Oprah (7 page)

Oprah has admitted to promiscuity during her adolescent years, saying she ran the streets and had sex with any man who would have her
because she wanted attention. She also said that she was continually molested by the men in her mother’s house. “I was 36-23-36 at age thirteen, which created a few problems. I was not allowed to talk to boys and they were everywhere….This happens in a lot of families where there’s a single parent and the mother runs the family: there are boyfriends going in and out of the house and daughters particularly see this. Mothers say, ‘Don’t let some man do this. You keep your dress down! You do what I say!’ When what the child sees is entirely different from what the mother is saying. I had that when I was a kid. ‘Do as I say, not what I do.’ But that doesn’t work. Doesn’t work.”

Her family saw only a promiscuous teenager who threw herself at men, which is why they did not believe her when she finally told them about being sexually molested. They could not see her as a victim.

“I don’t believe a bit of it,” said her “aunt” Katharine many years later. “Oprah was a wild child running the streets of Milwaukee in those days, and not accepting discipline from her mother. She shames herself and her family to now suggest otherwise.” Mrs. Esters pointed to the timing of Oprah’s revelation of sexual abuse and suggested that she simply wanted publicity when she was taking her show national. “That story helped launch Oprah and make her what she is today,” she said. “I don’t hold with telling lies, but in this case I forgive Oprah because she has done so much for other people. Maybe this was the only way for a poor child to succeed and become rich. Now she does her good works to make her amends….No one in the family believes her stories [of sexual abuse] but now that she’s so rich and powerful everyone is afraid to contradict her. I’m not afraid because I’m not financially dependent on Oprah….Her audiences may believe her stories. Her family does not….Let’s leave it at that.”

For Oprah, like other victims of sexual abuse, the burden of not being believed weighs as heavily as the shame of being molested. Most families cannot or will not face the defilement caused by a loved one or by their own complicity—intentional or unintentional—in the violation of a child they did not protect. Sadly, like her relatives, Oprah blamed herself, even as she was counseling others not to accept condemnation. “All the years that I convinced myself I was healed, I wasn’t. I still carried the shame and I unconsciously blamed myself for those men’s acts. Something deep within me felt I must have been a bad little girl for those men to have abused me.”

When school let out in the summer of 1968, Oprah went to Nashville to visit Vernon and Zelma, and was driven there by her favorite uncle, Trenton Winfrey, her father’s closest brother. During the drive Trenton asked her if she had been dating boys.

“I said, ‘Yeah, but it’s really hard because all the boys want to do is French kiss.’ And immediately after the conversation about French kissing, he asked me to pull over to the side and take off my panties….All those years I thought that if I hadn’t brought up the subject of French kissing, he wouldn’t have done that, because he was my favorite uncle.”

Oprah complained to her father and stepmother about her uncle, but they did not believe her then, and Trenton denied her story. Years later Vernon still seemed conflicted. “I know she feels that I didn’t handle it well,” he said, “[but] Trent was my closest brother. We were torn.”

When Oprah returned to Milwaukee, she ran away from home and stayed on the streets for a week. “Mom was frantic and called all her friends looking for her,” said her sister. “Mom didn’t know if she was dead or alive.”

Oprah joked about the incident years later as she recalled hustling
Aretha Franklin, who was appearing in Milwaukee. When she saw the singer sitting in a limousine, Oprah threw herself into another drama. “I rushed up to her, started crying, said I was an abandoned child and needed money to return to Ohio. I liked the sound of Ohio. She gave me $100.” Oprah, then fourteen years old, claims she went to a nearby hotel, took a room by herself, and spent the money drinking wine and ordering room service. Then she called the pastor of her mother’s church and begged him to help her get back home.

“After I ran out of money I told the late Reverend Tully everything that was going on in my house and how bad I felt. So he took me back to my house and gave my mother a lecture, which really pleased me.”

Her sister was ecstatic to see her, but Vernita was furious. After the pastor left, she picked up a small chair to beat Oprah, who, according to Patricia, “was crying and cowering. I was screaming and begging Mom, ‘Please don’t kill Oprah!’ ” Vernita finally put the chair down, but she insisted Oprah accompany her to the juvenile detention center.

“I remember going to the interview process where they treat you like you’re already a known convict and thinking to myself, ‘How in the world is this happening to me?’ I was fourteen and I knew that I was a smart person; I knew I wasn’t a bad person, and I remember thinking, ‘How did this happen? How did I get here?’ ”

Vernita was told she would have to wait two weeks before Oprah could be processed. “I can’t wait two weeks,” said her mother.

“She wanted me out of the house that minute,” said Oprah.

Back in the apartment, Vernita called Vernon in Nashville and told him he had to take over, but by then Vernon had realized he was not Oprah’s birth father. Nine months before Oprah’s birth in January 1954 he was in the service.

Knowing that Vernon and Zelma were unable to have children, Katharine Carr Esters called and urged Vernon to take Oprah. “I knew he wasn’t her father but I told him, ‘Claim her as your own. You and Zelma want a child, and Oprah needs help. Her mother can’t handle her.’…I told him everything that Oprah had done, and he finally agreed to take her, but under strict conditions of discipline that she no longer go back and forth to Vernita and that he would be in charge.
Vernita agreed….We were all there when Oprah left—her mother, her sister and brother and all of her cousins.”

Patricia recalled her sister in tears at having to leave Milwaukee. “Oprah didn’t want to go. She was crying and hugged me before she got into Vernon’s car.”

Reserved by temperament, Vernon had been shocked by the stories of Oprah’s behavior, which he later described as “Oprah making herself available to men.” Once inside his house on Arrington Street he sat her down at the kitchen table and laid down the law. He told her that he would rather see her dead and floating faceup in the Cumberland River than have her bring disgrace and shame on his family.

“No more halter tops, no more short shorts, and no more heavy eye makeup…You’ll start dressing like a proper young lady.”

“Okay, Pops,” said Oprah, who now referred to Mama Zelma as “Peach.”

Vernon nearly erupted. He wrote in his book proposal that Oprah’s response smacked of disrespect. “I felt like my daughter dusted her shoes with my white hankie and stuffed it back in my pocket. There was something snide behind the new names…something ill-mannered.”

He laid down more rules that Oprah was to follow: curfews, chores, homework. “She didn’t have to like them; she just had to obey them. ‘If you run away, stay away.’ That’s what I told her. You have to behave, behave as if you want to make something of yourself….That means no association with boys….And,” he added, “I’m still Daddy. I’ll always be Daddy. My wife says you can call her Peach. That’s her business. But don’t call me Pops!”

“Okay, Daddy,” said Oprah, who came to see her ramrod father as an unbending martinet. “He used to tell me, ‘Listen, girl, if I say a mosquito can pull a wagon, don’t ask me no questions. Just hitch him up.’ ” Recalling her father for Toronto’s
Starweek,
she said, “I hated him and my stepmother, Zelma, as I was growing up.”

Vernon and Zelma started to transform Oprah into a “proper young lady,” and she hated that, too. “Every morning of my life my step-mother would check me out to make sure I’d picked out the right socks, that everything matched,” she told
TV Guide.
“When I weighed 70 pounds I had to wear a girdle and a slip every day. God forbid
somebody should see through your skirt! What are they going to see? The outline of your leg, that’s all!”

Vernon saw his daughter as a wild runaway horse that had been let loose for five years. “When it came to discipline, hard was the only way I knew,” he said. Years later he wished he had parented with a little patience and more humor. “My own daddy could wring a hoot from the mourners’ bench,” Vernon said, “[but] Oprah had a way of keeping my blood up. If I pulled east, she’d tug west. If I pointed north, she was hell-bent on south. She wasn’t an unpleasant child. In fact, her company was a great joy to me. But she did have a problem with directions.”

In addition to doing household chores, Oprah was put to work in the small grocery store that Vernon operated next to his barbershop, where he posted a sign: “Attention Teenagers: If You Are Tired of Being Hassled by Unreasonable Parents, Now Is the Time for Action. Leave Home and Pay Your Own Way While You Still Know Everything.” Selling penny candy after school to poor neighborhood kids was a far cry from having milk and cookies served on silver trays by black maids in the homes of Nicolet students. “I hated working in that store,” Oprah said, “hated every minute of it.”

In the fall of 1968 she started school as a sophomore at East Nashville High, in the first class to officially integrate the school. “We were lily-white up to that point,” said Larry Carpenter, class of 1971, “but we were under court order that year to admit black students, and it was the best thing that ever happened to the school, and to the country, for that matter.”

As part of the seventy–thirty black minority, Oprah went unnoticed for most of her first year at East, unlike her arrival at Nicolet. She attended class every day but sat quietly in the back, a peculiar departure for someone who always sat up front and antagonized other students by knowing every answer and constantly waving her hand to ingratiate herself with the teachers.

“I could walk into any classroom and I was always the smartest kid in the class….I was raised to believe that the lighter your skin, the better you were. I wasn’t light-skinned, so I decided to be the best and the smartest.”

When she brought home her first report card from East, Vernon
was irate. “Troubled teen or not, I wasn’t having any of that. My expectations of her were a mountain most high. I told her, ‘If you were a C student, you could bring me C’s. You are not a C student! Hear me?’

“ ‘Yes, Daddy.’

“ ‘If you bring me any more C’s, I’m going to place heavy burdens on you….Heavy burdens.’ ”

He explained that “heavy burdens” were biblical weights for a daughter he saw drifting aimlessly in 1968, who had announced that she wanted to be a hippie.

“She was only fourteen, but I didn’t care if she were forty. No child of mine was going to stick wildflowers in her hair and light that Hindu incense—or light any other nonsense. Oh, no. Not in my house! Maybe it was a costume thing. Maybe the tie-dyed dashikis and bell-bottom pants enchanted her, the sandals and beaded necklaces. Maybe the hippie life looked fun, fashionable. But I knew better. A life of drugs and sexual freedom would bring all her promise to ruin.”

The hippie phase passed, but Oprah continued to drift. “I talked to her about her studies,” said Vernon. “ ‘What happened to you, Oprah? You used to love school. You used to love to lead the class.’ ”

He recalled her sad response: “School was fun when I was little. Things are different now.”

That year, during the winter, Oprah began wearing her heavy coat in the house and complaining of being cold. When her legs and ankles swelled over her shoes and her belly looked distended, her stepmother took her to a doctor, who told Oprah what she already knew. She was pregnant.

“Having to go home and tell my father was the hardest thing I ever did,” Oprah said later. “I wanted to kill myself.” She admitted she had spent half her time in denial and the other half trying to hurt herself to lose the baby. After her pregnancy she told her father what his brother Trent had done to her, and that he could be the baby’s father. “Everybody in the family sort of shoved it under a rock,” Oprah told
Ebony
’s Laura Randolph. “Because I had already been involved in sexual promiscuity they thought if anything happened, it had to be my fault and because I couldn’t definitely say that he was the father of the child, the issue became ‘Is he the father?’ not the abuse….I wasn’t the
kind of kid who would persist in telling until someone believes you. I didn’t think enough of myself to keep telling.”

For Vernon, having a daughter with a child out of wedlock was considered so shameful that he and his wife considered getting Oprah an abortion or sending her away to have the baby and then putting it up for adoption. “We thought about it all and then I just decided whenever it comes I’ll just have me a grandson or granddaughter.”

The stress of having to tell her father and stepmother that she was pregnant sent Oprah into labor in her seventh month. On the evening of February 8, 1969, a few days after her fifteenth birthday, she gave birth to a baby boy in Hubbard Hospital at the all-black Meharry Medical College. Her name appears on the birth certificate as Orpah Gail Lee, not Oprah Winfrey. She named her little boy Vincent Miquelle Lee.

“He was premature and born very ill,” recalled Vernon. “They kept him in an incubator because he was having such a tough time.” Oprah, who stayed in the hospital only two days, said she was psychologically disconnected from herself and never saw her child. The baby died one month and eight days after he was born, and his body was given to Meharry Medical College.

“I don’t know what happened after the baby died,” said Vernon. “I don’t know what they did with the body—whether they used it in experiments or what. We tried to keep the fact of the baby quiet, even within the family. There was no funeral, no death notice.”

Vernon did call Vernita, who came to Nashville to be with Oprah for a week, but few others knew what had happened. “Oprah never talked about her lost baby,” said her sister, Patricia. “It was a deep family secret that was almost never discussed within the family.” In 1990, Patricia, in desperate need of drug money, sold the secret to the tabloids for $19,000.