by Kitty Kelley
The snakebite of the sex scandal marked the end of Oprah’s involvement with TSU and the Vernon Winfrey scholarships. “They tried everything to reconnect, but she would not come back to Nashville,” said Brooks Parker, former aide to Governor Donald K. Sundquist. “I suggested that the city’s mayor and the governor send her an invitation saying they were going to give her a special award voted by the state legislature as the Most Outstanding Tennessean, or something like that….It was planned as a citywide celebration, to take place on the campus of TSU….I asked Chris Clark, her first boss, to write her a letter, which he did, and it was a great letter. Then I wrote to her, saying, ‘The state and city are set to pay dignified homage to you.’ But she never responded.”
After sending his letter, Chris Clark, who knows how to dance both sides of the ballroom, called Oprah’s assistant and told her to tell Oprah to ignore what he had written. “I said I wrote the damn letter because I had to and she shouldn’t pay any attention to it. She didn’t have to come home. No one else was going to get that award. It was just a publicity gimmick to get her to come to Nashville and be associated with TSU.” So Oprah declined the governor’s award.
She rarely returned to the city after that, except on occasion, to visit her father. “When she does come I send my adopted son [Thomas Walker] to pick her up at the airport in his police car,” said Vernon. “He’s with the Davidson County Sheriff’s Office.” Even on those unannounced visits, when they go out to eat catfish, Oprah is pestered for money. “We went to the cafeteria,” said Vernon’s second wife, Barbara, “and some lady slipped her a note asking for fifty thousand dollars.” Oprah ignored most requests from the city’s civic leaders for help on local projects. “No one in Nashville can get through to her,” said Paul Moore of the William Morris Agency. “Not even Tipper Gore.”
At the same time Oprah was funding scholarships at TSU, she became a benefactor of Morehouse College, a private men’s school in Atlanta, Georgia, and the alma mater of Martin Luther King, Jr. “I did that because I care about black men, I really do,” she said. “The last two movies I have been in [The Color Purple and Native Son] have not been great portrayals of black men, but I have great black men in my life, both my father and Stedman.”
After receiving an honorary doctorate from Morehouse in 1988, she established the Oprah Winfrey Endowed Scholarship Fund, to which she donated $7 million. “My dream was—when I first started making money—to pass it on and I wanted to put 100 men through Morehouse,” she said in 2004. “Right now we’re at 250 and I want to make it a thousand.” She felt she reaped far more goodwill from the men of Morehouse than she ever did from TSU.
Over the years, Oprah became a prized commencement speaker at colleges and universities, including Wesleyan, Stanford, Howard, Meharry, Wellesley, and Duke. In each speech, she cited her personal connection to the school through a friend or a relative, and she shared her beliefs about achieving greatness through service. She always invoked the glories of God and the need to give praise. Then, at some point, she frequently descended from the lofty to the low.
When her niece Chrishaunda La’ttice Lee graduated from Wesleyan in 1998, Oprah spent part of her ten-minute speech talking about “peeing.” “All I can remember ten years later is Oprah talking about herself going to the bathroom,” said a member of the class of ’98. “Very uncommencement-like.”
At the Stanford graduation of Gayle King’s daughter, Kirby Bumpus, in 2008, Oprah quoted Martin Luther King, Jr., who said, “Not everyone can be famous.” Then she added, “Everybody today seems to want to be famous. But fame is a trip. People follow you to the bathroom, listen to you pee. It’s just— Try to pee quietly. It doesn’t matter. They come out and say, ‘Ohmigod, it’s you. You peed.’ That’s the fame trip so I don’t know if you want that.”
A country girl with bathroom humor, Oprah liked to shock the prissy by announcing at every turn she had “to pee” or “go wee willie winkle.” Over the years she softened her rough edges and learned company manners. She mastered thank-you note etiquette and the art of the hostess gift, instructing her audiences never to arrive at someone’s home empty-handed. “Bring soaps—really good soaps,” she once advised. She thumped gum chewers and smokers, and always tipped well. She sent lavish bouquets for special occasions and never forgot her friends’ birthdays. She once spent $4 million to rent the yacht Seabourn Pride for a week’s cruise for two hundred guests to celebrate Maya Angelou’s seventieth birthday. But for all her social niceties, Oprah still lapsed into potty talk on occasion, and the occasions were often public ones that were supposed to be uplifting.
Some people found these restroom riffs to be funny and a part of her basic, earthy appeal, perhaps attributable to her outhouse years in Kosciusko and having had to empty the slop jar. Others found her comments coarse, jarring, and inappropriate.
To a paying audience at the Kennedy Center for the Nation’s Capital Distinguished Speakers Series, Oprah shared her moments in a bathroom stall at O’Hare Airport. She gave similar information to six thousand people gathered for the American Women’s Economic Development Corporation in New York City. In between inspiring quotes from Sojourner Truth and Edna St. Vincent Millay, she told the thunderous crowd, “I can’t even pee straight, you see, because everywhere I go, people in the bathroom want me to sign their toilet paper.”
Her compulsion to talk about bodily functions once gave her best friend pause when she heard that Oprah had shared with her national television audience the graphic details of watching Gayle give birth to her second child. “She said I pooped all over the table during the birth,” Gayle recalled during a Q&A session with Oprah. “People literally stopped me on the street after that one.”
“You know in retrospect I might have thought a little more before saying that,” said Oprah. “But I was talking about pregnancy, what actually happens, and that’s one of the things people never tell you. Gayle goes, ‘Well listen…’ ”
“[I told her the] next time you’re talking about shitting on a table, keep my name out of it,” said Gayle. “I was a news anchor [WSBF-TV in Hartford, Connecticut] by then. ‘I’m Gayle King. Eyewitness News.’ And I’d get people saying: ‘Yes, I saw you on the news. I didn’t know you pooped all over.’ ”
During a speech at a fund-raising luncheon for the Holocaust Memorial Museum, Oprah showed a film clip of her visit to Auschwitz (May 24, 2006) with Elie Wiesel. That show had been advertised on a jarring billboard over Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, showing Oprah, with a dazzling smile, next to the words “OPRAH GOES TO AUSCHWITZ. Wednesday 3 P.M.” This drew barbed comments on the Internet:
“This is actually part of a series where Oprah tours historic atrocity sites:
‘Oprah Goes Beach Blanket Bosnia on Thursday!’
‘Hey Ho Hiroshima! Oprah learns the difference between sushi and sashimi—oh, and a little something about radiation poisoning on Friday!’ ”
Unfortunately, the interview Oprah conducted with Elie Wiesel on that trip was, in the estimation of frontpagemag.com, “vapid.” She sounded inane as she walked the icy grounds of the death camp. “Wow,” she said. “Unbelieveable…wow…wow…unbelievable…”
Granted, the sight of ovens used to dispose of human beings challenges description, but as she interviewed Wiesel, Oprah began to sound like Little Miss Echo:
WIESEL: There were three to a bunk.
OPRAH: Three to a bunk…
WIESEL: Straw.
OPRAH: Straw…
WIESEL: There were trees.
OPRAH: There were trees.
WIESEL: But we didn’t look at them.
OPRAH: But you didn’t look at them.
She frequently repeats what her guests say as if she is a Berlitz translator.
Oprah later sold DVDs of her trip with Wiesel at The Oprah Store across the street from her studio, for thirty dollars apiece, prompting one critic to call it “Holocash.”
During her speech at the Holocau
st Memorial Museum, she talked about the devastation of concentration camps and then, inexplicably, segued into how hard it was to be famous and go to the bathroom in public. She said she had used the restroom earlier in the day and the person in the next stall had said, “You pee like a horse.” After that, Oprah told the crowd, who had come to donate money in remembrance of the six million Jews who’d perished in death camps, that she had decided from now on to put lots of paper in the toilet to dampen the sound of her peeing. Robert Feder wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times that it was “one of the most outrageous utterances” of the year.
“I don’t know what possesses Oprah to talk like that at the most inappropriate times,” said Jewette Battles, who helped arrange Oprah’s 1988 visit to Kosciusko. “She did something similar when she came back here to dedicate the Oprah Winfrey Road….The whole town turned out to celebrate her on Oprah Winfrey Day and the mayor gave her a key to the city. It was a very big deal….She’s the biggest thing to come out of Mississippi since Elvis Presley. So when she got up on the stage of the Attala County Coliseum everyone was cheering, so happy she was there and so proud of her….At first she made the crowd laugh and…then all of a sudden she started performing a piece about a slave girl and the plantation mistress who made her drink urine….I don’t know where the urine thing came from—if it was something from the book Jubilee or what—but people were shocked into absolute silence….I did not understand Oprah’s purpose except to say, ‘Look at me now. I’m on top….’ And if that’s what it was, who’s to blame her? It’s hard to be black and poor in America, but I wondered later if she didn’t do that performance to throw up slavery to us as a part of Mississippi’s awful past….Even though she’s five generations removed from slavery and was much too young to be mistreated when she was here as a child….Besides, things have changed in Mississippi over the years….We have overcome….There’s no sense in rubbing our noses in it now.”
There are signs in the airport in Jackson, one and a half hours north of Kosciusko, that announce, “No Blacks. No Whites. Just the Blues,” and the T-shirts on sale inform visitors “Yes, We Wear Shoes Down Here. Sometimes Even Cleats.”
On her visit home on June 4, 1988, Oprah wore a bright turquoise silk dress from The Forgotten Woman, a label for large sizes. She was accompanied by her mother; her father and stepmother; Stedman; her personal secretary, Beverly Coleman; her attorney, Jeff Jacobs; her hairdresser, Andre Walker; her makeup man, Roosevelt Cartwright; three cameramen; and a producer. She planned to make her visit into a show about stars who return to their roots.
“This is a real homecoming,” she told the three hundred people standing on a small portion of dirt road that had been named in her honor. “It is a deeply humbling experience to come back to the place where it all started. No one ever goes very far in life without remembering where they came from.”
Her grandmother’s small wooden shack had long ago been chopped down for firewood, and the outhouse had disappeared into decades of underbrush. There was no trace of the pretty blue hydrangeas that Hattie Mae had grown or the cow she kept to give the family milk. Only the small plot of land remained, which her children had inherited. They had debated opening a gift shop for people who wanted to see where Oprah Winfrey had grown up, but with it being three miles outside the city limits of Kosciusko, there wasn’t enough tourism to support the idea. Instead, they erected a sign on the property:
• FIRST HOME SITE OF OPRAH WINFREY •
On January 29, 1954, Oprah Winfrey was born in a wood frame house located on this site. She resided here as a child before moving to Milwaukee at age 6. Within walking distance is the church where she made her first appearance in an Easter citation.
She grew in the information/entertainment industry to become the world’s foremost TV talk show host with a daily audience in the millions. At the same time she never forgot or overlooked her heritage and has been a regular support of folks back home as well as a role model to much of America.
With photographers trailing her and cameramen on either side, Oprah made her way to the church where her family had placed another sign: “Oprah Winfrey Faced First Audience Here.”
“The church was my life,” she recalled. “Baptist Training Union. Every black child in the world who grew up in the church knows about BTU. You did Sunday School, you did the morning service, which started at 11 and didn’t end until 2:30, you had dinner on the ground in front of the church, and then you’d go back in for the 4 o’clock service. It was forever, oh, it was forever. It was how you spent your life.”
She walked across the parched grass and into the humble cemetery next to the church, where five generations of her maternal ancestors lay buried. With Vernon on one side and Vernita on the other, she looked like she was flanked by Jack Sprat, who ate no fat, and his wife, who ate no lean. (Vernon would later say, “Oprah is definitely her mother’s daughter in that respect. The women in her family are all heavy, very heavy.”) They all bowed their heads for a few moments in front of two raised blocks of stone the size of shoe boxes on a sliver of granite:
HATTIE MAE EARLEST LEE
APRIL 15, 1900 JUNE 16, 1883
FEBRUARY 27, 1963 DECEMBER 29, 1959
There are far more impressive grave sites than the ones for Oprah’s grandparents, but as Katharine Carr Esters explained, it was what Hattie Mae’s children could afford from the Davidson Marble and Granite Works in Kosciusko. “Poor black folks save their whole lives to buy these tombstones,” she said. The name of Oprah’s grandfather Earlist is misspelled on the gravestone. “Suzie Mae [his daughter and Oprah’s aunt] spelled it the way she knew,” said Mrs. Esters. “He didn’t read or write, so he wouldn’t have been much help.”
The cemetery, a small field of scrubby grass filled with granite stones the size of For Sale signs, is sprinkled with a few pyramid towers and a couple of large crosses banked by plastic flowers, but most of the markers are modest. One is particularly joyful: a model of a coffin with an aluminum cover that reads, “Gone Fishing in Crystal Clear Water.”
Oprah paid homage to her grandmother on that visit. “It was not in any words she said, it was just the way she lived. She instilled in me that I could do whatever I wanted to do, that I could be whatever I wanted to be, that I could go wherever I wanted to go.” This was for the hometown folks. For other audiences she told a different story about her grandmother washing clothes in a boiling cauldron and telling Oprah to pay attention so that when she grew up she could get herself “some good white folks to work for.” Oprah always ended that story by saying she knew at the age of four she would never take in wash like her grandmother: “I just wish she had lived long enough to see that I did grow up and I’ve now got some good white folks working for me.”
That evening the family and several community leaders met with Oprah at Katharine Esters’s home to discuss what Oprah could do to fulfill the sign’s declaration that she supported the “folks back home.” Her secretary took notes on the various suggestions, and Oprah promised to get back to them with her decision. Ten years later she returned to Kosciusko to dedicate a $30,000 Habitat for Humanity house that she had financed through Oprah’s Angel Network. Ordinarily, she built Habitat houses in towns where television stations carried her talk show, but she made an exception for Kosciusko, and the town showed its appreciation. The front-page headline of The Star-Herald (circulation: 5,200) trumpeted, “Kosciusko Prepares for Oprah’s Visit.” One old-timer observed, “We haven’t had that kind of a headline since Allied forces landed in Normandy.”
The day before Oprah was to be photographed handing over the house keys to the lucky family, she visited the home and saw that it was empty. She called a nearby Eddie Bauer store and told them to furnish it overnight, from curtains and couches to towels and dishes. She also had every closet filled with clothes in the right size for each family member. Some estimated it cost more to furnish the house than to build it. Oprah laughed. “I couldn’t give them an empty house,”
she said.
Most of the town was on its knees in gratitude, but Katharine Carr Esters, who spent years badgering the city to bring running water to the nearby black community, pushed Oprah to do more, especially for the poor children of Kosciusko. “That’s when the seed was planted for the $5 million Oprah Winfrey Boys and Girls Club, which Oprah opened in 2006,” she said. “It took eight years to complete but…the Boys and Girls Club has done more good than anything this community has ever seen. Teenage pregnancy has dropped, juvenile crime has decreased, and vandalism has almost disappeared because of the programs offered. In addition, the club has provided jobs for people. So Oprah did a wonderful thing for the people here, and praise God that she did….But…”
Mrs. Esters cannot help but add a clear-eyed caveat about her cousin’s philanthropy. “She does a lot of good things for people with her money, but it’s easy when you have that much and you need tax deductions and all. And Oprah doesn’t bang a nail for Habitat unless her cameras are running. Yes, she should get publicity for all her good works, and she certainly makes sure that she does. She never misses an opportunity, especially to make money. She does not come home to visit. She only comes home to do a show. She’s been here all of three times in the last twenty years, and each time was to do a show. It’s all business with Oprah. In 1988 she filmed the visit to Oprah Winfrey Road for one of her shows. In 1998 she dedicated a Habitat house at the same time her film Beloved was opening at our local theater, so she promoted her movie by giving a speech before every showing. In 2006 she had her cameras here again, to film the opening of the Oprah Winfrey Boys and Girls Club….Nothing is wasted with that girl.”
Worried that her friend, the straight-shooting Mrs. Esters, might have taken too deadly an aim, Jewette Battles interjected. “Oprah has her faults and frailties, just like the rest of us, but she does do good work. It’s just that she presents her generosity as the whole of herself and her character, and that’s not quite accurate.” Both women had occasions over the years to see Oprah in various incarnations. The one they liked best was Oprah the philanthropist. The one they liked least was Oprah the self-promoter. “She will give money, but only if it’s on her terms or her idea,” said Mrs. Battles. “Every move is calculated to further her brand and lift her image, which is why she does good works.”