Anne Davidson’s powerful and moving memoir Finding Grace - Regaining My Vision and Soul gives a possible answer to the question posed on her memoir’s back cover: What happens to children when they lose their beloved nannies?
With the departure of Grace and Joe, Anne loses the African Americans who have loved and rescued her from her mother’s abuse. At five, she hides her grief in an emotionless personality, but at twenty, psychotherapy brings her back to life. Anne finds the joys of love, dance, children, and international living, until riveting flashbacks, at forty, force her to begin a challenging journey to truth and her Black roots. The memories are overwhelming, and Anne suppresses them. At fifty, she comes back from Europe to the United States where her husband has taken on a new job-coincidentally near her hometown. There, the onslaught of memories that Anne has been able to shake off while teaching dance and raising two children in The Netherlands, reoccur. In dealing with them through therapy, Anne deepens her sense of how important her childhood caregiver, Grace, had been to her, both as a substitute mother and in forming her values. Anne also discovers how much her mother had pressured her to forget Grace in her childhood. Breaking through this remembered pressure, Anne finds Grace and connects with her, taking on some of the care for her brown mother in her last years. Anne moves South with her retired husband and begins volunteer work in Royal, the historic and oldest all-black community in Florida, helping others recognize the significance of this historic gem. In working with dance students for the non-profit Young Performing Artists, Inc. in its Royal summer youth program, she realizes that she has come full circle. She is giving back to Grace’s people and loving the experience. Anne realizes that she has felt, unconsciously, as if she were a Black person all her life.
Davidson originally published her memoir Finding Grace in 2014. Having found a form of racism in the South more blatantly cruel than what she has seen in the North, Davidson and other volunteers from the North feel that they have come to the South to change it. However, they are horrified to realize that this overt racism has spread to other parts of the country. Davidson is moved to revise Finding Grace with the purpose of highlighting the truth about racism. She feels called to speak out and show, through her life-story, that White skin does not determine better values or character. All people are capable of showing love and goodness or hate and violence. The two Black women who raised her, Grace and her family’s cook, Jessie, were morally better than the White people-her parents-who employed them. Racial prejudice is based on a myth, ideas as thin as skin tone and used to maintain power and exploitation.
