Oprah (4 page)

Years later she created Oprah’s Child Predator Watch List at
www.oprah.com
, to help track down child sex offenders. In December 2005 there were ten men on the list, and fifteen months later five of them had been captured because Oprah had drawn attention to their cases. She offered to give a reward of $100,000 for information leading to the capture of any of the men on the list, and by September 2008 her company announced that nine of the men had been captured. In at least three cases Oprah paid out $100,000 to those who turned the men in.

Throughout the years she continued to do shows on sexual abuse. Some of those shows were gratuitous (“I Want My Abused Kids Back,” “Call Girls and Madams,” “Fathers Dating Their Daughters’ Friends,” “Women Who Turn to Lesbianism”), others were groundbreaking (“Sexual Abuse in Families,” “Rape and Rape Victims,” “How to Protect Yourself from Abduction by a Rapist”), but each show brought her closer to understanding what had happened to her.

Still, it took her a long time to comprehend the real destruction
wreaked by child molestation. She learned that sexual abuse is a crime that continues its damage long after the predator is gone, sometimes leaving its survivors suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder many years later—but she did not think she was one of them. Initially, she asserted that she had sailed through her experience of rape completely unscathed. She was strong, sassy, confident. “It was not a horrible thing in my life,” she said of her years of sexual abuse, adding that she let the fondling continue because she liked the attention. “And I think a lot of the confusion and guilt comes to the child because it does feel good. It really does.”

Always more forthcoming with black publications, she admitted to
Ebony
in 1993, even as she testified before Congress that no child is responsible for being sexually abused, that she still felt in her case she must have done or said something provocative to encourage her molesters. “Only now am I letting go of that shame,” she said.

In the days before she knew better, Oprah dismissed rape as sex, not violence. During her debut week in Chicago, the soap opera star Tony Geary was a guest. A woman in the audience asked about the
General Hospital
story line in which Geary’s character commits rape. Oprah quipped, “Well, if you’re going to get raped, you might as well be raped by Tony Geary.”

It took many more shows for her to see the connection between the crime that had scarred her as a child and the ravages that followed—adolescent promiscuity, an unwanted pregnancy, abysmal relationships with men, gravitation to women, drug abuse, an obsessive need to control, and the compulsive eating that drove her weight up and down the scale for decades.

Rather than seek psychotherapy to deal with her wounds, she sought the salve of public confession on television, thinking that would be the best solution for herself and for others.

“A lot of me talking about myself has been as cathartic for me as it is for the guests on my show. I understand why they let a lot of it out, because once it’s out there it doesn’t hold you anymore. I mean, coming out and saying I was sexually abused did more for me than it did for anybody. I couldn’t have done it any other way and still been me.”

With that particular show she had identified herself as a victim,
which gave her a platform of authority to address the issue, but she refused to be defeated by the abuse. As a result, she was rewarded with huge ratings, national attention, and waves of sympathy that inoculated her against criticism. Once she went public with her private shame, she wore it like a new hat, even adding to her official press biography that she was “a childhood victim of sexual abuse.”

She began accepting invitations to speak at rape centers, address victims of incest, and raise money for children who had been molested. She testified before Congress, and got legislation proposed, passed, and signed into law by the president of the United States. Within a few months she felt safe enough to talk about her own rape in further detail.

“The guy was a cousin by marriage. I was nine and he was nineteen. Nobody else was home at the time. I didn’t know what was happening. I’d never seen a man. I may not have even known that boys were different. I knew, though, that it was a bad thing, because it started with him rubbing me and feeling me. I remember it was painful. Afterwards, he took me to the zoo as payment for not telling anyone. I was still hurting and recall bleeding on the way there. That year I found out where babies came from and I lived in absolute horror that at any moment I was going to have a baby. For the entire fifth grade I got these stomach aches during which I would excuse myself to go to the bathroom so I could have the baby there and not tell anyone.”

Many years later she talked about what had happened in her mother’s house. “[T]he boyfriend of my mother’s cousin…was a constant sexual molester of mine. And I just felt like this is what happens to you. I felt like I was marked, somehow. I thought it was my fault….I thought I was the only person that had ever happened to, and it was very lonely and I knew in my spirit that it would not have been safe for me to tell. I felt instinctively that if I told I would be blamed, you know, because those were the days when people said, ‘Well, you were fast anyway, you know?’ Or else, like Pa says of Celie in Alice Walker’s novel
The Color Purple,
‘She always did lie.’

“My abuser practically told everybody. He’d say, ‘I’m in love with Oprah. I’m gonna marry her, she’s smarter than all of you.’ He would say it and we’d go off to places together. Everybody knew it. And they
just chose to look the other way. They were in denial. And then there was this sick thing going on—my cousin who lived with us was also a battered woman. And I used to bargain with her boyfriend that he could have sex with me if he wouldn’t beat her. I felt protective of her and I’d say, ‘God, okay, I’ll go with you if you promise not to beat Alice. And that’s how it was….It was just an ongoing, continuous thing. So much so that I started to think, you know, ‘This is the way life is.’ ”

Oprah appeared to be so open with revelations about her intimacies on television that no one suspected she might be hiding secrets. Like comedians who cover their darkness with humor, she had learned to joke away her pain, and keep what hurt the most stuffed deep inside. She knew how to give just enough information to be amusing and to deflect further inquiry, which is one reason she insisted on taking control of her own public relations when her show went national. While she looked like she was telling the world everything about herself, she was actually keeping locked within more than she would share on television. She felt she needed to present herself as open, warm, and cozy on the air, and conceal the part of her that was cold, closed, and calculating. She was afraid she wouldn’t be liked if people saw a more complex dimension to the winning persona she chose to present. “Pleasing people is what I do,” she said. “I need to be liked…even by people I dislike.”

Her personal victimization would shadow her shows for the next twenty years, influencing her choice of topics and guests, her book club selections, her charities, and even her relationships. She was forever trying to come to terms with what had happened in her mother’s house. She used her sad childhood to try to help others as she tried to help herself, but without therapy, her struggle was never-ending, showing itself in a constant battle with weight—losing and gaining, bingeing and fasting. Her excessive need for control, plus the immense gratification she derived from being the center of attention, applause, and approval, had its roots in her adolescent sexual abuse. The need to climb out of that sordid hole would drive her toward unparalled success, which brought the rich rewards of an extravagant lifestyle, a healing balm to growing up poor.

T
HE LEGEND
of Oprah Winfrey as a dirt-poor fatherless black child neglected by her teenage mother, who Oprah claimed carried her “in shame,” took hold when Oprah began giving interviews in Chicago. “I never had a store-bought dress,” she told reporters, “or a pair of shoes until I was six years old….The only toy I had was a corn cob doll with toothpicks….” She recalled her early years as lonely, with no one to play with except the pigs that she rode bareback around her grandmother’s yard. “I had only the barnyard animals to talk to….I read them Bible stories.” The years with her welfare mother in Milwaukee were even worse. “We were so poor we couldn’t afford a dog or cat, so I made pets out of two cockroaches….I put them in a jar, and named them Melinda and Sandy.”

She regaled her audiences with stories of having to carry water from the well, milk cows, and empty the slop jar—a childhood of cinders and ashes that was the stuff of fairy tales. Oprah morphed into Oprah-rella as she spun her tales about the switch-wielding grandmother and cane-thumping grandfather who raised her until she was six years old.

“Oh, the whuppins I got,” she said. “The reason I wanted to be white was that I never saw little white kids get whippings,” she told
writer Lyn Tornabene. “I used to get them all the time from my grandmother. It’s just part of Southern tradition—the way old people raised kids. You spill something, you get a whipping; you tell a story, you get a whipping….My grandmother whipped me with switches….She could beat me every day and never get tired.”

Oprah played with race like a kitten batting a ball of yarn. “I was jes’ a po’ little ole’ nappy-headed colored chile,” she said of her birth, on January 29, 1954, in Mississippi, the most racist state in the nation. Rather than deal cards of recrimination, she spread her deck like a swansdown fan, teasing and titillating, as she slipped into dialect to talk about growing up in Kosciusko, Mississippi. “That place is so small you can spit and be out of town before your spit hits the ground,” she said of the small community (population 6,700) where she was born in her grandmother’s wooden shack beyond the county line.

“We were colored folks back then—that was before we all became Negroes—and colored folks lived outside the city limits with no running water. And y’all know what
that
means,” she drawled. “Yes, ma’am,” she said, rolling her big brown eyes. “A two-holer with nothin’ but a Sears and Roebuck catalogue to wipe yo’self clean.” She recalled her grandmother’s outhouse with exaggerated shudders. “Oh, my sweet lord. The smell of that thang….I was always afraid I was going to fall in.”

Oprah said she prayed every night to have ringlet curls like Shirley Temple’s. “I wanted my hair to bounce like hers instead of being oiled and braided into plaits with seventeen barrettes.” She tried to reconfigure her nose, “trying to get it to turn up,” by wearing a clothespin to bed every night. “Yes, I admit it,” she told Barbara Walters. “I wanted to be white. Growing up in Mississippi [I thought that] white kids were loved more. They received more. Their parents were nicer to them. And so I wanted that kind of life.”

Oprah’s sister later dismissed the myth of grinding poverty. “Sure, we weren’t rich,” Patricia Lloyd told a reporter. “But Oprah exaggerated how bad we had it—I guess to get sympathy from her viewers and widen her audience. She never had cockroaches for pets. She always had a dog. She also had a white cat, an eel in an aquarium, and a parakeet called Bo-Peep that she tried to teach to talk.”

Giving an interview to
Life
magazine in 1997, Oprah, then forty-three, broke down and sobbed over her miserable childhood, prompting the reporter to write: “Oprah was the least powerful of girls, born poor and illegitimate in the segregated South on a farm in Kosciusko, Mississippi. She spent her first six years there abandoned to her maternal grandmother.”

Not everyone in her family agreed with the forlorn tone of that assessment. As her mother, Vernita Lee, put it when asked about her daughter’s tendency toward self-dramatization, “Oprah toots it up a little.” The family historian, Katharine Carr Esters, the cousin Oprah calls Aunt Katharine, was not so tolerant.

“All things considered, those six years with Hattie Mae were the best thing that could have happened to a baby girl born to poor kin,” she said. “Oprah grew up as an only child with the full and undivided attention of every one of us—her grandparents, her aunts, uncles, and cousins, as well as her mother, who Oprah never mentions was with her every day for the first four and a half years of Oprah’s life, until she went North to Milwaukee to find a better job….

“Where Oprah got that nonsense about growing up in filth and roaches I have no idea. Aunt Hat kept a spotless house….It was a wooden, six-room house with a large living room that had a fireplace and rocking chairs. There were three big windows with white Priscilla-style lace curtains. The dining room was filled with beautiful Chippendale furniture. And in Aunt Hat’s bedroom she had this beautiful white bedspread across her bed that all the kids knew was off-limits for playing on.”

At the age of seventy-nine, Katharine Carr Esters sat on the “Ladies Porch” of Seasonings Eatery in Kosciusko during the summer of 2007 with her good friend Jewette Battles and shared her recollections of Oprah’s “growing-up years” in Mississippi.

“Now, you have to understand that I love Oprah, and I love all the good work she does for others, but I do not understand the lies that she tells. She’s been doing it for years now,” said Mrs. Esters.

“Well, her stories have a bitty bit of truth in them,” said Mrs. Battles, “but I suppose that Oprah does embroider them beyond all recognition into stories that—”

“They are not stories,” said the no-nonsense Mrs. Esters. “They are lies. Pure and simple. Lies…Oprah tells her viewers all the time that she and Elvis Presley’s little girl, Lisa Marie, are cousins, and oh, Lord, that is a preposterous lie….Yes, we have Presleys in our family, but they are no kin to Elvis, and Oprah knows that, but she likes to make out that she is a distant cousin of Elvis because that makes her more than she is.”

Mrs. Esters is adamant about setting straight the family history. “Oprah wasn’t raised on a pig farm. There was one pig. She didn’t milk cows; there was only one cow….Yes, they were poor—we all were—but Aunt Hat owned her own house, plus two acres of land and a few chickens, which made her better off than most folks in the Buffalo community. Hattie Mae did not beat Oprah every day of her life, and Oprah most certainly did not go without dolls and dresses….Oh, I’ve talked to her about this over the years. I’ve confronted her and asked, ‘Why do you tell such lies?’ Oprah told me, ‘That’s what people want to hear. The truth is boring, Aunt Katharine. People don’t want to be bored. They want stories with drama.’