Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [18]
At church Oprah grabbed center stage. “She’s never been a backseat person,” Vernon said. “She always loved the limelight. One time she was a little louder than I wanted, and I told her, ‘Honey, people see you when you’re quiet, and they see you when you’re loud. Nine times out of ten, you’re better thought of when you’re quiet.’ I toned her down a little.”
During the spring of 2008, Vernon Winfrey, then seventy-five and still working in the Nashville barbershop he’d opened in 1964, reflected wistfully on his daughter when she was seven and played in the backyard of his house. “I’d watch from the window as she and her little friends Lilly and Betty Jean played imaginary games. Those three would amuse themselves for hours, sitting in child-size chairs, which I placed in the speckled shade of our maple tree.… I still have those chairs, by the way.… From what I observed then, Lilly and Betty Jean didn’t enjoy playing school as much as Oprah did. I think that’s because she was always the teacher, always scolding her little playmates as she scrawled invisible lessons on a make-believe blackboard. Lilly and Betty Jean would sit attentively at imaginary desks, hoping against hope that Oprah didn’t call their names during spelling bees. Can’t say I much blamed them, because if they misspelled a word, there was trouble. Oprah would get her little switch, which was not at all imaginary, and spank the palms of their hands.”
Oprah had learned from her grandmother how to punish.
“One day I confronted her,” said Vernon. “ ‘Why don’t you let your friends play the teacher sometimes?’
“She looked at me with the sweetest expression, all cute, and bewildered about how I could ask such a silly thing. ‘Why, Daddy,’ she informed me, ‘Lilly and Betty Jean can’t teach till they learn how to read.’ ”
Vernon related this incident almost exactly as it appeared in the 2007 book proposal he submitted to publishers. Working with the writer Craig Marberry, he had produced several sample chapters of an autobiography that he titled Things Unspoken.
“I wanted to write a book about my life—my mother and my father and their nine children and how we all came up in the South.” As a black man born in Mississippi in 1933, Vernon faced challenges that he said his daughter would never know. “Oprah talks about Martin Luther King, and she can recite all his speeches, but she doesn’t know anything about the struggle. I lived it. Oprah just got in on the fly up.… She reaped the harvest Dr. King sowed.… I can go back seventy years in that struggle, and I want to write about it.… I know that Oprah’s a part of my life, of course, and I did right by her, but Oprah is not all of my life, and I don’t have to tell her everything I do. I’m not her boy. I’m a grown man and I can do what I want as long as I stay at the side of the Lord. So, no, I didn’t tell Oprah about my book beforehand.”
During a public appearance in New York City in 2007, Oprah was stunned when a reporter asked about her father’s plans to write a book. “That’s impossible,” she said. “I can assure you it’s not true.… The last person in the world to be doing a book about me is Vernon Winfrey. The last person.”
Vernon smiled wryly at Oprah’s reaction. “She doesn’t understand that my book is not all about her, but that’s what she and that girlfriend of hers thinks.… When Oprah called me the next day she was just as mad as you please. She said, ‘Daddy, are you really writing a book?’ I told her yes. She was upset because she said she now looked like a liar to the reporters. She said I made her look like a fool.
“I said, ‘Oprah, I’m entitled to tell my story, aren’t I?’
“ ‘Yes, Daddy, but it would have been nice if you had told me about it first.’
“Then Gayle King called me. ‘Mr. Winfrey, how dare you do a book,’ she said. ‘No one cares about you. No one wants to read about you. The only reason anyone on earth would be interested in what you have to say is because of Oprah.’ She called me here at the barbershop. I was standing right over there.” He pointed to the gray