Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [16]
“Oprah claims she never had a store-bought dress, but she had more store-bought dresses than I had! She claimed she had no dolls, but she had lots of dolls—all kinds of dolls.”
The closest Oprah came to revising her “no dolls” story was during her 2009 interview with Barbra Streisand, who said she had grown up so poor that she transformed a hot water bottle into her one and only doll. “Wow,” said Oprah. “You were poorer than I was.”
The black community began leaving Kosciusko in the 1950s when the town’s biggest employer, the Apponaug Cotton Mill, closed. “Jobs became scarce and so a lot of us headed north to find work,” said Mrs. Esters, describing what became the largest population shift in American history, known as the Great Migration. “During those years there wasn’t an empty car to be seen leaving town. We’d pack them full and drive to Chicago and Detroit and Milwaukee in hopes of finding manufacturing jobs with better pay. All over the South, black grandmothers were raising their grandchildren because mothers and fathers left for the North to get jobs and make money. There was nothing to be had staying in the South. Cotton was not being picked and folks wanted more than to be servants in the houses where their kin had worked. Oprah’s mother, who never finished high school, worked as a domestic here, but she wanted something better for herself and her child, so I drove her to Milwaukee [1958], where she lived with me until she got on her feet.… She’s lived there ever since, but I returned to Kosciusko in 1972.”
Oprah’s grandfather Earlist Lee died in 1959, when Oprah was five years old. She recalls him only as a dark presence in her life. “I feared him.… I remember him always throwing things at me or trying to shoo me away with his cane.” Hattie Mae, then sixty and in ill health, could no longer care for her, so Oprah was sent to live with her twenty-five-year-old mother, who by then had given birth to another daughter, named Patricia Lee, born June 3, 1959. Patricia’s father was listed years later on her death certificate as Frank Stricklen, although he and Vernita never married. Vernita and her baby were living in a rooming house run by the baby’s godmother when Oprah arrived.
“Mrs. Miller [the landlady] didn’t like me because of the color of my skin,” Oprah recalled. “Mrs. Miller was a light-skinned black woman who did not like darker-skinned black people. And my half sister [was] light-skinned, and she was adored. It was not something that was ever said to me, but [it was] absolutely understood that she is adored because she is light-skinned and I am not.”
Later, when she moved to Chicago, she expanded her views on skin color, talking about Harold Washington, the city’s first African American mayor. “We’re fudgies,” she said, categorizing her race by color, and revealing a leitmotiv that influenced her selection of male and female friends over the years. “There are fudgies, gingerbreads and vanilla creams. Gingerbreads are the ones who, even though you know they’re black, have all the features of whites.… Vanilla creams are those who could pass if they wanted to, and then there’s folks like me and the Mayor. No mistakin’ us for anything but fudgies.”
Oprah’s cousin, Jo Baldwin, remembered Oprah calling after reading Baldwin’s novel Louvenia, Belle’s Girl. “Oprah said, ‘Hello. This is Louvenia calling.’
“I said, ‘Oprah, is that you?’
“ ‘This is Louvenia,’ she said.
“I laughed. ‘Oprah, you can’t be Louvenia, because her character is based on how I look. But you can be Belle. She has the best lines anyway.’ ”
In Baldwin’s novel Belle