Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [80]
“She said Vernita felt totally entitled.… She was just a greedy greenback.… But she got the big-time bucks because Oprah probably knew she would make her life a living hell if she didn’t [by selling stories to the tabloids].”
As generous as Oprah was to her mother—one Mother’s Day she arrived with a gift-wrapped box containing $100,000 in cash—she was still bitter toward Vernita for “giving me away,” and she ricocheted from resentment to gratitude over those motherless years. She understood that the lack of her mother’s unconditional love drove her to develop skills to get praise from others, but she also saw that she tried to fill her motherless hole with food as a substitute for love and comfort and security. It would be many years before she reckoned with the depth of her psychological damage.
“If [my mother] hadn’t given me up, I would be in deep trouble now,” she said. “I would have been barefoot and pregnant, had at least three kids by the time I was 20. No doubt about it. I would have been part of that whole ghetto mentality that’s waiting for somebody to do something for them.”
She was quite clear about what she thought of Vernita. “I don’t feel I owe anybody anything but my mother feels I do.… She says, ‘There are dues to pay.’ I barely knew her [when I was little].… That’s why it’s so hard now. My mother wants this whole wonderful relationship. She has another daughter and a son. And everyone now wants this close family relationship.… They want to pretend as though our past did not happen.”
Oprah occasionally derided her mother on the air, once telling her audience that Vernita had borrowed her BMW two years before and hadn’t returned it. She told Life magazine her mother cursed her as a child for being a bookworm, saying, “You think you’re better than the other kids.” She told Tina Turner her mother did not want her. “[I]t affected my self-esteem for years,” said Oprah. “It’s unnatural to not be wanted by your mother. That takes some overcoming.” She told BET’s Ed Gordon that she was hesitant to have children because of the poor mothering she’d received. “I would be afraid that I would make a lot of the mistakes that were made with me.”
Yet Vernita Lee defended herself as a mother. “I am a good mom,” she said. “I know I am a good mom. When my children were small, I took care of them. I dressed them very nice and I took them to Sunday school and they went to church every Sunday. And we did things together, as hard as times was for us. It was hard. But we made it.”
The strained relationship between Oprah and her mother became obvious to everyone who watched them on Oprah’s 1987 Mother’s Day show. “I could not hug her,” Oprah said later. “Oprah Winfrey who hugs everyone could not hug her own mother. But we have never hugged, we have never said, ‘I love you.’ ” By then Oprah had emotionally erased Vernita as her mother, relegating her to the horde of grabby relatives she said always had their hands out. “I think that Maya Angelou was my mother in another life,” Oprah said. “I love her deeply. Something is there between us. So fallopian tubes and ovaries do not a mother make.”
Eventually Oprah created a new family for herself, one that she felt she deserved and could claim with pride. In place of her welfare mother with three illegitimate children, she selected the celebrated poet and author, an autodidact with no formal education beyond high school, who claimed