she was about four or five years old and had the mammoth responsibility of taking care of her younger siblings. As she tells it, she would take the Binky from her own mouth to put in her brother’s mouth. That was how young she was. Like most children at that time, while the adults worked in the fields, the children were left home alone, unattended. Often, they cooked, cleaned, and changed diapers.
She was playing with matches one day in the open fireplace of their wooden shack, and the rug caught fire. It scared MaMama tremendously. She had the presence of mind to grab her younger brother Jimmy and run out of the house. As the house went up in flames, she couldn’t reach her younger sister, who was in the back room. When Deloris was found, she was perfectly, beautifully intact, but she had died of smoke inhalation.
“She was a beautiful baby, like a doll,” moaned MaMama. Unfortunately, MaMama was blamed for Deloris’s death and subsequently beaten by both her father and mother. She says she still has problems to this day with the arm that was beaten.
MaMama tells this story on a loop. Finally, after so many years, I told her, “You know that was not your fault. It was not your fault. I’m giving you permission to forgive yourself. Your parents were wrong for beating you. It was an accident. You should not have even been in that position.”
Painful silence. Then she simply changed the subject. I know MaMama will never forgive herself, even though years later we saw the death certificate that shows MaMama couldn’t have been more than three years old, not four or five, when her baby sister died.
I love staring at my mom. I take in every detail of her face, hands, skin. I see all the scars. Some I remember from abuse she endured, and some I don’t. The sore left arm. The scar on her right forearm made by my dad ripping her arm open. Scars on her face, legs . . . Scars. I think about the complexity of her childlike heart compared to the ferocious, maternal warrior who would angrily snatch her wig off to kick anybody’s ass who even thought about harming her babies.
I think about her bravery in fighting for welfare reform in the 1970s. Getting arrested. Holding us with one arm and waving her fist with the other as we were herded into wagons. Her speaking at Brown University: “I may have had an eighth-grade education and I was nervous, but I spoke.” I
think of the woman who survived horrific sexual abuse only to marry my dad who was an abuser, yet after many years became a true partner.
All that comes to mind when I look at one of the great loves of my life, my mother, and listen to her retell the same stories.
“That doctor said you were gonna have a water bucket head, a big stomach, and bowlegs,” my mom said in between eating bites of rice and drinking her mimosa. She was telling a story of when I was about two years old.
“You was at Memorial Hospital. You was just a baby. They had you all hooked up to machines and all that crust and matter like that in tha around ya eyes and nose. Ya daddy went there to see you and it was the first time I seen him cry like a baby. I knew I had bad milk. The doctor said you weren’t going to develop like, you know, normal.”
MaMama was visiting my house in Los Angeles telling this story. It was on a day off from shooting How to Get Away with Murder. We were in the backyard. I knew the story by heart, but listened anyway.
“He wanted to experiment on you. He said he was gonna break ya legs to see if they grew straight. But I saw how he was looking at me. I ain’t dumb. He saw that I was poor and Black. I took you from that hospital. That doctor kept sayin, ‘Mrs. Davis, you’re making a big mistake!’ But I told him he wasn’t gonna experiment on my baby. I took you to Miss Cora’s house and she made you some lima bean soup, and you ate the whole bowl and drank a big glass of cold water and that was it.”
Miss Cora was our distant relative who lived in Prospect Heights, a low- income housing project in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.
“Miss Cora said, ‘Ain’t nothing wrong with this baby!’ And after you ate that soup you hugged Miss Cora’s leg and wouldn’t let go.”
I just listen, always silent. I have a vague memory of this moment hugging Miss Cora’s leg, feeling gratefulness, but just that moment.
“I know that doctor’s not alive now cuz this was when you were a baby. But I wish he could see you now,” she says, as always, with a great burst of joy, smiling, laughing. “You ain’t got no bowlegs or big stomach. Ya head is big, but that’s what make you a good actor!
“Vahla, make ya mama another one of these memeesas or . . . you know what I mean.” No matter what, I cannot get her to remember “mimosa” so I stopped trying because I sort of enjoy it.
I run to make her another mimosa—more juice than champagne— anxiously getting up the courage to ask a very risqué question. Anything to ply secrets from her. The “water bucket head hospital story” is one of her favorites. I grew up hating it. I let her get it out of the way before I ask her something more challenging. One of the beauties of getting older is really getting to know a parent.
“Uhh . . . Mom . . . did you ever have an affair? Fall in love with someone else? Did you have an affair with Howie?”
Howie was a really nice white guy who lived on the second floor of 128 Washington Street, an apartment building we lived in. Every time my father would beat my mom, she would run to Howie’s apartment. He would wash her wounds and let my mom hide out in his apartment until my dad calmed down. Picture the stereotypical ’70s hippie. That was Howie. He would play the guitar for us and give us candy. Just regular candy; no hippie “additives.”
“No, Vahla. I nevah did nothin’ with Howie. He was just a nice guy. Ya daddy always accused me of messin’ with him.”
I have to say, I was disappointed with that one. I was waiting for not only something salacious but sort of wanted my mom to have some story where she harnessed her joy, desires, or a tiny bit of happiness, even if it was from an affair.
She took another sip. “But I did fall in love with my gynecologist.” I perked up. “OHHH! Really!”
“Vahla, I was pregnant with Danielle and, ya know, he was taking care of me, listening to me. I was so sensitive at that time, and he was so nice.”
I waited for more but that was it. She had feelings for a man who cared for her. As stubborn as a bull, as innocent as a child, and loyal even when she has been abandoned. Thank God for mimosas, or as MaMama calls them, “memeesas.”
When I was young, I thought, perhaps arrogantly, that I could do better than my mom. I was going to slay dragons. Be stronger and more confident. I wasn’t going to run from bad memories. I would be a “hero,” an overcomer.
But you know the saying, “Show me a hero and I’ll show you a tragedy.” As a theater geek, I learned that tragedies always end with the downfall of the hero. Everyone who was influenced by them, who benefits from them, who relies on them is crushed in their downfall. Heroes always
cause their own downfall, like Oedipus. I didn’t want to cause my own downfall. I didn’t want to move through my life and not be accountable for recklessness. I wanted to be aware of my Achilles heel. I believed awareness was what would release my blessings. I had no idea the mammoth task I was asking the universe.
In one of my mother’s episodes of dropping spontaneous and extremely important facts, without warning or context, she told me that although she has gone by Mary Alice Davis for most of her life, her real name is actually Mae. “M-A-E,” she always says, “not M-A-Y.” She renamed herself Mary early in life because all the girls in the country were named Mae, and she didn’t want to be like everyone else. How badass is that!
The woman I tried so hard not to be was the muse sitting on my shoulder in How to Get Away with Murder. She didn’t tell me or my sisters about her name change until much later in life. I was thirty-five when I found out. It wasn’t a legal change, just a personal one. When she told me, it was absolutely not a confession, but a correction. It was almost as if she was insulted that I said her name wrong. I was sending her money via Western Union, like I always did. “Vahla! Stop writing Mary!! My name ain’t Mary! It’s Mae. M-A-E! You keep writing my name wrong!”
Silence. “MaMama, what’re you talking about? You’ve always been Mary: Mary Alice Davis.”
“Vahla! I’ve always been Mae. I just never liked that name. Everyone in the country was named Mae.”
“I . . . I . . . I’m confused.”
“But my ID says ‘Mae,’ so send it to ‘Mae Alice Davis.’” Silence.
“Vahla?! You heard what ya mama said, didn’t you?”
“Uhh. Yeah. Sure, Ma.” I just went with it. As confused as I was, I didn’t want to ask questions because she didn’t seem to be open to it. Plus, she would whoop my ass when I saw her next. I’m not kidding. Two generations removed from slavery, as docile as she appeared at times, she had a brutal right hook. So I didn’t bring up that her sister’s name was Mary, an interesting sidebar to her name change from “Mae” to “Mary.”
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.
Unlike my mother, my father was a simpler man. Dan Davis was born in 1936 in St. Matthews, South Carolina. As far as I know, he had two sisters. For the life of me I can’t remember, but he had, I believe, a poor relationship with his stepfather, whose last name was Duckson.
Daddy says his education went as far as fifth grade, but evaluating his penmanship over the years, I would say my father’s formal education ended closer to second grade. He may not have been educated, but he was not a dumb man. Illiterate at fifteen, he learned to read because his friend taught him by looking at billboards on the side of the road.
At fifteen, after years of abuse, he ran away from home to work as a horse groomer at racetracks around the country. He groomed some of the greatest racehorses in history, and yet he hated the work. MaMama woefully says that my father never groomed Secretariat. We still have photos of him in the winner’s circle because the groom was nearly always in the picture when a horse won.
I loved going to work with my father when I was younger. I loved being around the horses. Even the smell of the manure, hay, and horse food excited me. Looking at the horses in their stables, and feeding them with my father is a happy memory.
When the owners came and directed my father about how to brush the horses and how to feed them, the atmosphere transformed into something very different. When my father was around those men, it was almost as though he was a slave and they were masters. He would be juggling five tasks at once. The huge syringe with vitamin shots for the horse, the different mixtures of feed, the grooming brushes and hay. They had no understanding of how much they were asking him to do at any given moment. I could feel his frustration, his anger. But what choice did he have?
To make matters worse, grooms were barely paid a living wage. Imagine hauling your family from the South with all the hope in the world that you could do better. Yet all you have, all that you can do is not good enough to keep them alive and functioning. I could tell he was happy that I had witnessed the difficulties of his job. It was a way, I think, for him to validate that what was happening to him was real.
But my father, whom we called “MaDaddy,” was more than his work. He was a great storyteller. Dad was also a pretty good guitar and harmonica player. He absolutely loved soul, jazz, and the blues, especially BB King.
Because MaDaddy is gone now, I will never know what demons caused him to run away from his home at fifteen. As much as I love my father, I know those demons haunted him his entire life. They embedded themselves deep within him and boiled into rage and alcoholism. That rage was usually released on payday.
I’ve always been an introvert, and when I was young, I was extremely shy. At an early age, I became a keen observer of the world around me. I blended into the wall in almost every setting, and I was able to see without saying a thing. What I saw in my father was a man who, alone and single, could’ve kept his check and spent it all on women and booze. But he wasn’t alone. During my childhood my father had five children to feed (minus my sister Danielle who is almost twelve years younger than me). Every penny he worked for had to go to us. Even with the hard labor, enduring the disrespect from white horse owners, it was never enough.
So, he raged.
He had open affairs. The only “other woman” I vividly remember was Patricia. Patricia was a very large woman who lived near Railroad Street in Central Falls. Railroad Street was at the edge of town, which was only a square mile. He would take me over there and always give me a dollar or seventy-five cents in quarters to not tell MaMama where we were going.
“Okay, Daddy,” I’d say, excitedly taking the money. I was no more than five or six.
My dad was always very well-dressed, and at various times would have a nice car. The car he had at this time was a convertible. Don’t ask me how he was able to afford the car, but I do think of this time period as the “good years,” financially speaking.
We would get to Patricia’s apartment and she answered the door naked, which absolutely traumatized me. Shut me right down. She in no way attempted to cover up, neither her naked ass nor her ill intentions with my father. Rather, she ran into my father’s arms, kissing him and giggling. “Oh, Dan! Is this your baby?” I wanted to say, Heifer, I’m MaMama’s baby! Not yours! I hated her. My father would just say, “Go downstairs and wait for ya daddy.”
Patricia would then close the door in my face, giggling.
I hated going downstairs. They wanted me to play with this little girl who was my age. She had the best toys, but she never wanted to play with me. She never wanted me to touch her toys, and her mom would come out
and shoo me away. I ended up just sitting there by myself, wanting my mom more than ever.
My father would emerge after a long time and repeat, “Don’t tell ya mama where we been.”
As soon as we got home my mom asked, “Where y’all been?”
“We were at Patricia’s house! Daddy gave me seventy-five cents to not tell,” I blurted.
My daddy would roll his eyes and all hell would break loose.
The affair with Patricia ended when MaMama found out he was at the local bar with her. She told us that she would be right back. She left our apartment and went down to the bar and slapped the piss out of Patricia, who fell right off the barstool. My father was livid and slapped my mom.
Ironically, Patricia wrote my mom a letter explaining what a “no good asshole” my daddy was. She kept the letter under her mattress for a long time and would pull it out to read. It would always make her depressed.
My sisters and I would read it as well. In my fantasy, I always imagined her exploring what the hell to do with this information. I wish that MaMama could have acquired the tools to imagine a life free from that sort of pain. Rejecting everything her family had instilled in her about marriage and never giving up, never leaving your man even if he cheats, putting up with abuse. I imagined that if she had the language and the wherewithal, she would’ve simply said, “Help me.” “Guide me.” But even grown with multiple children, she was still that little fifteen-year-old Black girl from the backwoods of South Carolina who got pregnant and married before she could legally drive.
My older sister Dianne retells a story of my mom and dad having a fight outside. My dad was screaming, “Mae Alice! You want me to stay or leave? Tell me? You want me to stay or go?” My sister was sending telepathic messages in her mind, Please tell him to go! Tell him to go, Mama! But MaMama just screamed, “I want you to stay!” It was a choice that had resounding repercussions. Abuse elicits so many memories of trauma that embed themselves into behavior that is hard to shake. It could be something that happened forty years ago, but it remains alive, present.
Like I said, Mae Alice has a heart that simply is loyal. It attaches and asks for nothing in exchange. She shows her claws only when those she loves need protection or to protect who she feels belongs to her. She never raises her fist for . . . her. There is a very flimsy barrier between the asshole
predators, abusers, and my mom. She is a “self-sacrificer” at the expense of her own joy.
My dad came home from the bar one night and collapsed inside our doorway. My mom screamed, “Y’all go to bed!!”
She helped him to their bed. He had been stabbed in the back. His lower back on the left-hand side. I got up to peek. My mom took his shirt off and used a rag and peroxide to wipe the blood. It was deep and tissue was hanging out. He kept moaning and saying, “Mae Alice, don’t call the ambulance. Don’t, Mae Alice.”
My mom finally just stood over the bed and cried. I remember coming and standing next to her. She put her arms around me and said, “I can’t do nothin’. I can’t do nothin’!” We just stood there and I remember waiting for him to die. I imagined what our lives would be like without him. I imagined a life with no more drunken rages and the constant abuse of my mom. I secretly felt how much better our lives would be. The next day, he was better. Death wouldn’t come until 2006, and man, my prayers at that time were different. Every last breath he took, I took with him.
Coming from St. Matthews, South Carolina, an area influenced by the Gullah culture of the Sea Islands, my father, as well as my mother, grew up believing in “haints,” evil spirits or ghosts.
My father made haints present in our lives. We could not sweep over by his feet or he’d become livid, saying it meant he’d go to jail. He said he had already gone to jail for stabbing a guy who pulled his shirt over his head. We couldn’t pass by a gravestone without crossing ourselves—performing the “Catholic” sign of the cross—or else the deceased person would not rest in peace. We’d have to spit on our finger, dig it in the dirt, and pass the grave again. We couldn’t stare at ourselves in the mirror for very long in the dark, without turning on the light, or we would turn into a monster. If we woke up in the morning drowsy, not yet moving or speaking, my father would run into our room, and ask, “What’s wrong? What’s wrong?” Before we could answer, he’d say, “The witch is ridin’ the broom. It’s the haints. I, I, I got it.”
He’d get paper or cloth, sprinkle on salt and pepper, and wave it over us to get the witch to ride off. Of course, as we fully woke and started to slowly move around, that was proof to Daddy that he had warded off the haints. Victoriously, he would delve deeper: “What happened? Did ya have a bad thought about a old person who passed by ya?” Deloris or I would
mention the hairy, old man down the street whom we thought looked like a monster. Mr. Miacca to be exact.
Mr. Miacca was a fictitious character in a Joseph Jacobs folktale (collected in his English Fairy Tales) who ate little boys for supper. Every time this man passed by us, we would whisper to our baby sister, Danielle, “Danielle!! Here he comes. Mister Miacca!” It would send chills up her spine and whatever bad thing she was doing she would stop immediately.
“That’s it. That’s it!” Daddy would say, again waving the salt-and- peppered paper over us. “Stop fuckin’ wit’ that man! You understand me? Stop even thinking bad thoughts about him!!”
Because of Daddy, the myth of haints was part of our lives. Haints, which are also mentioned in To Kill a Mockingbird, were my parallel growing up to the Furies I later learned about in Greek theater. The Furies are goddesses in Greek tragedies who come from the Underworld to exact vengeance on a person who has done wrong. The purpose of Furies was to make the person accountable for their wrongdoing, even their part in generational curses. Daddy’s haint rituals reminded us to hold ourselves accountable. They bridged spaces that helped us learn to navigate life. They were interesting guideposts, of which I was never skeptical, until I was a teen. I bought into haints 100 percent until it didn’t make sense to me anymore. As I grew away from my parents, I tried to be my own person, dispelling what I’d been taught.
I had two parents who were running away from bad memories. Both had undiscovered dreams and hopes. Neither had tools to approach the world to find peace or joy. MaMama worked sporadically in factories and was a gambler.
My father was an alcoholic and would disappear for months at a time when we were really young. He always came back, but by the time I was five I never remember him leaving for any long periods of time. Only later did I realize he was numbing, which is absolutely without question an understandable solution to dealing with a fucked-up world. Then, he would come back, from who knows where, and beat MaMama. Lashing out instead of lashing in.
He was inaccessible to us for most of my childhood. I did not know how to reach him. He was the first man who loved me. Picked me up from school during lunch breaks before we had lunch in school. He would take me to a great mom-and-pop restaurant for wieners, hot dogs with ground
meat, onions, and celery salt on top. He would put a quarter in the mechanical horsey machines and let me ride and smile from ear to ear and then drive me back to school. He loved me. That I know. But his love and his demons were fighting for space within, and sometimes the demons won. One of the many defining memories of my dad is when I was fourteen.
We were living at 4 Park Street, a two-story, two-family house. The upper floor had no electricity or heat, but at least it was two stories and we had the whole house. My baby sister, Danielle, was about one and a half years old. I would die for her. She was the most precious gift to all of us.
Well, my mom and dad were fighting. I never knew about what. Most of the time the fights just started because my dad wanted to vent. They were facing each other screaming and my dad picked up a glass. I grabbed my sister Danielle with one arm and put my other arm between my parents willing them to stop. None of my other sisters were home. My older sister Dianne left me a stern warning, “If they start fighting this time try to stop them.” Up until this time, we had never tried to stop them for fear it would get worse, because it would. With my arm between them I was gently saying, “Please, Daddy, stop.”
It didn’t work. “Tell me I won’t bust yo’ head open, Mae Alice? Tell me I won’t?”
Then he just swung his hand and smashed the glass on the side of my mom’s head and I saw the glass slice the upper side of her face near her eye and blood just squirted out. A lot of blood. I couldn’t anymore. I just couldn’t passively stand by as he lifted his hand to swing again. I yelled, “Stop! You just stop right now, Daddy! Give me the glass! Give it to me!” I saw my hand shaking uncontrollably. My heart was in my throat. I was immersed in fear.
He stood staring at my mom, wanting to swing again. My dad never looked at me. He kept his hand gripped on the glass, staring at my mom. His eyes bloodshot wanting so bad to hit her again. I screamed, “Give it to me!” Screaming as if the louder I became the more my fear would be released. And he gave me the glass and walked away. I took the glass and hid it, and my body felt like I had just been beaten up or ran thirty miles.
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. Frightening? Without knowing, I had already been imprinted, stamped by
their behavior and all that they were. As much as I wanted my life to be better, the only tools I had to navigate the world were given to me by them. How they talked. How they fought. How my mom made concessions. How they loved and who they loved shaped me. If I didn’t bust out of all that, would this exhaustion and depletion be what I would feel after every fight in my life, even the small ones?
That fight marked the beginning of my shift. Looking back on that night when I stood up to my dad and wiped up my mom’s blood, I knew my life would be a fight. And I realized this: I had it in me.
