Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [15]
Mrs. Esters will not accept Oprah’s colorful stories as merely fanciful. “She makes up stories to make more of herself, and that’s not right.… She’s not straight with the truth. Never has been. She claims that she didn’t have as a little girl, but she did. You should’ve seen the clothes and dolls and toys and little books that Aunt Hat brought home for her. Hattie Mae was working for the Leonards then—they were the richest white people in Kosciusko—and they made sure that Oprah had everything their own little girls had. Now, it’s true that the ribbons and ruffled pinafores and so forth were not brand-new; they were hand-me-downs from the Leonards, but they were still mighty fine. The Leonards owned the big department store in town, and their things were the best. Hattie Mae dressed Oprah like a little doll every Sunday and took her to the Buffalo Baptist Church, where she began saying her little pieces.”
Aunt Katharine remembered Oprah as a precocious child, who walked and talked early. “She was always the center of attention because she was the only baby in the household. And she always wanted to have the spotlight. If adults were talking and she couldn’t get their attention, she’d walk over and hit them to make them pay attention to her.”
Vernita confirmed that her daughter was indulged by everyone, including her grandmother. “She [Hattie Mae] was strict, but Oprah got away with a lot of stuff that I never could, because she was the first grandchild. She was a sweet little girl but very bossy. She always wanted to be boss.”
By the time she was three years old, Oprah was mesmerizing her grandmother’s country congregation by reciting the story of Daniel in the lion’s den. “I would just get up in front of her friends and start doing pieces I had memorized,” Oprah once said. “Everywhere I went, I’d say, ‘Do you want to hear me do something?’ ”
Oprah’s grandmother Hattie Mae Presley was the granddaughter of slaves. She raised six children while working as a cook for the sheriff of Kosciusko and keeping house for the Leonards, whom she called “good white folks.” She was educated only as far as the third grade, and her husband, Earlist Lee (called Earless by the family), could not read or write his name. “But Aunt Hat certainly knew her Bible, and she taught those stories to Oprah. She also taught her the shape of letters, and then my father taught Oprah how to read, so by the time she was six years old she had learned enough to skip kindergarten and go right into the first grade,” said Katharine Esters, the first person in her family to earn a college degree. “It took me twelve years of night school to get that diploma, but I finally did it.… I bought a thesaurus and read it like a novel.”
Katharine’s mother, Ida Presley Carr, named Vernita Lee’s baby Orpah after the sister-in-law of Ruth in the Old Testament, but en route to the county courthouse to file the birth certificate, the midwife, Rebecca Presley, misspelled the biblical name, and Orpah became Oprah, never to be called anything else.
The birth certificate for Oprah Gail Lee contained another error, naming Vernon Winfrey as her father. “We found out years later that couldn’t possibly have been true, but at the time, Bunny—that’s what the family calls Vernita—named Vernon as the father because he was the last of the three men she said she had laid down with. And he accepted the responsibility.… He didn’t realize the truth until years later, when he checked his service records and saw for sure he couldn’t have given life to a baby born in January 1954. But by the time he found out the truth, Oprah had already called him Daddy.”
Although Oprah came to appreciate her grandmother’s work ethic, she recalled her years with Hattie Mae,