Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [21]
The same year that The Supremes electrified America on television, Congress passed the Economic Opportunity Act as part of the nation’s “War on Poverty.” The legislation was later criticized for inefficiency and waste, but many blacks benefited, especially through the Head Start program for preschool children and the Upward Bound Program for high-school students. One of those kissed by the affirmative action of Upward Bound was Oprah, then a student at Lincoln Middle School, which was considered “the melting pot” of Milwaukee. The program director, Eugene H. Abrams, had noticed her in the school cafeteria reading a book, and recommended her as one of six black students—three girls, three boys—to integrate Nicolet High School in the wealthy country club suburb of Glendale.
Years later Oprah said that she had been given “a scholarship” to the privileged school, and was the only one in her class selected for that honor. “I was in a situation where I was the only black kid, and I mean the only one, in a school of two thousand upper-middle-class suburban Jewish kids. I would take the bus in the morning to school with the maids who worked in their homes. I had to transfer three times.”
Being one of “the bus kids,” as the other students called them, Oprah was noticed. “She stood out from the crowd,” said Irene Hoe, one of five Asian students at Nicolet and a senior when Oprah was a freshman. “She did not live in the predominantly affluent, mostly white suburban neighborhoods of Milwaukee, which fed their children to our high school.… Back in those politically incorrect days … it might have been said that she did not ‘belong.’ ”
No one recognized that displacement more acutely than Oprah, who suddenly saw how poor she was next to wealthy girls who wore different sweater sets every day of the week and had allowances for pizza, records, and milk shakes after school. “For the first time I understood that there was another side,” she said. “All of a sudden the ghetto didn’t look so good anymore.
“In 1968 it was real hip to know a black person, so I was very popular. The kids would all bring me back to their houses, pull out their Pearl Bailey albums, bring out their maid from the back and say, ‘Oprah, do you know Mabel?’ They figured all blacks knew each other. It was real strange and real tough.”
Mothers encouraged their daughters to invite “Opie” home after school. “Like I was a toy,” she said. “They’d all sit around talking about Sammy Davis, Jr., like I knew him.”
Oprah wanted to have money like the other kids, but her mother, working two jobs at the time, had none to spare. So Oprah began stealing from Vernita. “I started having some real problems,” she said later. “I guess you could call me troubled—to put it mildly.”
Her sister, Patricia, remembered Oprah stealing $200 from their mother, which was an entire week’s pay. Another time she stole one of her mother’s rings and pawned it. “Oprah said she’d taken the ring to have it cleaned. But Mom found the pawn ticket in a pillowcase and made Oprah get the ring back.”
Her relatives recall Oprah as an out-of-control teenager who would do anything for money. At one point she wanted to get rid of her “ugly butterfly bifocals.” She asked her mother to buy her a new pair of octagonal glasses like the kids at Nicolet wore. Vernita said she could not afford the expense. Oprah was determined to get the new glasses.
“I staged a robbery, broke my glasses and pretended I was unconscious and feigned amnesia. I stayed home from school one day and stomped the glasses on the floor into a million pieces. I pulled down the curtains, knocked over the lamps, and cut my left cheek enough to draw blood. I called the police, laid myself down on the floor, and waited for them to arrive.”
Then, exactly as she had seen on an episode of Marcus Welby, M.D., she feigned amnesia. She showed the police a bump on her head but