Oprah (8 page)

When Vernon told Oprah her baby had died, he said, “This is your second chance. We were prepared, Zelma and I, to take this baby and let you continue your schooling, but God has chosen to take this baby and so I think God is giving you a second chance, and if I were you, I would use it.” They never said another word about the tragedy. “We didn’t talk about it then,” Vernon said in 2008. “We don’t discuss it now.”

S
PRINTING FORWARD
, Oprah blocked out her pregnancy, confident that no one would ever find out. “I went back to school and not a soul knew. Nobody,” she told the historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in 2007. “Otherwise, I would not have had this life that I’ve had.”

Whether or not that belief is correct, Oprah made the clear choice that secrecy was her salvation, and she closed her past even to her closest friends. “I dated Oprah for two and a half years in high school,” said Anthony Otey. “That’s why I [was later] so stunned to learn that the girl I thought I knew so well had actually had a baby before I even met her. How was she able to suppress it?

“We never had sex, not even on prom night. We agreed when we first started dating as fifteen-year-olds in our old neighborhood in Nashville that we would never go all the way. It was a matter of our Christian upbringing and our determination to make something of ourselves as adults.

“In all the time we dated, she never mentioned a single word about any of this to me. She never spoke about her past. Oprah never talked about her mother, and she never told me that she had a brother and a sister.”

Her teachers, too, were dumbfounded. “I taught her every day at
school and traveled with her through the state and around the country to speech tournaments,” said Andrea Haynes, “and I had no idea of her travail. When I heard that she had had a baby I felt very sorry that she had come from such a sad place….I can assure you that Oprah did not emit any symptoms of an emotionally disturbed child when I knew her.”

Luvenia Harrison Butler, her best friend in those days, was not surprised. She recalled Oprah as great fun but very secretive. “She had so many secrets, dark secrets. I didn’t know what they were but [I knew] there were reasons Vernon was so strict, and believe me, he was strict. Even in girl talk Oprah was guarded….I know she seems to be so open with her audiences, but that’s just because she’s a good actress….I’m not saying she needs to tell everybody everything, but she’s the one who says she’s so open and honest and truthful about her life. Fact is, she only shares her personal stuff when forced to….For instance, she admitted her drug use on the air only when someone was set to tell all in an article, and her pregnancy only when her sister outed her.”

Oprah recalled that pregnancy as “the shaming, most embarrassing, horrible thing” of her young life. She illustrated the disgrace with a story about a girl in her senior class who was barred from graduation because she had become pregnant. “[T]here was this big brouhaha whether she would even be allowed to…walk with the rest of the graduating class. And the decision was no, she could not walk with the rest of the class. So my entire life would have been different [if anyone had known I had had a baby]. Entirely different.”

Her classmates do not recall the story that Oprah tells. “I never heard about anyone being pregnant and not allowed to graduate,” said Larry Carpenter, the East alumni representative for the class of 1971. “We were a big class, about three hundred, but that’s something that would’ve been known.”

“Not so,” said Cynthia Connor Shelton. “I was in Oprah’s class at East, and I had a friend who was seven months pregnant our senior year and she graduated with us….Certainly there was a social stigma attached to unwed pregnancy, but not enough to deny a girl graduation.”

Whether or not a pregnant student was barred from walking with the class at East Nashville High, Oprah’s story reflects her own fear
about her situation, which she knew could have drastically altered the life she wanted. So she wrapped herself in secrecy as a protective coating. For a churchgoing child there were Ten Commandments to live by, but no stone tablets about how to bury the past. Whether her pregnancy was the result of sexual molestation or promiscuity, it was something she felt she needed to hide.

The power of her denial through the years became evident when she entered the Miss Black Nashville contest in 1972 and signed an affidavit swearing she had “never conceived a child.” During a 1986
Oprah
show on racism, a white man said to her, “You [black people] took over Chicago….In twenty years, Chicago became eighty percent black…so you have to be breeding.” Oprah said, “I haven’t bred one person.” And in 1994 when she hosted a show titled “Is There Life After High School?” she asked a panel of five former classmates from East to relate the most humiliating moment from their high-school years. Each gave an example of adolescent mortification, which made Oprah laugh. “I did not have any embarrassing moments in high school,” she said. “Nothing humiliating.”

After the pregnancy Vernon had tightened the reins on his “wild runaway horse” and led her back to the stable, where, slightly tamed but still spirited, she started her run for the roses. “I became the high-school state champion in speaking and winning drama contests, trying to prove myself, prove that I was a good girl,” she said.

A week after giving birth, and almost a month before her baby died, Oprah pulled on her knee-highs, ribboned her hair into two ponytails, and returned to East Nashville High, where she began to reinvent herself. Gone was the sullen student with swollen ankles crouched in the back row wearing a baggy sweater. In her place was a bright-eyed, energetic sophomore with relentless confidence who demanded to be recognized beyond the confines of her school and her church.

Andrea Haynes, who taught Oprah speech, drama, and English at East, recalled their meeting in the spring of 1969. “I still remember her bounding into my classroom, saying, ‘Are you Miss Haynes? Well, I’m Oprah Gail Winfrey.’ ” She later announced that she was going to be an actress—“a movie star.” She did not say she
wanted
to be a star; she
declared firmly she was
going
to be a star. “I’ve got to change my name,” she told Ms. Haynes. “Nobody has a name like Oprah. I could go as Gail. I’ve already told my family to call me Gail.”

The teacher immediately saw a student with marquee ambitions. “You stick with Oprah,” she said. “It’s a unique name and you have a unique talent.”

On her own, Oprah started making a name for herself in the black churches around Nashville after Ms. Haynes introduced her to readings from
God’s Trombones: Eight Negro Sermons in Verse,
by James Weldon Johnson. “I used to do them for churches all over the city,” said Oprah. “You sort of get known for that.”

Gary Holt, the former student body president of East, remembered her performing at the Eastland Baptist Church on Gallatin Road. “She did a reading from a Negro spiritual in which she was the Preacher; she delivered a sermon with that great big voice of hers, and she was wonderful.”

Those performances earned Oprah a trip to Los Angeles to speak to other church groups. During that time, she toured Hollywood’s Walk of Fame in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, which further fired her fantasies. “When she came back, she said, ‘Daddy, I got down on my knees there and ran my hand along all those stars on the street and I said to myself,
One day, I’m going to put my own star among these stars,
’ ” said Vernon. “That was the foreshadowing I had that she would one day be famous.”

Oprah did not hide her ambitions. In junior high in Milwaukee, when she filled out one of those “Where Will I Be in Twenty Years?” forms, she checked “Famous.” She said, “I always knew I’d do great things in my life. I just didn’t know what.”

“She knew what she wanted very early in life,” said Anthony Otey. “She said she wanted to be a movie star and she was willing to put aside a lot of things.”

“She was driven, even back then,” said Gary Holt, who considered Oprah, an only child who was always well dressed, to be one of the more privileged in their class. Ironically, at East High she looked like one of the students she used to envy at Nicolet. “You’ve got to understand that East was lower, lower, lower middle class,” he said. “Most of
us—black and white—were poor kids whose parents, if they worked at all, had blue-collar jobs. Vernon Winfrey had his own business—being a barber is a good cash business—and he also owned his own house. So he was definitely middle class to us.”

Having had a lifetime of “bad jobs, low-paying jobs,” Vernon emphasized to Oprah the need for getting an education. “She complained sometimes about other children dressing better than she dressed,” he said. “And I said to her, ‘You get something here’ ”—he tapped his head—“ ‘and you can dress like you want to in days to come.’ ”

At school Oprah joined the National Forensic League and worked closely with Ms. Haynes on dramatic interpretations to prepare for competitions. The goal was to win the Tennessee State Forensic Tournament and qualify for the nationals. By her junior year she was the school’s best entry.

Again enacting the role of the Preacher, who tells the story of the Apocalypse from
God’s Trombones,
she won the first place dramatics trophy on March 21, 1970. “It’s like winning an Academy Award,” she told her school newspaper. “I prayed before I competed and said, ‘Now, God, you just help me tell them about this [The Judgment Day]. They need to know about the Judgment. So help me tell them.” Then, as she had seen Oscar winners do on television, she said, “I want to thank God, Miss Haynes, and Lana [Lott], also Paula Stewart for telling me she wouldn’t speak to me anymore if I didn’t win.” After winning at the state level, Oprah went to the nationals in Overland, Kansas, but she was eliminated before the quarterfinals.

That same year she was one of twelve finalists sponsored by the Black Elks Club of Nashville, a service organization formally known as the Improved Benevolent Protective Order of Elks of the World.

“I can’t remember what I said but my topic [for the two-and-a-half-minute speech] was ‘The Negro, The Constitution, and The United States.’ I delivered it in front of 10,000 people in Philadelphia and I felt really comfortable up there. I had always worried whether my slip was hanging down whenever I got up to speak but in front of 10,000 people you realize nobody can see if it’s hanging down. You can’t get scared when it’s a sea of people everywhere you look.”

Oprah won the competition at the Seventy-first Grand Lodge
Convention, which honored Mayor Charles Evers of Fayette, Mississippi, with its highest award. The mayor was the older brother of Medgar Evers, the civil rights worker murdered in 1963 by a white supremacist.

While the Black Elks were meeting in Philadelphia, the white Elks met in San Francisco and voted to keep their “whites only” membership requirement. They maintained that God did not make a single black man acceptable to their “brotherhood.” At the time, a spokesman for the white Elks said their discussion, barred to the press, had been “amicable” and “in the spirit of brotherly love.”

The next year, Oprah competed in the Tennessee State Forensic Tournament, again won first place, and went to the 1971 nationals at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. “I don’t recall any other black student at the nationals that year,” said Andrea Haynes, “and there certainly weren’t any among the finalists. Oprah was the only one. She performed and won almost every single day of that week, ending up in the top five.”

During a five-hour break between presentations, Oprah went shopping in San Francisco and bought a silk scarf for her teacher, who recalled the incident with delight. “She was so impressed that she had paid fifteen dollars for that scarf, and so impressed that she had bought it at Saks Fifth Avenue.” The scarf was a splurge for a seventeen-year-old girl from Nashville, Tennessee, who, in 1971, spent seventy-two cents for two pieces of Minnie Pearl fried chicken.

Losing the national tournament disappointed Oprah, who had presented a stirring reading from Margaret Walker’s novel,
Jubilee,
the black version of
Gone With the Wind,
in which a female slave named Vyry is doused with urine by the slave master’s wife, who is jealous of her beauty. Vyry is later whipped to a bloody pulp while trying to escape.

“In retrospect, it was a bold selection, putting the slave experience in the faces of whites, but Oprah, who was not an activist in any way, captured the humanity of the character and presented her without anger or bitterness,” said Ms. Haynes.

Dressed in a long cotton skirt and an old shawl, and with a white knit hairnet covering her long black hair, Oprah delivered her oration to her classmates before the state tournament.

“I will never forget the force of energy when she walked to the front of the room, already in character, her eyes sweeping across the room, making eye contact with as many of her fellow students as possible,” recalled classmate Sylvia Watts Blann more than thirty-five years later. “Without much ado, she launched into a powerful performance, relating the first-person story of a female slave as she was examined, [offered but not sold] on the block, eventually tied to a post and whipped for having too much spirit and had salt rubbed into her wounds.

“I wasn’t the only one that morning with tears in my eyes as the class was transported back one hundred and ten years to a horrifying time when white people presumed to own black people in this very nation—in this very state. I have always been struck with the way she, rather than lashing out in personal anger, chose to mirror back to us the legacy of this crime against humanity. Over the years, as Oprah went about building her career in public life, I thought back many times on the heart-wrenching reality conveyed by her performance. We knew she was special even back then.”

While the Civil Rights Act had mandated integration in public schools and public facilities, the social line separating blacks and whites remained firmly in place in Nashville in 1970. “We were all friends during the day, but you didn’t do anything with them [the black kids] after school,” said Larry Carpenter. “Oprah tried to socialize with whites and she was chastised for it. The black kids felt she dealt with the other race too much.”