Oprah (5 page)

“Oprah makes her first six years sound like the worst thing that ever befell a child born to folks just trying to survive. I was there for most of that time, and I can tell you she was spoiled and petted and indulged better than any little girl in these parts….Every parent knows that a child’s first six years lays the foundation for life, and those first six years down here with Hattie Mae gave Oprah the foundation for her self-confidence, her speaking ability, and her desire to succeed. What happened later in her adolescence—well, that was a different matter.”

Mrs. Esters will not accept Oprah’s colorful stories as merely fanciful. “She makes up stories to make more of herself, and that’s not right….She’s not straight with the truth. Never has been. She claims that she didn’t have as a little girl, but she did. You should’ve seen the clothes and dolls and toys and little books that Aunt Hat brought home for her. Hattie Mae was working for the Leonards then—they were the richest white people in Kosciusko—and they made sure that Oprah had everything their own little girls had. Now, it’s true that the ribbons and ruffled pinafores and so forth were not brand-new; they were hand-me-downs from the Leonards, but they were still mighty fine. The
Leonards owned the big department store in town, and their things were the best. Hattie Mae dressed Oprah like a little doll every Sunday and took her to the Buffalo Baptist Church, where she began saying her little pieces.”

Aunt Katharine remembered Oprah as a precocious child, who walked and talked early. “She was always the center of attention because she was the only baby in the household. And she always wanted to have the spotlight. If adults were talking and she couldn’t get their attention, she’d walk over and hit them to make them pay attention to her.”

Vernita confirmed that her daughter was indulged by everyone, including her grandmother. “She [Hattie Mae] was strict, but Oprah got away with a lot of stuff that I never could, because she was the first grandchild. She was a sweet little girl but very bossy. She always wanted to be boss.”

By the time she was three years old, Oprah was mesmerizing her grandmother’s country congregation by reciting the story of Daniel in the lion’s den. “I would just get up in front of her friends and start doing pieces I had memorized,” Oprah once said. “Everywhere I went, I’d say, ‘Do you want to hear me do something?’ ”

Oprah’s grandmother Hattie Mae Presley was the granddaughter of slaves. She raised six children while working as a cook for the sheriff of Kosciusko and keeping house for the Leonards, whom she called “good white folks.” She was educated only as far as the third grade, and her husband, Earlist Lee (called Earless by the family), could not read or write his name. “But Aunt Hat certainly knew her Bible, and she taught those stories to Oprah. She also taught her the shape of letters, and then my father taught Oprah how to read, so by the time she was six years old she had learned enough to skip kindergarten and go right into the first grade,” said Katharine Esters, the first person in her family to earn a college degree. “It took me twelve years of night school to get that diploma, but I finally did it….I bought a thesaurus and read it like a novel.”

Katharine’s mother, Ida Presley Carr, named Vernita Lee’s baby Orpah after the sister-in-law of Ruth in the Old Testament, but en route to the county courthouse to file the birth certificate, the
midwife, Rebecca Presley, misspelled the biblical name, and Orpah became Oprah, never to be called anything else.

The birth certificate for Oprah Gail Lee contained another error, naming Vernon Winfrey as her father. “We found out years later that couldn’t possibly have been true, but at the time, Bunny—that’s what the family calls Vernita—named Vernon as the father because he was the last of the three men she said she had laid down with. And he accepted the responsibility….He didn’t realize the truth until years later, when he checked his service records and saw for sure he couldn’t have given life to a baby born in January 1954. But by the time he found out the truth, Oprah had already called him Daddy.”

Although Oprah came to appreciate her grandmother’s work ethic, she recalled her years with Hattie Mae, whom she called “Mama,” as miserable and unhappy. Still, before she died in 2007, Oprah’s maternal aunt Susie Mae Peeler, who described Oprah as a sweet, smart youngster, said, “We all just adored her. We just worshipped her and everything. My mother, Hattie, gave Oprah everything she wanted her to have and everything Oprah wanted. And so we were poor people. But we got it for her. We dressed her real nice and everything. She went on and made something out of herself, too.

“Oprah claims she never had a store-bought dress, but she had more store-bought dresses than I had! She claimed she had no dolls, but she had lots of dolls—all kinds of dolls.”

The closest Oprah came to revising her “no dolls” story was during her 2009 interview with Barbra Streisand, who said she had grown up so poor that she transformed a hot water bottle into her one and only doll. “Wow,” said Oprah. “You were poorer than I was.”

The black community began leaving Kosciusko in the 1950s when the town’s biggest employer, the Apponaug Cotton Mill, closed. “Jobs became scarce and so a lot of us headed north to find work,” said Mrs. Esters, describing what became the largest population shift in American history, known as the Great Migration. “During those years there wasn’t an empty car to be seen leaving town. We’d pack them full and drive to Chicago and Detroit and Milwaukee in hopes of finding manufacturing jobs with better pay. All over the South, black grandmothers were raising their grandchildren because mothers and fathers left for
the North to get jobs and make money. There was nothing to be had staying in the South. Cotton was not being picked and folks wanted more than to be servants in the houses where their kin had worked. Oprah’s mother, who never finished high school, worked as a domestic here, but she wanted something better for herself and her child, so I drove her to Milwaukee [1958], where she lived with me until she got on her feet….She’s lived there ever since, but I returned to Kosciusko in 1972.”

Oprah’s grandfather Earlist Lee died in 1959, when Oprah was five years old. She recalls him only as a dark presence in her life. “I feared him….I remember him always throwing things at me or trying to shoo me away with his cane.” Hattie Mae, then sixty and in ill health, could no longer care for her, so Oprah was sent to live with her twenty-five-year-old mother, who by then had given birth to another daughter, named Patricia Lee, born June 3, 1959. Patricia’s father was listed years later on her death certificate as Frank Stricklen, although he and Vernita never married. Vernita and her baby were living in a rooming house run by the baby’s godmother when Oprah arrived.

“Mrs. Miller [the landlady] didn’t like me because of the color of my skin,” Oprah recalled. “Mrs. Miller was a light-skinned black woman who did not like darker-skinned black people. And my half sister [was] light-skinned, and she was adored. It was not something that was ever said to me, but [it was] absolutely understood that she is adored because she is light-skinned and I am not.”

Later, when she moved to Chicago, she expanded her views on skin color, talking about Harold Washington, the city’s first African American mayor. “We’re fudgies,” she said, categorizing her race by color, and revealing a leitmotiv that influenced her selection of male and female friends over the years. “There are fudgies, gingerbreads and vanilla creams. Gingerbreads are the ones who, even though you know they’re black, have all the features of whites….Vanilla creams are those who could pass if they wanted to, and then there’s folks like me and the Mayor. No mistakin’ us for anything but fudgies.”

Oprah maintained that because of her dark skin she had to sleep on the porch in the back of the rooming house, while her light-skinned sister slept with her mother in Vernita’s bedroom. She said that
discrimination made her feel ugly. “White people never made me feel less,” she said years later. “Black people made me feel less. I felt less in that house with Mrs. Miller. I felt less because I was too dark and my hair was too kinky….I felt like an outcast.”

Katharine Esters responded sternly to Oprah’s poignant memory. “This bothers me more than her corncob doll lies and her cockroach lies, because it plays into the damaging discrimination practiced by our own people,” she said. “I’m a dark-skinned woman, Oprah’s grandfather Earless was black enough to be painted by a brush, and Oprah is as dark as a preacher’s prayer book, but when she says things like that she reminds me of my cousin Frank, who did not wish to be what he was and discriminated among his kin, preferring the lighter-skinned to the darker-skinned folks.

“Oprah slept on the porch in the back of the rooming house only because Vernita had to take care of her baby and there was just one bedroom. That’s it. Period. If Oprah was discriminated against because of her skin color, I’d tell you,” said Mrs. Esters, a civil rights activist who worked for the Urban League in Milwaukee. “I believe in telling the truth—spiders, snakes, and all—because I believe some good can come from opening up dark secrets to the light….Oprah puts too much stock on color….I suppose that her wanting to be white makes her see things the way she does, but sleeping on the porch had nothing to do with her dark skin. The fact of the matter is that Oprah was no longer an only child when she came to Milwaukee. She was not the princess anymore or the center of everyone’s attention. Her mother and the landlady fussed over the babies, not Oprah, and that was very hard for her.”

Over the years Oprah’s memories of growing up have become rife with disregard and discrimination. “The only photo I have of my grandmother she’s holding a white child,” she said at the age of fifty-one. Yet a published picture of Oprah’s desk shows a photo of her grandmother with her arm draped lovingly around Oprah as a little girl, with no white child in sight. Yet Oprah recalled: “Every time she would ever talk about those white children there would be this sort of glow inside her….No one ever glowed when they saw me.”

Less than a year after Oprah moved to Milwaukee to be with her
mother, Vernita had a third child, Jeffrey Lee, on December 14, 1960. His father was listed years later on his death certificate as Willie Wright, the man Vernita eventually hoped to marry but never did. After Jeffrey’s birth she moved into the small apartment of her cousin Alice Cooper, and lived for a while on welfare. Taking care of three children became so difficult that Vernita sent Oprah to live with Vernon Winfrey in Nashville. “Vernita’s lifestyle was not ideal at that time,” said Katharine Esters, who claimed Vernita spent her welfare money on clothes and cosmetics, “so sending Oprah away was a blessing for her.”

“That was the beginning of shuttling her back and forth between my house in Nashville and her mother’s house in Milwaukee,” said Vernon Winfrey many years later. “It was a mistake. King Solomon taught long ago that you can’t divide a child.”

Vernon, who married Zelma Myers in 1958, lived in a little brick house on Owens Street in East Nashville and worked for Vanderbilt University as a janitor. At that time, he still believed he was Oprah’s father.

“So we welcomed Oprah and gave her a proper home with structure—schooling, regular visits to the library, a little bit of television, playtime, and church every single Sunday. I’d drive us to the Baptist church in my old 1950 Mercury and cover the seats to keep the lint off our clothes.”

At church Oprah grabbed center stage. “She’s never been a backseat person,” Vernon said. “She always loved the limelight. One time she was a little louder than I wanted, and I told her, ‘Honey, people see you when you’re quiet, and they see you when you’re loud. Nine times out of ten, you’re better thought of when you’re quiet.’ I toned her down a little.”

During the spring of 2008, Vernon Winfrey, then seventy-five and still working in the Nashville barbershop he’d opened in 1964, reflected wistfully on his daughter when she was seven and played in the backyard of his house. “I’d watch from the window as she and her little friends Lilly and Betty Jean played imaginary games. Those three would amuse themselves for hours, sitting in child-size chairs, which I placed in the speckled shade of our maple tree….I still have those chairs, by the way….From what I observed then, Lilly and Betty Jean
didn’t enjoy playing school as much as Oprah did. I think that’s because she was always the teacher, always scolding her little playmates as she scrawled invisible lessons on a make-believe blackboard. Lilly and Betty Jean would sit attentively at imaginary desks, hoping against hope that Oprah didn’t call their names during spelling bees. Can’t say I much blamed them, because if they misspelled a word, there was trouble. Oprah would get her little switch, which was not at all imaginary, and spank the palms of their hands.”

Oprah had learned from her grandmother how to punish.

“One day I confronted her,” said Vernon. “ ‘Why don’t you let your friends play the teacher sometimes?’

“She looked at me with the sweetest expression, all cute, and bewildered about how I could ask such a silly thing. ‘Why, Daddy,’ she informed me, ‘Lilly and Betty Jean can’t teach till they learn how to read.’ ”

Vernon related this incident almost exactly as it appeared in the 2007 book proposal he submitted to publishers. Working with the writer Craig Marberry, he had produced several sample chapters of an autobiography that he titled
Things Unspoken.

“I wanted to write a book about my life—my mother and my father and their nine children and how we all came up in the South.” As a black man born in Mississippi in 1933, Vernon faced challenges that he said his daughter would never know. “Oprah talks about Martin Luther King, and she can recite all his speeches, but she doesn’t know anything about the struggle. I lived it. Oprah just got in on the fly up….She reaped the harvest Dr. King sowed….I can go back seventy years in that struggle, and I want to write about it….I know that Oprah’s a part of my life, of course, and I did right by her, but Oprah is not all of my life, and I don’t have to tell her everything I do. I’m not her boy. I’m a grown man and I can do what I want as long as I stay at the side of the Lord. So, no, I didn’t tell Oprah about my book beforehand.”