Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [13]
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 unparalleled success, which brought the rich rewards of an extravagant lifestyle, a healing balm to growing up poor.
THE 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