Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [24]
“Okay, Pops,” said Oprah, who now referred to Mama Zelma as “Peach.”
Vernon nearly erupted. He wrote in his book proposal that Oprah’s response smacked of disrespect. “I felt like my daughter dusted her shoes with my white hankie and stuffed it back in my pocket. There was something snide behind the new names … something ill-mannered.”
He laid down more rules that Oprah was to follow: curfews, chores, homework. “She didn’t have to like them; she just had to obey them. ‘If you run away, stay away.’ That’s what I told her. You have to behave, behave as if you want to make something of yourself.… That means no association with boys.… And,” he added, “I’m still Daddy. I’ll always be Daddy. My wife says you can call her Peach. That’s her business. But don’t call me Pops!”
“Okay, Daddy,” said Oprah, who came to see her ramrod father as an unbending martinet. “He used to tell me, ‘Listen, girl, if I say a mosquito can pull a wagon, don’t ask me no questions. Just hitch him up.’ ” Recalling her father for Toronto’s Starweek, she said, “I hated him and my stepmother, Zelma, as I was growing up.”
Vernon and Zelma started to transform Oprah into a “proper young lady,” and she hated that, too. “Every morning of my life my step-mother would check me out to make sure I’d picked out the right socks, that everything matched,” she told TV Guide. “When I weighed 70 pounds I had to wear a girdle and a slip every day. God forbid somebody should see through your skirt! What are they going to see? The outline of your leg, that’s all!”
Vernon saw his daughter as a wild runaway horse that had been let loose for five years. “When it came to discipline, hard was the only way I knew,” he said. Years later he wished he had parented with a little patience and more humor. “My own daddy could wring a hoot from the mourners’ bench,” Vernon said, “[but] Oprah had a way of keeping my blood up. If I pulled east, she’d tug west. If I pointed north, she was hell-bent on south. She wasn’t an unpleasant child. In fact, her company was a great joy to me. But she did have a problem with directions.”
In addition to doing household chores, Oprah was put to work in the small grocery store that Vernon operated next to his barbershop, where he posted a sign: “Attention Teenagers: If You Are Tired of Being Hassled by Unreasonable Parents, Now Is the Time for Action. Leave Home and Pay Your Own Way While You Still Know Everything.” Selling penny candy after school to poor neighborhood kids was a far cry from having milk and cookies served on silver trays by black maids in the homes of Nicolet students. “I hated working in that store,” Oprah said, “hated every minute of it.”
In the fall of 1968 she started school as a sophomore at East Nashville High, in the first class to officially integrate the school. “We were lily-white up to that point,” said Larry Carpenter, class of 1971, “but we were under court order that year to admit black students, and it was the best thing that ever happened to the school, and to the country, for that matter.”
As part of the seventy–thirty black minority, Oprah went unnoticed for most of her first year at East, unlike her arrival at Nicolet. She attended class every day but sat quietly in the back, a peculiar departure for someone who always sat up front and antagonized other students by knowing every answer and constantly waving her hand to ingratiate herself with the teachers.
“I could walk into any classroom and I was always the smartest kid in the class.… I was raised to believe that the lighter your skin, the better you were. I wasn’t light-skinned, so I decided to be the best and the smartest.”
When she brought home her first report card from East, Vernon was irate. “Troubled teen or not, I wasn’t having any of that. My expectations of her were a mountain most high. I told her, ‘If you were a C student, you could bring me C’s. You are not a C student! Hear me?’
“ ‘Yes, Daddy.’
“ ‘If you bring me any more C’s, I’m going to place heavy burdens on you.… Heavy