*In a new interview to promote her latest film “Suicide quad,” Viola Davis recalled what life was like growing up on her grandmother’s home on a southern farm. The “How to Get Away With Murder” actress later learned that the one-room house was on an old plantation that had a horrific history.
“I wasn’t on it long, because I was the fifth child, and so we moved soon after I was born,” she told PEOPLE and Entertainment Weekly editorial director Jess Cagle. “I mean, I went back to visit briefly but still not aware of the history. I think I read one slave narrative of someone who was on that plantation, which was horrific. One-hundred-sixty acres of land and my grandfather was a sharecropper. Most of my uncles and cousins, they’re farmers. That’s the choice that they had.”
Located in St. Matthews, South Carolina, the history of Singleton Plantation was not known to Davis until she read the account of an enslaved African who was there. In a 2008 interview with NPR, the actress said she once lived in “abject poverty and dysfunction.”
Davis told Jess Cagle that she keeps a photo of the house – which she described as a “one-room shack” – on her phone, to remind her of her past and where she comes from.
Check out their chat via the clip below.
READ RELATED STORY: Viola Davis Gets Away with Murder in ‘Suicide Squad’ [EUR Exclusive!]
“I think it’s a beautiful picture,” she said of the home that had no running water. An outhouse was used instead.
“My mom says that the day I was born, all of my aunts and uncles were in the house. She said everyone was drinking and laughing, and having fun,” Davis shared. “She said she ate a sardine, mustard, onion, tomato sandwich after I was born.”
“I love that story,” she continued. “It’s a great story to me. It’s a great story of celebration in the midst of what you would feel is a decimated environment, but you could see the joy and the life that can come out of that because it’s not always about things, you know.”
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