Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [25]
He explained that “heavy burdens” were biblical weights for a daughter he saw drifting aimlessly in 1968, who had announced that she wanted to be a hippie.
“She was only fourteen, but I didn’t care if she were forty. No child of mine was going to stick wildflowers in her hair and light that Hindu incense—or light any other nonsense. Oh, no. Not in my house! Maybe it was a costume thing. Maybe the tie-dyed dashikis and bell-bottom pants enchanted her, the sandals and beaded necklaces. Maybe the hippie life looked fun, fashionable. But I knew better. A life of drugs and sexual freedom would bring all her promise to ruin.”
The hippie phase passed, but Oprah continued to drift. “I talked to her about her studies,” said Vernon. “ ‘What happened to you, Oprah? You used to love school. You used to love to lead the class.’ ”
He recalled her sad response: “School was fun when I was little. Things are different now.”
That year, during the winter, Oprah began wearing her heavy coat in the house and complaining of being cold. When her legs and ankles swelled over her shoes and her belly looked distended, her stepmother took her to a doctor, who told Oprah what she already knew. She was pregnant.
“Having to go home and tell my father was the hardest thing I ever did,” Oprah said later. “I wanted to kill myself.” She admitted she had spent half her time in denial and the other half trying to hurt herself to lose the baby. After her pregnancy she told her father what his brother Trent had done to her, and that he could be the baby’s father. “Everybody in the family sort of shoved it under a rock,” Oprah told Ebony’s Laura Randolph. “Because I had already been involved in sexual promiscuity they thought if anything happened, it had to be my fault and because I couldn’t definitely say that he was the father of the child, the issue became ‘Is he the father?’ not the abuse.… I wasn’t the kind of kid who would persist in telling until someone believes you. I didn’t think enough of myself to keep telling.”
For Vernon, having a daughter with a child out of wedlock was considered so shameful that he and his wife considered getting Oprah an abortion or sending her away to have the baby and then putting it up for adoption. “We thought about it all and then I just decided whenever it comes I’ll just have me a grandson or granddaughter.”
The stress of having to tell her father and stepmother that she was pregnant sent Oprah into labor in her seventh month. On the evening of February 8, 1969, a few days after her fifteenth birthday, she gave birth to a baby boy in Hubbard Hospital at the all-black Meharry Medical College. Her name appears on the birth certificate as Orpah Gail Lee, not Oprah Winfrey. She named her little boy Vincent Miquelle Lee.
“He was premature and born very ill,” recalled Vernon. “They kept him in an incubator because he was having such a tough time.” Oprah, who stayed in the hospital only two days, said she was psychologically disconnected from herself and never saw her child. The baby died one month and eight days after he was born, and his body was given to Meharry Medical College.
“I don’t know what happened after the baby died,” said Vernon. “I don’t know what they did with the body—whether they used it in experiments or what. We tried to keep the fact of the baby quiet, even within the family. There was no funeral, no death notice.”
Vernon did call Vernita, who came to Nashville to be with Oprah for a week, but few others knew what had happened. “Oprah never talked about her lost baby,” said her sister, Patricia. “It was a deep family secret that was almost never discussed within the family.” In 1990, Patricia, in desperate need of drug money, sold the secret to the tabloids for $19,000.
When Vernon told Oprah her baby had died, he said, “This is your second chance. We were prepared, Zelma and I, to take this baby and let you continue your schooling, but God has chosen to take this baby and so I think God is giving you a second chance, and if I were you, I would use it.” They never said another word