Hearing Oprah talk about her early schooling, I was particularly struck by the contrast between the reinforcing climate she discovered in her school and the alienation she experienced within her home, especially hearing the horrific stories of her sexual abuse. The very idea of education transformed her—school had clearly given her an enormous amount of gratification and self-assurance. At the same time, school could not protect her from the trauma of daily life in her mother’s house.
By the time she was fourteen, Oprah was living on the streets of Milwaukee. “I became a sexually promiscuous teenager,” she recalled. “I ran away from home. I was going to be put into a detention center and ended up being sent to my father instead. I was out of control.”
Oprah’s father, Vernon Winfrey, provided a lifeline. The authority that emanated from him, the order and financial security of his Nashville home, and the role model offered by his new wife combined to give Oprah discipline and stability—and a chance to save herself. All of this would eventually lead to a profound transformation. What’s more, Vernon provided a renewed focus on education, reinforcing Oprah’s earlier passion for learning, which the abuse had served to obscure.
“On the Winfrey side of my family,” Oprah recalled, “education was everything. I remember coming home once, and I had a C and my father said, ‘C’s are not allowed in this house.’ And we were sitting in the kitchen, and he opened the door and said, ‘You can stay out there with those people if you’re gonna bring a C because you are not a C student! If you were a C student, I would let you get C’s, but you’re not a C student, so you can’t bring ’em in this house.’”
However, before any transformation could occur, Oprah was forced to endure another terrible ordeal. When she moved back to Nashville, her father struggled to instill order and discipline in her life. He didn’t know the deep, dark secrets of her abuse. He knew only that she was troubled, and he tried to respond. But her father could not imagine the true depths of her problems, or their origin. “He said to me that there would be no association with boys. He didn’t know there had already been an association. Because I was pregnant when I came to my father, and my father didn’t know it. So he sat down and said to me that he would rather see a daughter of his dead, floating down the Cumberland River, than to bring shame on the Winfrey name. And I knew I was pregnant. I thought about killing myself.”
The stress caused Oprah to go into premature labor. Her legs started to swell, and her father sent her to see a doctor—accompanied by her stepmother, Zelma Winfrey. “We went to the pediatrician,” Oprah recalled. “And the pediatrician says, ‘Either this is the biggest tumor I’ve ever seen in my whole life or you’re pregnant. Are you pregnant?’ My stepmother was there in the room. So I said, ‘No.’ And so he asked my stepmother to leave the room, and then I broke down and cried, and oh, my God, it was bad.”
Oprah then had to go back home and tell her father. She doesn’t recall what he did or said, only that he was devastated by the news and that she was overwhelmed with shame, falling further into a deep depression, consumed by thoughts of suicide. The story is harrowing—and its ending was tragic. Oprah went into labor shortly after seeing the doctor and delivered a baby who would die a few months later. With that, her father took full control.
“My father,” she recalled, “came in and said to me, ‘This is your second chance.’ He said, ‘We were prepared 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. If I were you, I would use it.’”
With this second chance, Oprah transformed her life. Thanks to her father’s discipline—and with her stepmother’s encouragement—Oprah focused on her studies, won a scholarship to study speech, drama, and English at Tennessee State University, where she excelled, realizing all of her enormous intellectual potential. At the age of nineteen, she began co-anchoring the news at Nashville’s CBS affiliate. And by 1977 she had moved to Baltimore’s ABC affiliate, before taking a new job in Chicago seven years later, which would catapult her to the unimaginable heights she has since attained.
Hearing Oprah tell me the story of her early life enabled me to begin to see how she had been shaped, positively and negatively, by her family. And I wanted to find out more about these various family members, about who had raised them, where and how, under what circumstances. I found ample material on both her father’s and her mother’s sides. Oprah’s maternal grandparents were Earlist Lee, born in 1887 in Hinds County, Mississippi, and Hattie Mae Presley, born around 1900. Oprah lived with them for the first six years of her life. They had a tremendous impact on shaping her childhood, even more than was usual for someone of Oprah’s generation. Indeed, Oprah is able to describe her grandparents’ daily life in vivid, eloquent detail.
“I slept with my grandmother in a big poster bed in the living room,” she said. “We had a hearth, and the living room had the bed in it. There was just one big room with the hearth, the bed. People would come to visit, and there’d be the chairs in front of the bed. We called it the front room. Behind the front room was the kitchen. There was no running water. To the side was another room where my grandfather slept. My job in the morning was to go to the well and bring water, then to take the one cow out to pasture. Then my job was to do whatever my grandmother wanted me to do—get the eggs from the chicken without breaking the eggs. When it was hog-killing time, I was the one picking up all the intestines, and I would flick things off here and there. I had all the worst jobs.”
Oprah remembers her grandmother making lye soap and homemade shoes and sewing their clothes. “It was a really big deal to get store-bought clothes or patent-leather shoes,” she marveled. “It was a rural life. There was no indoor plumbing, no bathrooms. I bathed only on Saturdays. And it was my job to empty the slop jar in the morning. We had the slop jar under the bed. It was my job to keep the irons clean—because we had these irons for ironing clothes, and so when you used starch, they’d have to be washed off and scraped. It was my job to do that. I was a busy little girl.”
Hearing her recount the basic level of her family’s existence, the amount of grinding labor it took merely to provide the most fundamental features of daily existence, one can’t help but be amazed at how far Oprah has come—she is almost like a character in a fairy tale. Yet her memory is absolutely correct: The rural poverty she describes was typical, indeed pervasive, among black people in the South. Oprah grew up in a community of sharecroppers, people bound to the soil by a system that was intended to replace slavery with its mirror image, a system of peonage to which most blacks were chained economically, as surely as they had been chained in slavery. The vast majority of former slaves became sharecroppers, almost as soon as slavery ended, and very few were able to break out of this system and own their own land.
Oprah’s father, Vernon, recognized this and encouraged the education of his children as strongly as he could. Unfortunately, Hattie Lee, Oprah’s maternal grandmother, had a different imaginative horizon, a horizon delimited in scope by the confines of the sharecropping system, Jim Crow segregation, and its various complex legacies. No doubt because of this set of experiences, she could not imagine encouraging her granddaughter to dream of getting an education so that she could become a doctor or some other kind of professional. Instead Hattie Mae wanted Oprah to grow up and “work for good white folks.” And, given the severe limits of her own options, this was a noble and loving enough goal to which to aspire for her granddaughter.
But curiously, one generation back, Hattie Mae’s family had taken a very different approach to the harsh system in which they found themselves. Hattie’s mother was Amanda Winters, born around 1874 in Kosciusko, Mississippi. Amanda was the daughter of Pearce and Henrietta Winters, both former slaves in Mississippi. All these people seemed to have prized education. Amanda attended a freedmen’s school, and for their time she and her siblings were quite accomplished individuals. Her brother, Jesse Winters, attended Wilb
erforce University, and her sister, Matilda, was a math teacher. Amanda herself taught public school English to black children in the 1890s and 1900s. She seems to have risen high in the community as well. She married Nelson Alexander Presley in 1893. They had eight children together, including Hattie Mae. What’s more, after Nelson died (sometime around 1907), Amanda married Charles Bullocks, also widowed and seemingly well-to-do for a black man of his time.
Digging deeper, we discovered something most unusual about Amanda. When the NAACP was founded in 1909, one of its biggest supporters was a visionary philanthropist named Julius Rosenwald. Rosenwald had made a fortune with Sears, Roebuck and Company, and he was really passionate about what we would have called back then “Negro-white relations.” Starting in 1912, he gave millions of dollars to help rural black communities set up elementary schools. Remarkably, in 1929, Oprah’s great-grandmother Amanda became a trustee of one of these schools—a very rare feat for a woman of her day, white or black. We do not know exactly why she was appointed, but it is probably a sign of how respected she was in her community. Amanda was clearly a very accomplished, able woman. According to our research, she organized not only the school but also the Methodist church in Kosciusko.
How did Amanda’s daughter Hattie Mae end up in such difficult straits just one generation later? The answer is illustrative of the precarious status of all African Americans in the Jim Crow South. Whatever gains they made were inevitably fragile, sometimes including even the ownership of land, the crucial variable for the accumulation of wealth in this country.
Records show that Amanda and her second husband, Charles Bullocks, borrowed money from the Federal Land Bank. After Bullocks died, Amanda defaulted on payments, and the bank seized their land. Amanda offered to pay her debts with money from her children, but the banks wanted the land. According to Katherine Esters, who is Oprah’s cousin and the family’s unofficial historian, they wanted it because they didn’t think it was right that a black man—and now a black woman—had owned so much land. So the bank seized it all, along with all of Amanda’s belongings. She then moved to her first husband’s property and lived in a shanty for the rest of her life, dying sometime around 1940. Thus she was unable to preserve her briefly held prosperity, much less pass it on to her children, although her first husband’s land did remain in the family as a more lasting form of wealth.
This story is tragic, of course, but Oprah was thrilled to learn that at the height of segregation her great-grandmother was working to educate African Americans. “It feels like I’ve carried it on,” she said. “It feels like she would be the kind of person you would’ve had to have been to be able to stand up in a room. I mean, I feel it myself now when I go into a corporate room and I’m the only black face in that room and I’m the only female. I often say that ‘I go forth alone, and I stand as ten thousand,’ which is a line from one of Maya’s poems.”
I nodded in agreement. Oprah’s maternal ancestors clearly shared her willpower and her passion for education and the ownership of property.
Oprah now wanted to learn more about these people from whom she descended, and I did my best to oblige her, even though the chasm of slavery began to make things very difficult. Amanda Winters’s parents were the eldest generation on her maternal line that we could find. Their names were Henrietta and Pearce Winters. The 1870 census tells us that Pearce was born a slave around 1849, and the 1880 census tells us that his wife, Henrietta, was born a slave in Mississippi around 1854 (Henrietta’s last name is not recorded). This census also tells us that by 1880, Pearce and Henrietta were living in Attala County, Mississippi, with their five children, including Oprah’s great-grandmother Amanda. Sadly, we know nothing more about these people.
Oprah was disappointed to hear that we could not with certainty trace Amanda’s line any further than this. But by going back a branch along Oprah’s maternal line, we were able to learn more about the ancestry of her maternal grandfather, Earlist Lee. Earlist’s parents were Harold and Elizabeth Lee. According to the 1870 census, Harold was born a slave around 1855 in Hines County, Mississippi, whereas Elizabeth was born in freedom, also in Mississippi, sometime around 1875. The same census data revealed that Harold’s parents—Oprah’s great-great-grandparents—were named Grace and John Lee. They both were born slaves in Mississippi in 1833, which means they spent the first thirty-two years of their lives as a white man’s property.
It is very difficult to find any records documenting the lives of our slave ancestors during the years that they were held in bondage. As we have seen, the slave system stripped them by design of the last names that they created for themselves, as part of a larger process of officially and legally denying their humanity. Indeed, names, records, language, family structures—all were intentionally repressed by the slave owners.
In Oprah’s case, by searching over the records of slave owners in Mississippi, we were extremely lucky. We found an 1860 slave schedule for someone called S. E. Lee, who owned a female slave, age twenty-six, which is how old Oprah’s great-great-grandmother Grace would have been in 1860. S. E. Lee also owned a male slave, age twenty-six, which is how old her great-great-grandfather John would have been in 1860. Moreover—and this is very important—he owned a male slave, age five, which is how old Oprah’s great-grandfather Harry Lee would’ve been in 1860. No other slaves in the county match these three ages and relationships of proximity to a white person named Lee. You don’t exactly have to be Sherlock Holmes to deduce that these people are most probably Oprah’s ancestors, even though they stand nameless in their slave owner’s records.
Of course, matching ages and genders of slaves listed in the 1850 or 1860 slave schedules with freedmen and -women listed in the 1870 census is not absolute proof of identity, but it is overwhelmingly likely that these three people are Oprah’s ancestors on this side of her family, her direct ancestors who were born into slavery and remained in slavery until the end of the Civil War. We were especially fortunate in that this is the only slave owner named Lee in the state of Mississippi whose slaves’ ages matched that of her ancestors. And we looked at every Lee in the entire state.
Oprah was deeply moved when I showed her S. E. Lee’s slave schedule. This seemingly simple document, almost 150 years old, listing human beings as objects of property, bore evidence of her ancestors’ existence. There were her great-great-grandparents, written down as possessions, their ages and color recorded, but not their names. Oprah began to cry. And she cried, I think, because she was shocked to see two human beings from whom she is directly descended listed merely as nameless objects along with “the chickens and the cows,” as she put it.
I asked her whether her family ever talked about slavery when she was growing up. She said no, absolutely not. “When you grow up poor and on welfare,” she continued, “you don’t have time to think about what came before.” This is true, of course, but then I suggested that there might be another reason as well—a reason I’ve contemplated many times regarding the lives of all black Americans, be they rich, poor, or somewhere in between. For years and years, we were embarrassed about slavery. We were embarrassed about our slave past. That’s why I think it’s so extraordinary that our generation is embracing our slave heritage so very enthusiastically—slavery, the proverbial skeleton in America’s historical closet. Some African Americans were so embarrassed by the fact of slavery that they would claim that their family members never had been slaves, a historical impossibility! Slavery has traditionally been difficult for all Americans to deal with honestly and openly. But this has changed with a new generation of African Americans hungry for all the details of their family’s past, even the most painful and humiliating ones. We now realize that ultimately these are tales of survival and triumph.
Oprah agrees. “When I did the movie Beloved,” she said, “it was not as successful at the box office as any of us would have wanted it to be, and I was asked by so many press people, ‘Why would you want to tell this story?’ I wanted to
tell the story because I find such pride in the story. My strength comes from their strength. That’s one of the reasons I work so hard. And I feel like I have not even the right to be tired, ever, because I know I come from this. I didn’t know names and backgrounds, but I know I come from this.” Indeed, and so do we all.
At this point we had traced Oprah’s maternal lineage as far back as the written record would allow. So we turned to her paternal line—and found another wealth of fascinating stories. Oprah’s paternal grandfather, Elmore Winfrey, was born in 1901 in Poplar Creek, Mississippi. Her paternal grandmother was Beatrice Woods, born in 1903 in Carroll County. Oprah knew Elmore and Beatrice. Though she saw them rarely after she left Mississippi, she heard plenty of stories about them from her father, and these stories accord with the records that we were able to find.
In some ways the Winfreys were archetypal citizens of the Jim Crow South, where economic opportunities for African Americans were exceedingly scarce. Like the vast majority of their peers, they were sharecroppers, and their lives were brutally harsh. However, in one crucial way they were different. Most sharecroppers were illiterate, because whites wanted them that way. If black farmers couldn’t read or count, then they couldn’t manage their own transactions. That made them vulnerable, and they could be taken advantage of. (Indeed, if you look at contracts written in the Jim Crow years between blacks and whites, blacks were often paid less than their fair share.) There were exceptions, though. By all accounts, Elmore and Beatrice Winfrey were two of them. Elmore could read and write and understand math. He was reportedly a good businessman who successfully managed his own farm. We found a land deed revealing that in 1942 Elmore spent $3,425 on a 104-acre piece of land, ten miles southwest of Poplar Creek. This is truly remarkable for a black person who lived at his time, either in the North or in the South, but especially in the South.
The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader Page 54