Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [96]
“This is a real homecoming,” she told the three hundred people standing on a small portion of dirt road that had been named in her honor. “It is a deeply humbling experience to come back to the place where it all started. No one ever goes very far in life without remembering where they came from.”
Her grandmother’s small wooden shack had long ago been chopped down for firewood, and the outhouse had disappeared into decades of underbrush. There was no trace of the pretty blue hydrangeas that Hattie Mae had grown or the cow she kept to give the family milk. Only the small plot of land remained, which her children had inherited. They had debated opening a gift shop for people who wanted to see where Oprah Winfrey had grown up, but with it being three miles outside the city limits of Kosciusko, there wasn’t enough tourism to support the idea. Instead, they erected a sign on the property:
• FIRST HOME SITE OF OPRAH WINFREY •
On January 29, 1954, Oprah Winfrey was born in a wood frame house located on this site. She resided here as a child before moving to Milwaukee at age 6. Within walking distance is the church where she made her first appearance in an Easter citation.
She grew in the information/entertainment industry to become the world’s foremost TV talk show host with a daily audience in the millions. At the same time she never forgot or overlooked her heritage and has been a regular support of folks back home as well as a role model to much of America.
With photographers trailing her and cameramen on either side, Oprah made her way to the church where her family had placed another sign: “Oprah Winfrey Faced First Audience Here.”
“The church was my life,” she recalled. “Baptist Training Union. Every black child in the world who grew up in the church knows about BTU. You did Sunday School, you did the morning service, which started at 11 and didn’t end until 2:30, you had dinner on the ground in front of the church, and then you’d go back in for the 4 o’clock service. It was forever, oh, it was forever. It was how you spent your life.”
She walked across the parched grass and into the humble cemetery next to the church, where five generations of her maternal ancestors lay buried. With Vernon on one side and Vernita on the other, she looked like she was flanked by Jack Sprat, who ate no fat, and his wife, who ate no lean. (Vernon would later say, “Oprah is definitely her mother’s daughter in that respect. The women in her family are all heavy, very heavy.”) They all bowed their heads for a few moments in front of two raised blocks of stone the size of shoe boxes on a sliver of granite:
HATTIE MAE EARLEST LEE
APRIL 15, 1900 JUNE 16, 1883
FEBRUARY 27, 1963 DECEMBER 29, 1959
There are far more impressive grave sites than the ones for Oprah’s grandparents, but as Katharine Carr Esters explained, it was what Hattie Mae’s children could afford from the Davidson Marble and Granite Works in Kosciusko. “Poor black folks save their whole lives to buy these tombstones,” she said. The name of Oprah’s grandfather Earlist is misspelled on the gravestone. “Suzie Mae [his daughter and Oprah’s aunt] spelled it the way she knew,” said Mrs. Esters. “He didn’t read or write, so he wouldn’t have been much help.”
The cemetery, a small field of scrubby grass filled with granite stones the size of For Sale signs, is sprinkled with a few pyramid towers and a couple of large crosses banked by plastic flowers, but most of the markers are modest. One is particularly joyful: a model of a coffin with an aluminum cover that reads, “Gone Fishing in Crystal Clear Water.”
Oprah paid homage to her grandmother on that visit. “It was not in any words she said, it was just the way she lived. She instilled in me that I could do whatever I wanted to do, that I could be whatever I wanted to be, that I could go wherever I wanted to go.” This was for