Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [44]
Oprah’s friend, who became president of the League of Women Voters in Nashville, did not try to conceal her disappointment over the lost friendship. “I don’t think Oprah knows how much we admire her for all she’s done, especially for the little girls in South Africa.”
Perhaps for Oprah the price of surviving was to forget, and the down payment on dreams as big as hers meant dropping a guillotine on the past. She did return to Nashville in 2004, for the fiftieth anniversary of WTVF-TV, and appeared on television to congratulate NewsChannel 5, but she did not come back three years later for Chris Clark’s retirement party. “We were all there,” said one former coworker. “Jimmy Norton cut short a church mission in New Orleans to be on hand, and Ruth Ann Leach flew in from New York City. Even the governor was there, but Oprah didn’t show.”
Her absence surprised many. “We have always been a family at the station, and Chris was on the air there for forty years, probably a record for any anchorman in the country, which is why his retirement party was a big deal,” said Jimmy Norton. “So I think everyone expected Oprah would be there. After all, Chris had given her her big break.… But thirty years had passed and … well … Oprah has changed.… She’s not the same sweet nineteen-year-old kid we used to know.… She did invite Chris to her big splashy fiftieth birthday party earlier that same year, and sent a plane for him and all, so maybe she felt she had done enough for him, I don’t know.… I won’t say she wouldn’t come to his retirement party. I’ll just say she didn’t come.”
COUNTEE CULLEN, a leading poet of the Harlem Renaissance, wrote “Incident,” his most famous poem, about what happened to him as a child:
Once riding in old Baltimore
Heart-filled, head-filled with glee.
I saw a Baltimorean
Keep looking straight at me.
Now I was eight and very small,
And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, but he poked out
His tongue and called me “nigger.”
I saw the whole of Baltimore
From May until December;
Of all the things that happened there
That’s all that I remember.
Baltimore had changed since that poem was published in 1925, but even with a 55 percent black population, its attempts at integration were often hesitant and halting. Situated north of the Confederacy, south of the Mason-Dixon Line, and in the shadow of Washington, D.C., the city produced world-renowned figures such as Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Post, Upton Sinclair, H. L. Mencken, Babe Ruth, Cab Calloway, Billie Holiday, and Thurgood Marshall. By the time Oprah Winfrey arrived in the Bicentennial summer of 1976, Baltimore was known as “Charm City,” after a gimmick to lure tourists with charm bracelets. The ad campaign was launched ten days into a garbage strike that was exacerbated by a 110-degree heat wave that baked the city in a gagging stench and triggered riots requiring the deployment of state troopers in gas masks.
“It took me a year to become charmed by Baltimore,” Oprah said, unimpressed by the city’s historic row houses. “I didn’t understand why they were all stuck together.… [And] the first time I saw the downtown area I got so depressed that I called my daddy in Nashville and burst into tears. In Nashville you had a yard, even if you didn’t have a porch. But the houses on Pennsylvania Avenue [in Baltimore] had neither. I picked Columbia for the grass and trees.”
A lovely verdant suburb, Columbia, Maryland, was designed in 1967 to look like a village spread