Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [35]
Understandably, Oprah engendered bitterness among some TSU classmates, who dismissed her comments about the school as complete fabrications by someone trying to ingratiate herself with a white audience. “TSU was not like what Oprah said it was—maybe it was in the early sixties, but not when we were there,” said Barbara Wright, who, like Oprah, was from the class of ’75. “I came from the North because I wanted to go to a historically black college. We all wore Afro puffs in those days, like Angela Davis, but we were not marching in the streets.” Known for her raised fist and struggle for black liberation, Davis, a former UCLA philosophy professor, made international news in 1970 when her gun was linked to the murder of a white judge in a courtroom battle that killed four people. She fled the jurisdiction but was arrested, detained, and harassed. After awaiting trial for twenty-two months, she was finally exonerated by an all-white jury in one of the most famous trials in U.S. history.
“We were real traditional kids who wanted the college experience of being away from home, living on campus, and joining a sorority,” said Barbara Wright. “Oprah was not a part of our college life at all, probably because she was grown beyond her years, as we all found out later. How are you going to be friends with those who haven’t experienced such? Also, Oprah was a townie who did not live on campus and did not get asked to join a sorority. Whenever she was around, she was hanging out at Fisk.”
Oprah was drawn to Fisk like a hummingbird to sugar water. “She would go there every chance she got,” said Sheryl Harris Atkinson, another TSU classmate. “We took a speech and communication class together as freshmen. Speech was her major; mine was education, but the class was a required course for both of us. There were fifteen in the class, and Oprah sat right next to me. ‘You seem really sweet and so I’m going to help you become a better communicator,’ she said. She mentored me in that class. We were peers, but she decided that I was her student, probably because I was the opposite of her. I’m not verbally aggressive or assertive. She would follow me around. ‘I’m behind you,’ she’d yell in the hall or on the stairs. ‘I’m following you.’ She was determined to be my friend. I was considered a pretty girl back then, and that’s why she wanted to befriend me. She knew I had been recruited by American Airlines, which was a big deal at that time. They were going to use me in their advertising commercials. So Oprah figured, ‘I’m going to get close to her.’ It was a ‘pretty girl’ thing. Nothing to do with any accomplishment or my personality. Just how I looked.”
For all her rampaging self-confidence, Oprah later admitted that her self-image was frayed around the edges. “I remember that every single month, on the day Seventeen magazine came out, I’d wait by the newsstand for the delivery truck. They’d throw a stack of magazines off, and I’d be there to buy the first copy and read all the beauty tips. I mean, my god, the idea of being a pretty girl! I thought if I could just be pretty, my life would be fine. So I’d look at the models and at every makeup trick there was and I’d try them all. I even ironed my hair. Here I was, a negro girl who had no business ironing anything but her shirt, and I was ironing my hair.”
Oprah’s first cousin, Jo Baldwin, a vice president at Harpo, Inc., from 1986 to 1988, remembered how upset Oprah was when Jo attracted the attention of Bryant Gumbel, and Arthur Ashe stopped his limousine on Madison Avenue to ask her name. “Oprah said, ‘I get tired of men looking at you all the time.… I would give half my fortune to look like you.’ ” More than twenty years later, Jo Baldwin laughed as she recalled her response.