Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [23]
“I said, ‘Yeah, but it’s really hard because all the boys want to do is French kiss.’ And immediately after the conversation about French kissing, he asked me to pull over to the side and take off my panties.… All those years I thought that if I hadn’t brought up the subject of French kissing, he wouldn’t have done that, because he was my favorite uncle.”
Oprah complained to her father and stepmother about her uncle, but they did not believe her then, and Trenton denied her story. Years later Vernon still seemed conflicted. “I know she feels that I didn’t handle it well,” he said, “[but] Trent was my closest brother. We were torn.”
When Oprah returned to Milwaukee, she ran away from home and stayed on the streets for a week. “Mom was frantic and called all her friends looking for her,” said her sister. “Mom didn’t know if she was dead or alive.”
Oprah joked about the incident years later as she recalled hustling Aretha Franklin, who was appearing in Milwaukee. When she saw the singer sitting in a limousine, Oprah threw herself into another drama. “I rushed up to her, started crying, said I was an abandoned child and needed money to return to Ohio. I liked the sound of Ohio. She gave me $100.” Oprah, then fourteen years old, claims she went to a nearby hotel, took a room by herself, and spent the money drinking wine and ordering room service. Then she called the pastor of her mother’s church and begged him to help her get back home.
“After I ran out of money I told the late Reverend Tully everything that was going on in my house and how bad I felt. So he took me back to my house and gave my mother a lecture, which really pleased me.”
Her sister was ecstatic to see her, but Vernita was furious. After the pastor left, she picked up a small chair to beat Oprah, who, according to Patricia, “was crying and cowering. I was screaming and begging Mom, ‘Please don’t kill Oprah!’ ” Vernita finally put the chair down, but she insisted Oprah accompany her to the juvenile detention center.
“I remember going to the interview process where they treat you like you’re already a known convict and thinking to myself, ‘How in the world is this happening to me?’ I was fourteen and I knew that I was a smart person; I knew I wasn’t a bad person, and I remember thinking, ‘How did this happen? How did I get here?’ ”
Vernita was told she would have to wait two weeks before Oprah could be processed. “I can’t wait two weeks,” said her mother.
“She wanted me out of the house that minute,” said Oprah.
Back in the apartment, Vernita called Vernon in Nashville and told him he had to take over, but by then Vernon had realized he was not Oprah’s birth father. Nine months before Oprah’s birth in January 1954 he was in the service.
Knowing that Vernon and Zelma were unable to have children, Katharine Carr Esters called and urged Vernon to take Oprah. “I knew he wasn’t her father but I told him, ‘Claim her as your own. You and Zelma want a child, and Oprah needs help. Her mother can’t handle her.’ … I told him everything that Oprah had done, and he finally agreed to take her, but under strict conditions of discipline that she no longer go back and forth to Vernita and that he would be in charge. Vernita agreed.… We were all there when Oprah left—her mother, her sister and brother and all of her cousins.”
Patricia recalled her sister in tears at having to leave Milwaukee. “Oprah didn’t want to go. She was crying and hugged me before she got into Vernon’s car.”
Reserved by temperament, Vernon had been shocked by the stories of Oprah’s behavior, which he later described as “Oprah making herself available to men.” Once inside his house on Arrington Street he sat her down at the kitchen table and laid down the law. He told her that he would rather see her dead and floating faceup in the Cumberland River than have her bring disgrace and shame on his family.
“No more halter tops, no more short shorts, and no more