by Kitty Kelley
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 hap
pened. “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.
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.”
Three
SPRINTING 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 w
as 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.