I almost didn’t read it.
Siafa read Finding Me a year ago, and I remember watching him love it. The way he would talk about Viola Davis…careful, reverent, like someone protecting a flame. But the stories were too raw when they reached me secondhand. They felt like too much, and I turned away.
But the sentences came back, circling like a hymn that won’t leave you alone. A year later, I finally gave in. I opened the book. From the very first line, I felt like I’d been invited into a room I wasn’t supposed to enter: private, holy, dangerous.
It was not just a good read. It was a feeling.
When she wrote of her little sister being hunted, I felt a blanket of fear settle on me…heavy, suffocating. When Julius appeared in her story, I cried. After the ache of her broken relationships, Julius felt like God Himself saying: “I heard every teardrop, Viola. Here is a gift.”
But more than anything, the book left a residue. And not the pretty, floral kind. It was the scent of old urine soaked into a blanket, dried out, and used again. A smell you want to scrub away and can’t. A truth you can’t unknow.
She gave the world her truth, unpolished, unhidden. And I found myself leaning forward, whispering through tears: “Say it, Viola.” Because she was speaking what so many of us carry …the ache that comes with being Black in a country that would rather not name it.
Growing up in a predominantly white place, I felt it in ways that words never caught. Beauty had a standard, and I didn’t fit it. Boys wanted the lighter skin, the “good hair.” Our men, when they made it big, often chose anyone but a Black woman. That’s the kind of wound you carry quietly—the inheritance of “never enough.”
Viola put words to it. And once words exist, silence is no longer possible.
Parts of the book made me deeply uncomfortable. But not because of her. Because of me.
Her story forced me to stop burying things. It asked me to put aside the fresh coat of paint and Febreze I sometimes use to cover my own past and admit what was real. Life can be really bad for some. To deny that is to deny truth.
I ached for her childhood, for the hopelessness of her situation. I wanted to climb inside the page and rescue little Viola. But I couldn’t. And neither could she.
When she prayed—“Lord, if you’re real, take me out” **and then opened her eyes to the same urine, the same mice, the same hunger… I had to swallow hard. Because sometimes God doesn’t take you out. He grows you in it.
But who wants to be grown that way?
Nobody wants to be a lotus. Everybody wants to be a rose.
And yet her story was more than a phoenix rising. It was something holy. Something like redemption. Her suffering pressed her like a rock becoming a diamond. And in her survival, God made her a cornerstone, her very life testifying that He is still in the rescue business, even when His rescue doesn’t look like we expect.
There’s a part of me that wants to go back to pretending I never read it. To shove it under the rug. To spray my life with Febreze and move on.
But I know better.
Her book is a call to honesty. A call to truth. And healing cannot grow in lies.
The good thing is that most of us will never endure what Viola did. The bad thing is that she actually did. And the harder truth is that even if our stories don’t look the same, the wounds we carry can still break us just as deeply.
So the choice is this: Do we wash off the residue of her story, or do we rub it in?
I choose to rub it in.
Because when I rub it in, her courage seeps into me. Her glow, the one born not from comfort, but from pressure; becomes a light I can recognize in other women, other poor, other broken, other hopeless ones. Viola is proof that truth, no matter how raw, can be redeemed.
Her story reminds me that God doesn’t always remove us from the fire. Sometimes He uses the fire to show the world what cannot be consumed.
And that residue…unwanted, unshakable, holy, becomes the mark of survival, the evidence of grace, the witness of a woman who stood in truth and asked us to do the same.
If this post spoke to you…
Share it with someone who might need it, too. Whether it’s a quiet encouragement or a new way of seeing things, these reflections are meant to be passed along.
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Martina Griffin is a Catholic convert, writer, wife, and mother of four. She writes about faith, motherhood, beauty, books, and the quiet ache of transformation. A lover of popcorn, deep questions, and old classics, she shares her heart at Big Bowl of Popcorn—one post at a time. Instagram | Facebook | Email Me |
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