Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [14]
Oprah’s sister later dismissed the myth of grinding poverty. “Sure, we weren’t rich,” Patricia Lloyd told a reporter. “But Oprah exaggerated how bad we had it—I guess to get sympathy from her viewers and widen her audience. She never had cockroaches for pets. She always had a dog. She also had a white cat, an eel in an aquarium, and a parakeet called Bo-Peep that she tried to teach to talk.”
Giving an interview to Life magazine in 1997, Oprah, then forty-three, broke down and sobbed over her miserable childhood, prompting the reporter to write: “Oprah was the least powerful of girls, born poor and illegitimate in the segregated South on a farm in Kosciusko, Mississippi. She spent her first six years there abandoned to her maternal grandmother.”
Not everyone in her family agreed with the forlorn tone of that assessment. As her mother, Vernita Lee, put it when asked about her daughter’s tendency toward self-dramatization, “Oprah toots it up a little.” The family historian, Katharine Carr Esters, the cousin Oprah calls Aunt Katharine, was not so tolerant.
“All things considered, those six years with Hattie Mae were the best thing that could have happened to a baby girl born to poor kin,” she said. “Oprah grew up as an only child with the full and undivided attention of every one of us—her grandparents, her aunts, uncles, and cousins, as well as her mother, who Oprah never mentions was with her every day for the first four and a half years of Oprah’s life, until she went North to Milwaukee to find a better job.…
“Where Oprah got that nonsense about growing up in filth and roaches I have no idea. Aunt Hat kept a spotless house.… It was a wooden, six-room house with a large living room that had a fireplace and rocking chairs. There were three big windows with white Priscilla-style lace curtains. The dining room was filled with beautiful Chippendale furniture. And in Aunt Hat’s bedroom she had this beautiful white bedspread across her bed that all the kids knew was off-limits for playing on.”
At the age of seventy-nine, Katharine Carr Esters sat on the “Ladies Porch” of Seasonings Eatery in Kosciusko during the summer of 2007 with her good friend Jewette Battles and shared her recollections of Oprah’s “growing-up years” in Mississippi.
“Now, you have to understand that I love Oprah, and I love all the good work she does for others, but I do not understand the lies that she tells. She’s been doing it for years now,” said Mrs. Esters.
“Well, her stories have a bitty bit of truth in them,” said Mrs. Battles, “but I suppose that Oprah does embroider them beyond all recognition into stories that—”
“They are not stories,” said the no-nonsense Mrs. Esters. “They are lies. Pure and simple. Lies … Oprah tells her viewers all the time that she and Elvis Presley’s little girl, Lisa Marie, are cousins, and oh, Lord, that is a preposterous lie.… Yes, we have Presleys in our family, but they are no kin to Elvis, and Oprah knows that, but she likes to make out that she is a distant cousin of Elvis because that makes her more than she is.”
Mrs. Esters is adamant about setting straight the family history. “Oprah wasn’t raised on a pig farm. There was one pig. She didn’t milk cows; there was only one cow.… Yes, they were poor—we all were—but Aunt Hat owned her own house, plus two acres of land and a few chickens, which made her better off than most folks in the Buffalo community. Hattie Mae did not beat Oprah every day of her life, and Oprah most certainly did not go without dolls and dresses.… Oh, I’ve talked to her about this over the years. I’ve confronted her and asked, ‘Why do you tell such lies?’ Oprah told me, ‘That’s what people want to hear. The truth is boring, Aunt Katharine. People don’t want to be bored. They want stories with drama.’
“Oprah makes her first six years sound like the worst thing that ever befell a child born to folks just trying to survive. I was there for most of that time, and I can tell you she was spoiled and petted and indulged better than