Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [28]
Having had a lifetime of “bad jobs, low-paying jobs,” Vernon emphasized to Oprah the need for getting an education. “She complained sometimes about other children dressing better than she dressed,” he said. “And I said to her, ‘You get something here’ ”—he tapped his head—“ ‘and you can dress like you want to in days to come.’ ”
At school Oprah joined the National Forensic League and worked closely with Ms. Haynes on dramatic interpretations to prepare for competitions. The goal was to win the Tennessee State Forensic Tournament and qualify for the nationals. By her junior year she was the school’s best entry.
Again enacting the role of the Preacher, who tells the story of the Apocalypse from God’s Trombones, she won the first-place dramatics trophy on March 21, 1970. “It’s like winning an Academy Award,” she told her school newspaper. “I prayed before I competed and said, ‘Now, God, you just help me tell them about this [The Judgment Day]. They need to know about the Judgment. So help me tell them.” Then, as she had seen Oscar winners do on television, she said, “I want to thank God, Miss Haynes, and Lana [Lott], also Paula Stewart for telling me she wouldn’t speak to me anymore if I didn’t win.” After winning at the state level, Oprah went to the nationals in Overland, Kansas, but she was eliminated before the quarterfinals.
That same year she was one of twelve finalists sponsored by the Black Elks Club of Nashville, a service organization formally known as the Improved Benevolent Protective Order of Elks of the World.
“I can’t remember what I said but my topic [for the two-and-a-half-minute speech] was ‘The Negro, The Constitution, and The United States.’ I delivered it in front of 10,000 people in Philadelphia and I felt really comfortable up there. I had always worried whether my slip was hanging down whenever I got up to speak but in front of 10,000 people you realize nobody can see if it’s hanging down. You can’t get scared when it’s a sea of people everywhere you look.”
Oprah won the competition at the Seventy-first Grand Lodge Convention, which honored Mayor Charles Evers of Fayette, Mississippi, with its highest award. The mayor was the older brother of Medgar Evers, the civil rights worker murdered in 1963 by a white supremacist.
While the Black Elks were meeting in Philadelphia, the white Elks met in San Francisco and voted to keep their “whites only” membership requirement. They maintained that God did not make a single black man acceptable to their “brotherhood.” At the time, a spokesman for the white Elks said their discussion, barred to the press, had been “amicable” and “in the spirit of brotherly love.”
The next year, Oprah competed in the Tennessee State Forensic Tournament, again won first place, and went to the 1971 nationals at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. “I don’t recall any other black student at the nationals that year,” said Andrea Haynes, “and there certainly weren’t any among the finalists. Oprah was the only one. She performed and won almost every single day of that week, ending up in the top five.”
During a five-hour break between presentations, Oprah went shopping in San Francisco and bought a silk scarf for her teacher, who recalled the incident with delight. “She was so impressed that she had paid fifteen dollars for that scarf, and so impressed that she had bought it at Saks Fifth Avenue.” The scarf was a splurge for a seventeen-year-old girl from Nashville, Tennessee, who, in 1971, spent seventy-two cents for two pieces of Minnie Pearl fried chicken.
Losing the national tournament disappointed Oprah, who had presented a stirring reading from Margaret Walker’s novel, Jubilee, the black version of Gone With the Wind, in which a female slave named Vyry is doused with urine by the slave master’s wife, who is jealous of her mother. Vyry is later