Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [17]
“Hearing me say that she couldn’t be Louvenia made Oprah real quiet … and unhappy.”
Oprah maintained that because of her dark skin she had to sleep on the porch in the back of the rooming house, while her light-skinned sister slept with her mother in Vernita’s bedroom. She said that discrimination made her feel ugly. “White people never made me feel less,” she said years later. “Black people made me feel less. I felt less in that house with Mrs. Miller. I felt less because I was too dark and my hair was too kinky.… I felt like an outcast.”
Katharine Esters responded sternly to Oprah’s poignant memory. “This bothers me more than her corncob doll lies and her cockroach lies, because it plays into the damaging discrimination practiced by our own people,” she said. “I’m a dark-skinned woman, Oprah’s grandfather Earless was black enough to be painted by a brush, and Oprah is as dark as a preacher’s prayer book, but when she says things like that she reminds me of my cousin Frank, who did not wish to be what he was and discriminated among his kin, preferring the lighter-skinned to the darker-skinned folks.
“Oprah slept on the porch in the back of the rooming house only because Vernita had to take care of her baby and there was just one bedroom. That’s it. Period. If Oprah was discriminated against because of her skin color, I’d tell you,” said Mrs. Esters, a civil rights activist who worked for the Urban League in Milwaukee. “I believe in telling the truth—spiders, snakes, and all—because I believe some good can come from opening up dark secrets to the light.… Oprah puts too much stock on color.… I suppose that her wanting to be white makes her see things the way she does, but sleeping on the porch had nothing to do with her dark skin. The fact of the matter is that Oprah was no longer an only child when she came to Milwaukee. She was not the princess anymore or the center of everyone’s attention. Her mother and the landlady fussed over the babies, not Oprah, and that was very hard for her.”
Over the years Oprah’s memories of growing up have become rife with disregard and discrimination. “The only photo I have of my grandmother she’s holding a white child,” she said at the age of fifty-one. Yet a published picture of Oprah’s desk shows a photo of her grandmother with her arm draped lovingly around Oprah as a little girl, with no white child in sight. Yet Oprah recalled: “Every time she would ever talk about those white children there would be this sort of glow inside her.… No one ever glowed when they saw me.”
Less than a year after Oprah moved to Milwaukee to be with her mother, Vernita had a third child, Jeffrey Lee, on December 14, 1960. His father was listed years later on his death certificate as Willie Wright, the man Vernita eventually hoped to marry but never did. After Jeffrey’s birth she moved into the small apartment of her cousin Alice Cooper, and lived for a while on welfare. Taking care of three children became so difficult that Vernita sent Oprah to live with Vernon Winfrey in Nashville. “Vernita’s lifestyle was not ideal at that time,” said Katharine Esters, who claimed Vernita spent her welfare money on clothes and cosmetics, “so sending Oprah away was a blessing for her.”
“That was the beginning of shuttling her back and forth between my house in Nashville and her mother’s house in Milwaukee,” said Vernon Winfrey many years later. “It was a mistake. King Solomon taught long ago that you can’t divide a child.”
Vernon, who married Zelma Myers in 1958, lived in a little brick house on Owens Street in East Nashville and worked for Vanderbilt University as a janitor. At that time, he still believed he was Oprah’s father.
“So we welcomed Oprah and gave her a proper home with structure—schooling, regular visits to the library, a little bit of television, playtime, and church every single Sunday. I’d drive us to the Baptist church in my old 1950 Mercury and cover the seats