Viola Davis clarifies message about buying plantation shack in which she was born

Viola Davis has clarified a social-media message suggesting that as a birthday gift to herself, she had purchased the former Southern plantation shack in which she was born.

"The above is the house where I was born August 11, 1965," the Oscar-, Tony- and Emmy Award-winning star of ABC's "How To Get Away With Murder" initially wrote on Tuesday, posting a photo of a ramshackle, dilapidated building. "It is the birthplace of my story. Today on my 55th year of life....I own it....all of it." She followed this with what she said was a birth blessing of the Cherokee people: "May you live long enough to know why you were born."

Following congratulatory Instagram comments from fellow Oscar winners Halle Berry and Octavia Spencer and others, including Uzo Aduba, Courteney Cox, Bryce Dallas Howard, Michelle Pfeiffer, Sherrie Shepherd, Gabrielle Union, Lynn Whitfield and her series' creator, Shonda Rhimes, Davis said in a comment: "Uhh....contrary to websites....I do not 'own' above house, I 'own' my STORY!! Too abstract I guess."

While Davis was born in that house on the Singleton Plantation in St. Matthews, South Carolina, where her grandfather was a sharecropper and her father a horse trainer, her family moved with her and her five siblings to Central Falls, Rhode Island, when she was an infant. There, she has recounted, she grew up in poverty and, after discovering her love of acting while in high school, went on to Rhode Island College and The Juilliard School of Performing Arts. She won an Emmy for her recently concluded series, an Academy Award for “Fences" (2016) and two Tony Awards.

Founded by the prominent Singleton family — Angelica Singleton married President Martin Van Buren's son Abraham and became White House hostess for the widowed chief executive — the plantation was purchased by the Wienges family circa 1880. While its primary crop historically was cotton, it became in modern times home to O.H. Wienges & Son, a leading horse breeder.

The Wienges family continues to own the property whose red barn, built in the early 1900s, was used in the 1991 movie "Wild Hearts Can't Be Broken."