Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [30]
Vernon Winfrey was not impressed by her victory. “Any dog in the street can be popular,” he said. “Who was voted Most Likely to Succeed?” He had not encouraged Oprah to run for Miss East Nashville High or Miss Wool, and he was unsympathetic when she lost both contests. He didn’t care that she wasn’t homecoming queen, tulip queen, prom queen, or even a cheerleader. He was disappointed that she was not in the National Achievement Scholarship Program for Outstanding Negro Students, because he wanted her to graduate as valedictorian, but he settled for the good grades that put her into the National Honor Society. Tapping her on the head, he said, “Get something up there that no one can take away from you.”
From the beginning he and Zelma insisted she go to the library once a week, choose a book, and write a book report for them, which exposed Oprah to the lives of Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and Fannie Lou Hamer, and to the poetry of Langston Hughes and Maya Angelou. “Not only did I have homework from school, but homework at home,” said Oprah. “Plus, I was only allowed an hour a day to watch television, and that hour was always before Leave It to Beaver came on! I hated that.”
She complained bitterly and constantly about her father’s strictness. “Vernon was a tough old bird,” said Gary Holt, “and he made sure he knew where she was every minute of the day.… There was not much socializing between the races in those days, but if it had been acceptable, Oprah and I might have gotten together.… We were great friends and shared the same strong Christian beliefs—then.”
Oprah wrote in Holt’s yearbook:
You have showed me more by your actions, by the way you live from day to day, that there is truly only One Way, Jesus Christ! And that without Him taking control, without Him running the whole show, life is just an endless go-round with no meaning.
“Interracial dating was really not tolerated when we were in high school,” Holt said, “but Oprah wanted to pull a fast one on Vernon. So she invited me to her house and made him think I was her date. Vernon was stunned when he opened the door and saw me standing there. He was cordial but obviously concerned about a white boy calling on his daughter. It was like Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and I was Sidney Poitier. Oprah made him sweat for a while; then she started laughing and told him we were working on plans for the prom.”
Oprah and her black friends teased their white speech teacher in the same way. “If we were in a department store or a restaurant, they would yell at me from across the room: ‘Hey, Mama. Come on over here.’ Then they’d roar with laughter when all the white people turned and saw that I was their mama.” Ms. Haynes frequently drove her forensic students to tournaments in the state in her little red Mustang. Once, to get an early-morning start, she suggested Oprah spend the night and share a bedroom with her younger sister, who was visiting. “My sister was coming out of the shower and Oprah was talking on the phone to one of her friends: ‘Yeah, she’s in the shower right now,’ she said. ‘You know how these white girls love to wash their hair. All the time washing their hair.’ ”
The struggle for civil rights had hit Nashville hard in the 1960s, with boycotts, sit-ins, protests, demonstrations, and marches—all part of the racial turbulence rumbling across the South in those years. By the time Oprah was in high school, affirmative action was taking hold to give blacks, so long denied, a lift toward equal opportunity.
As the first black student body officer at East, and someone known in all the black churches of Nashville, Oprah was selected as one of the delegates to the 1971 White House Conference on Children and Youth. The director,