Oprah_ A Biography Part 2

Oprah's grandfather Earlist Lee died in 1959, when Oprah was five years old. She recalls him only as a dark presence in her life. "I feared him....I remember him always throwing things at me or trying to shoo me away with his cane." Hattie Mae, then sixty and in ill health, could no longer care for her, so Oprah was sent to live with her twentyfive-year-old mother, who by then had given birth to another daughter, named Patricia Lee, born June 3, 1959. Patricia's father was listed years later on her death certificate as Frank Stricklen, although he and Vernita never married. Vernita and her baby were living in a rooming house run by the baby's G.o.dmother when Oprah arrived.

"Mrs. Miller [the landlady] didn't like me because of the color of my skin," Oprah recalled. "Mrs. Miller was a light-skinned black woman who did not like darker-skinned black people. And my half sister [was] light-skinned, and she was adored. It was not something that was ever said to me, but [it was] absolutely understood that she is adored because she is light-skinned and I am not."

Later, when she moved to Chicago, she expanded her views on skin color, talking about Harold Washington, the city's first African American mayor. "We're fudgies," she said, categorizing her race by color, and revealing a leitmotiv that influenced her selection of male and female friends over the years. "There are fudgies, gingerbreads and vanilla creams. Gingerbreads are the ones who, even though you know they're black, have all the features of whites....Vanilla creams are those who could pa.s.s if they wanted to, and then there's folks like me and the Mayor. No mistakin' us for anything but fudgies."

Oprah maintained that because of her dark skin she had to sleep on the porch in the back of the rooming house, while her light-skinned sister slept with her mother in Vernita's bedroom. She said that discrimination made her feel ugly. "White people never made me feel less," she said years later. "Black people made me feel less. I felt less in that house with Mrs. Miller. I felt less because I was too dark and my hair was too kinky....I felt like an outcast."

Katharine Esters responded sternly to Oprah's poignant memory. "This bothers me more than her corncob doll lies and her c.o.c.kroach lies, because it plays into the damaging discrimination practiced by our own people," she said. "I'm a dark-skinned woman, Oprah's grandfather Earless was black enough to be painted by a brush, and Oprah is as dark as a preacher's prayer book, but when she says things like that she reminds me of my cousin Frank, who did not wish to be what he was and discriminated among his kin, preferring the lighter-skinned to the darker-skinned folks.

"Oprah slept on the porch in the back of the rooming house only because Vernita had to take care of her baby and there was just one bedroom. That's it. Period. If Oprah was discriminated against because of her skin color, I'd tell you," said Mrs. Esters, a civil rights activist who worked for the Urban League in Milwaukee. "I believe in telling the truth--spiders, snakes, and all--because I believe some good can come from opening up dark secrets to the light....Oprah puts too much stock on color....I suppose that her wanting to be white makes her see things the way she does, but sleeping on the porch had nothing to do with her dark skin. The fact of the matter is that Oprah was no longer an only child when she came to Milwaukee. She was not the princess anymore or the center of everyone's attention. Her mother and the landlady fussed over the babies, not Oprah, and that was very hard for her."

Over the years Oprah's memories of growing up have become rife with disregard and discrimination. "The only photo I have of my grandmother she's holding a white child," she said at the age of fifty-one. Yet a published picture of Oprah's desk shows a photo of her grandmother with her arm draped lovingly around Oprah as a little girl, with no white child in sight. Yet Oprah recalled: "Every time she would ever talk about those white children there would be this sort of glow inside her....No one ever glowed when they saw me."

Less than a year after Oprah moved to Milwaukee to be with her mother, Vernita had a third child, Jeffrey Lee, on December 14, 1960. His father was listed years later on his death certificate as Willie Wright, the man Vernita eventually hoped to marry but never did. After Jeffrey's birth she moved into the small apartment of her cousin Alice Cooper, and lived for a while on welfare. Taking care of three children became so difficult that Vernita sent Oprah to live with Vernon Winfrey in Nashville. "Vernita's lifestyle was not ideal at that time," said Katharine Esters, who claimed Vernita spent her welfare money on clothes and cosmetics, "so sending Oprah away was a blessing for her."

"That was the beginning of shuttling her back and forth between my house in Nashville and her mother's house in Milwaukee," said Vernon Winfrey many years later.

"It was a mistake. King Solomon taught long ago that you can't divide a child."

Vernon, who married Zelma Myers in 1958, lived in a little brick house on Owens Street in East Nashville and worked for Vanderbilt University as a janitor. At that time, he still believed he was Oprah's father.

"So we welcomed Oprah and gave her a proper home with structure--schooling, regular visits to the library, a little bit of television, playtime, and church every single Sunday. I'd drive us to the Baptist church in my old 1950 Mercury and cover the seats to keep the lint off our clothes."

At church Oprah grabbed center stage. "She's never been a backseat person,"

Vernon said. "She always loved the limelight. One time she was a little louder than I wanted, and I told her, 'Honey, people see you when you're quiet, and they see you when you're loud. Nine times out of ten, you're better thought of when you're quiet.' I toned her down a little."

During the spring of 2008, Vernon Winfrey, then seventy-five and still working in the Nashville barbershop he'd opened in 1964, reflected wistfully on his daughter when she was seven and played in the backyard of his house. "I'd watch from the window as she and her little friends Lilly and Betty Jean played imaginary games. Those three would amuse themselves for hours, sitting in child-size chairs, which I placed in the speckled shade of our maple tree....I still have those chairs, by the way....From what I observed then, Lilly and Betty Jean didn't enjoy playing school as much as Oprah did. I think that's because she was always the teacher, always scolding her little playmates as she scrawled invisible lessons on a make-believe blackboard. Lilly and Betty Jean would sit attentively at imaginary desks, hoping against hope that Oprah didn't call their names during spelling bees. Can't say I much blamed them, because if they misspelled a word, there was trouble. Oprah would get her little switch, which was not at all imaginary, and spank the palms of their hands."

Oprah had learned from her grandmother how to punish.

"One day I confronted her," said Vernon. " 'Why don't you let your friends play the teacher sometimes?'

"She looked at me with the sweetest expression, all cute, and bewildered about how I could ask such a silly thing. 'Why, Daddy,' she informed me, 'Lilly and Betty Jean can't teach till they learn how to read.' "

Vernon related this incident almost exactly as it appeared in the 2007 book proposal he submitted to publishers. Working with the writer Craig Marberry, he had produced several sample chapters of an autobiography that he t.i.tled Things Unspoken. Things Unspoken.

"I wanted to write a book about my life--my mother and my father and their nine children and how we all came up in the South." As a black man born in Mississippi in 1933, Vernon faced challenges that he said his daughter would never know. "Oprah talks about Martin Luther King, and she can recite all his speeches, but she doesn't know anything about the struggle. I lived it. Oprah just got in on the fly up....She reaped the harvest Dr. King sowed....I can go back seventy years in that struggle, and I want to write about it....I know that Oprah's a part of my life, of course, and I did right by her, but Oprah is not all of my life, and I don't have to tell her everything I do. I'm not her boy.

I'm a grown man and I can do what I want as long as I stay at the side of the Lord. So, no, I didn't tell Oprah about my book beforehand."

During a public appearance in New York City in 2007, Oprah was stunned when a reporter asked about her father's plans to write a book. "That's impossible," she said. "I can a.s.sure you it's not true....The last person in the world to be doing a book about me is Vernon Winfrey. The last person."

Vernon smiled wryly at Oprah's reaction. "She doesn't understand that my book is not all about her, but that's what she and that girlfriend of hers thinks....When Oprah called me the next day she was just as mad as you please. She said, 'Daddy, are you really writing a book?' I told her yes. She was upset because she said she now looked like a liar to the reporters. She said I made her look like a fool.

"I said, 'Oprah, I'm ent.i.tled to tell my story, aren't I?' "

" 'Yes, Daddy, but it would have been nice if you had told me about it first.'

"Then Gayle King called me. 'Mr. Winfrey, how dare you do a book,' she said.

'No one cares about you. No one wants to read about you. The only reason anyone on earth would be interested in what you have to say is because of Oprah.' She called me here at the barbershop. I was standing right over there." He pointed to the gray phone on the wall. "I said to Gayle, 'Call my wife. She knows more about it than I do,' and I hung up on her.

"Gayle is nothing but a street heifer....I've never been talked to like that, so disrespectful, in my life. I told Oprah later the only reason I didn't cuss Gayle out right then and there and call her the word that begins with B B and sounds like and sounds like witch witch was because was because I was cutting a preacher's hair and didn't want to talk ugly in front of him. But I told Oprah I would have nothing more to do with Gayle King ever again.

"Oprah said, 'The people who care about me are watching out for me and protecting me.'

"I said, 'When we had our troubles when you were a teenager, I left everyone else out of it, and that's how it should be between you and me now.' "

A proud man, Vernon Winfrey chafed under the yoke of his daughter's control, and they did not speak again for quite some time. "That all happened in May of 2007," he said. "I was very upset, and I had a stroke a few months later. Took me three months of physical therapy to recover, and I've finally calmed down now, but I still feel the same way about that dirt hog Gayle. She called me back after she spoke to Oprah, but even then she did not apologize. She said she did not think she had been disrespectful to me, but she was not the recipient of her words. I was. And in her words she told me I was not worth anything and that my life counted for nothing."

After Oprah's public objection to his book proposal, Oprah's father said that several potential publishers had backed off. "They now want her permission before they will proceed...." He shook his head at the fear his daughter had instilled. "I've put the book aside for the time being because my cowriter is out of the country, but I intend to finish it...despite what Oprah says....

"It disappoints me that she has changed so much over the years. She's become too close to that woman Gayle, and she no longer believes in Jesus Christ as her savior.

That's just not how I raised her."

If Oprah had seen her father's sixty-two-page book proposal, she would have realized that it was, as he said, as much about his life as the sixth of nine children born to Elmore and Ella Winfrey as it was about raising Oprah. What would concern her, though, was what he wrote about her "secrets, dark secrets. Some I didn't discover till she was a grown woman, till it was too late." He also expressed regret for having to be stern and hard on her during her teenage years and for not expressing his love as effectively as his discipline.

Still, he continued to disapprove of the "dark secrets" he discovered about the little girl he had raised. "She may be admired by the world, but I know the truth. So does G.o.d and so does Oprah. Two of us remain ashamed." He pointed to the sign behind his barber chair as if he were sending his daughter a message: "Live So the Preacher Won't Have to Tell Lies at Your Funeral."

The television set in Winfrey's Barber Shop is no longer tuned to Oprah's show at 4:00 P.M. on weekdays the way it once was, but one of her early publicity photos, unsigned, remains taped to the mirror behind Vernon's chair, next to a photograph of his Yorkshire terrier, Fluff. When it was noted that the photo of Fluff gets pride of place over Oprah's photo, Vernon smiled slyly. "So it does," he said. "I just love that little dog."

Vernon's role as Oprah's revered father came to an end in the summer of 1963, when he drove her to Milwaukee to spend a few weeks with her mother. "I never saw that sweet little girl again," he said. "The innocent child that I knew in Nashville disappeared forever when I left her with her mother. I shed tears that day because I knew I was leaving her in a bad environment that was no place for a young child, but there was nothing I could do about it."

Oprah agreed at the end of the summer to stay with Vernita because her mother said she was going to get married and wanted to have a real family. Besides, Oprah's life with "Daddy" and "Mama Zelma" in Nashville had been a bit too regimented, with only an hour of television a day, and never on Sundays. Vernita promised Oprah all the television she wanted in Milwaukee, and, ironically, it was that little bribe that led to a life-changing moment for her daughter.

"I stopped wanting to be white when I was ten years old and saw Diana Ross and The Supremes perform on The Ed Sullivan Show, The Ed Sullivan Show, " Oprah said. "I was watching television " Oprah said. "I was watching television on the linoleum floor in my mother's apartment [on a Sunday night]....I'll never forget it....It was the first time I had ever seen a colored person wearing diamonds that I knew were real....I wanted to be Diana Ross....I had to be Diana Ross."

The phones had started ringing in the inner cities of Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and Milwaukee a few days before Christmas 1964: The Supremes were going to be on The Ed Sullivan Show, The Ed Sullivan Show, then the premier showcase for talent in America. then the premier showcase for talent in America.

"Colored girls" on prime-time television were like Yankees in Atlanta--enough to give Southerners the vapors and sponsors the bends. But Ed Sullivan, who had an integrationist booking policy, was not to be deterred. He had introduced Elvis Presley to television audiences in 1956, and had launched the Beatles in America earlier in 1964. He was determined to present what he called "three colored gifts" from Motown who had produced three number one hits that year. His decision came five months after President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, which put the federal government squarely behind the drive for racial equality in the country. Now Ed Sullivan was going to change the national mind-set.

Up to that point blacks had seen themselves portrayed on television primarily as scheming scalawags ( Amos and Andy Amos and Andy), wire-haired scamps (Buckwheat in Little Rascals Little Rascals and Our Gang Our Gang), or "yes, ma'am" maids and "no, sir" chauffeurs. To see themselves presented with beauty and grace and elegance would be revolutionary, and to be applauded by whites was almost unimaginable.

The Supremes appeared fourteen times on The Ed Sullivan Show The Ed Sullivan Show between 1964 between 1964 and 1969, but the impact of their first appearance, on December 27, 1964, cannot be overstated. It was a clarifying moment for the country as both ends of the racial spectrum came together to be entranced and entertained by three exquisite young women singing "Come See About Me."

"Many felt pride seeing The Supremes [that evening]," recalled Diahann Carroll, the first African American woman to star in her own television series ( Julia, Julia, 1968-1971). 1968-1971).

"Young people will have to understand, that period of dreams and civil rights taught all of us in entertainment how to find our stepping-stones. It taught us how to pull others up in a manner that was beneficial to all people."

As someone who started dreaming that night, Oprah never forgot how she felt watching The Supremes. "In those days, anytime you saw a black person on television, it was so rare that everybody called everybody else, saying: 'Colored people are on.' You'd miss the performance because by the time you called everyone, the act was over. I remember saying, 'What? A colored woman can look like that?' Another electrifying moment was seeing Sidney Poitier. I was watching the Academy Awards [in 1964] and Sidney Poitier won for Lilies of the Field. Lilies of the Field. That was the first time I ever saw a black man That was the first time I ever saw a black man get out of a limousine instead of driving one....I remember thinking, 'If a colored man could do that, I wonder what I can do.' He opened the door for me."

Symbolically, cymbals clashed, drums rolled, and trumpets blew throughout black America that year. It was a new beginning for people of color to see their own portrayed with style and sophistication on television. Motown Music had invested thousands of dollars grooming The Supremes for mainstream stardom--charm school, makeup lessons, splendid wigs, beaded gowns, sparkling jewelry--and the investment paid off. Among the thousands of black children watching Ed Sullivan Ed Sullivan that evening were a six-year-old boy that evening were a six-year-old boy and a ten-year-old girl, both hypnotized by the dazzling style of the lithe lead singer.

Each child would grow up to become a reflection of the glamour they saw in her that night. Michael Jackson in Gary, Indiana, and Oprah Winfrey in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, wanted nothing more in life than to be Diana Ross. She became their polestar.

The same year that The Supremes electrified America on television, Congress pa.s.sed the Economic Opportunity Act as part of the nation's "War on Poverty." The legislation was later criticized for inefficiency and waste, but many blacks benefited, especially through the Head Start program for preschool children and the Upward Bound Program for high-school students. One of those kissed by the affirmative action of Upward Bound was Oprah, then a student at Lincoln Middle School, which was considered "the melting pot" of Milwaukee. The program director, Eugene H. Abrams, had noticed her in the school cafeteria reading a book, and recommended her as one of six black students--three girls, three boys--to integrate Nicolet High School in the wealthy country club suburb of Fox Point.

Years later Oprah said that she had been given "a scholarship" to the privileged school, and was the only one in her cla.s.s selected for that honor. "I was in a situation where I was the only black kid, and I mean the only one, in a school of two thousand upper-middle-cla.s.s suburban Jewish kids. I would take the bus in the morning to school with the maids who worked in their homes. I had to transfer three times."

Being one of "the bus kids," as the other students called them, Oprah was noticed.

"She stood out from the crowd," said Irene Hoe, one of five Asian students at Nicolet and a senior when Oprah was a freshman. "She did not live in the predominantly affluent, mostly white suburban neighborhoods of Milwaukee, which fed their children to our high school....Back in those politically incorrect days...it might have been said that she did not 'belong.' "

No one recognized that displacement more acutely than Oprah, who suddenly saw how poor she was next to wealthy girls who wore different sweater sets every day of the week and had allowances for pizza, records, and milkshakes after school. "For the first time I understood that there was another side," she said. "All of a sudden the ghetto didn't look so good anymore.

"In 1968 it was real hip to know a black person, so I was very popular. The kids would all bring me back to their houses, pull out their Pearl Bailey alb.u.ms, bring out their maid from the back and say, 'Oprah, do you know Mabel?' They figured all blacks knew each other. It was real strange and real tough."

Mothers encouraged their daughters to invite "Opie" home after school. "Like I was a toy," she said. "They'd all sit around talking about Sammy Davis, Jr., like I knew him."

Oprah wanted to have money like the other kids, but her mother, working two jobs at the time, had none to spare. So Oprah began stealing from Vernita. "I started having some real problems," she said later. "I guess you could call me troubled--to put it mildly."

Her sister, Patricia, remembered Oprah stealing $200 from their mother, which was an entire week's pay. Another time she stole one of her mother's rings and p.a.w.ned it.

"Oprah said she'd taken the ring to have it cleaned. But Mom found the p.a.w.n ticket in a pillowcase and made Oprah get the ring back."

Her relatives recall Oprah as an out-of-control teenager who would do anything for money. At one point she wanted to get rid of her "ugly b.u.t.terfly bifocals." She asked her mother to buy her a new pair of octagonal gla.s.ses like the kids at Nicolet wore.

Vernita said she could not afford the expense. Oprah was determined to get the new gla.s.ses.

"I staged a robbery, broke my gla.s.ses and pretended I was unconscious and feigned amnesia. I stayed home from school one day and stomped the gla.s.ses on the floor into a million pieces. I pulled down the curtains, knocked over the lamps, and cut my left cheek enough to draw blood. I called the police, laid myself down on the floor, and waited for them to arrive."

Then, exactly as she had seen on an episode of Marcus Welby, M.D., Marcus Welby, M.D., she feigned she feigned amnesia. She showed the police a b.u.mp on her head but said she did not remember what had happened. The police called her mother, but Oprah pretended not to recognize Vernita, who was shaken until the police mentioned that the only thing broken during the robbery was a pair of gla.s.ses.

"Oprah was always a big actress," said her sister. "She had a wild imagination."

After becoming s.e.xually promiscuous, Oprah devised another way to make money. "She invited men over during the day while my mother was working," said Patricia. "Her boyfriends were all much older than her, about 19 or in their early 20s.

Whenever a guy arrived at our door, Oprah would give Popsicles to me and our younger brother Jeffrey and say, 'You two go out on the porch and play now.' Oprah then would go inside with her boyfriend....I didn't find out what Oprah was doing until I was older and she showed me how she did 'The Horse'--which is what she called the s.e.x act."

It took Patricia many years to realize that Oprah was selling "The Horse"--trading s.e.xual favors for money. Patricia's awareness of this information and willingness to turn it over to the media eventually led to a rift between the two sisters that would never fully heal, and in 1993 it would lead to one of Oprah's more momentous decisions when dealing with the publication of her autobiography.

Oprah has admitted to promiscuity during her adolescent years, saying she ran the streets and had s.e.x with any man who would have her because she wanted attention. She also said that she was continually molested by the men in her mother's house. "I was 3623-36 at age thirteen, which created a few problems. I was not allowed to talk to boys and they were everywhere....This happens in a lot of families where there's a single parent and the mother runs the family: there are boyfriends going in and out of the house and daughters particularly see this. Mothers say, 'Don't let some man do this. You keep your dress down! You do what I say!' When what the child sees is entirely different from what the mother is saying. I had that when I was a kid. 'Do as I say, not what I do.' But that doesn't work. Doesn't work."

Her family saw only a promiscuous teenager who threw herself at men, which is why they did not believe her when she finally told them about being s.e.xually molested.

They could not see her as a victim.

"I don't believe a bit of it," said her "aunt" Katharine many years later. "Oprah was a wild child running the streets of Milwaukee in those days, and not accepting discipline from her mother. She shames herself and her family to now suggest otherwise."

Mrs. Esters pointed to the timing of Oprah's revelation of s.e.xual abuse and suggested that she simply wanted publicity when she was taking her show national. "That story helped launch Oprah and make her what she is today," she said. "I don't hold with telling lies, but in this case I forgive Oprah because she has done so much for other people. Maybe this was the only way for a poor child to succeed and become rich. Now she does her good works to make her amends....No one in the family believes her stories [of s.e.xual abuse] but now that she's so rich and powerful everyone is afraid to contradict her. I'm not afraid because I'm not financially dependent on Oprah....Her audiences may believe her stories. Her family does not....Let's leave it at that."

For Oprah, like other victims of s.e.xual abuse, the burden of not being believed weighs as heavily as the shame of being molested. Most families cannot or will not face the defilement caused by a loved one or by their own complicity--intentional or unintentional--in the violation of a child they did not protect. Sadly, like her relatives, Oprah blamed herself, even as she was counseling others not to accept condemnation.

"All the years that I convinced myself I was healed, I wasn't. I still carried the shame and I unconsciously blamed myself for those men's acts. Something deep within me felt I must have been a bad little girl for those men to have abused me."

When school let out in the summer of 1968, Oprah went to Nashville to visit Vernon and Zelma, and was driven there by her favorite uncle, Trenton Winfrey, her father's closest brother. During the drive Trenton asked her if she had been dating boys.

"I said, 'Yeah, but it's really hard because all the boys want to do is French kiss.'

And immediately after the conversation about French kissing, he asked me to pull over to the side and take off my panties....All those years I thought that if I hadn't brought up the subject of French kissing, he wouldn't have done that, because he was my favorite uncle."

Oprah complained to her father and stepmother about her uncle, but they did not believe her then, and Trenton denied her story. Years later Vernon still seemed conflicted. "I know she feels that I didn't handle it well," he said, "[but] Trent was my closest brother. We were torn."

When Oprah returned to Milwaukee, she ran away from home and stayed on the streets for a week. "Mom was frantic and called all her friends looking for her," said her sister. "Mom didn't know if she was dead or alive."

Oprah joked about the incident years later as she recalled hustling Aretha Franklin, who was appearing in Milwaukee. When she saw the singer sitting in a limousine, Oprah threw herself into another drama. "I rushed up to her, started crying, said I was an abandoned child and needed money to return to Ohio. I liked the sound of Ohio. She gave me $100." Oprah, then fourteen years old, claims she went to a nearby hotel, took a room by herself, and spent the money drinking wine and ordering room service. Then she called the pastor of her mother's church and begged him to help her get back home.

"After I ran out of money I told the late Reverend Tully everything that was going on in my house and how bad I felt. So he took me back to my house and gave my mother a lecture, which really pleased me."

Her sister was ecstatic to see her, but Vernita was furious. After the pastor left, she picked up a small chair to beat Oprah, who, according to Patricia, "was crying and cowering. I was screaming and begging Mom, 'Please don't kill Oprah!' " Vernita finally put the chair down, but she insisted Oprah accompany her to the juvenile detention center.

"I remember going to the interview process where they treat you like you're already a known convict and thinking to myself, 'How in the world is this happening to me?' I was fourteen and I knew that I was a smart person; I knew I wasn't a bad person, and I remember thinking, 'How did this happen? How did I get here?' "

Vernita was told she would have to wait two weeks before Oprah could be processed. "I can't wait two weeks," said her mother.

"She wanted me out of the house that minute," said Oprah.

Back in the apartment, Vernita called Vernon in Nashville and told him he had to take over, but by then Vernon had realized he was not Oprah's birth father. Nine months before Oprah's birth in January 1954 he was in the service.

Knowing that Vernon and Zelma were unable to have children, Katharine Carr Esters called and urged Vernon to take Oprah. "I knew he wasn't her father but I told him, 'Claim her as your own. You and Zelma want a child, and Oprah needs help. Her mother can't handle her.'...I told him everything that Oprah had done, and he finally agreed to take her, but under strict conditions of discipline that she no longer go back and forth to Vernita and that he would be in charge. Vernita agreed....We were all there when Oprah left--her mother, her sister and brother and all of her cousins."

Patricia recalled her sister in tears at having to leave Milwaukee. "Oprah didn't want to go. She was crying and hugged me before she got into Vernon's car."

Reserved by temperament, Vernon had been shocked by the stories of Oprah's behavior, which he later described as "Oprah making herself available to men." Once inside his house on Arrington Street he sat her down at the kitchen table and laid down the law. He told her that he would rather see her dead and floating faceup in the c.u.mberland River than have her bring disgrace and shame on his family.

"No more halter tops, no more short shorts, and no more heavy eye makeup...You'll start dressing like a proper young lady."

"Okay, Pops," said Oprah, who now referred to Mama Zelma as "Peach."

Vernon nearly erupted. He wrote in his book proposal that Oprah's response smacked of disrespect. "I felt like my daughter dusted her shoes with my white hankie and stuffed it back in my pocket. There was something snide behind the new names...something ill-mannered."

He laid down more rules that Oprah was to follow: curfews, ch.o.r.es, homework.

"She didn't have to like them; she just had to obey them. 'If you run away, stay away.'

That's what I told her. You have to behave, behave as if you want to make something of yourself....That means no a.s.sociation with boys....And," he added, "I'm still Daddy. I'll always be Daddy. My wife says you can call her Peach. That's her business. But don't call me Pops!"

"Okay, Daddy," said Oprah, who came to see her ramrod father as an unbending martinet. "He used to tell me, 'Listen, girl, if I say a mosquito can pull a wagon, don't ask me no questions. Just hitch him up.' " Recalling her father for Toronto's Starweek, Starweek, she she said, "I hated him and my stepmother, Zelma, as I was growing up."

Vernon and Zelma started to transform Oprah into a "proper young lady," and she hated that, too. "Every morning of my life my step-mother would check me out to make sure I'd picked out the right socks, that everything matched," she told TV Guide. TV Guide. "When I "When I weighed 70 pounds I had to wear a girdle and a slip every day. G.o.d forbid somebody should see through your skirt! What are they going to see? The outline of your leg, that's all!"

Vernon saw his daughter as a wild runaway horse that had been let loose for five years. "When it came to discipline, hard was the only way I knew," he said. Years later he wished he had parented with a little patience and more humor. "My own daddy could wring a hoot from the mourners' bench," Vernon said, "[but] Oprah had a way of keeping my blood up. If I pulled east, she'd tug west. If I pointed north, she was h.e.l.l-bent on south. She wasn't an unpleasant child. In fact, her company was a great joy to me. But she did have a problem with directions."

In addition to doing household ch.o.r.es, Oprah was put to work in the small grocery store that Vernon operated next to his barbershop, where he posted a sign: "Attention Teenagers: If You Are Tired of Being Ha.s.sled by Unreasonable Parents, Now Is the Time for Action. Leave Home and Pay Your Own Way While You Still Know Everything." Selling penny candy after school to poor neighborhood kids was a far cry from having milk and cookies served on silver trays by black maids in the homes of Nicolet students. "I hated working in that store," Oprah said, "hated every minute of it."

In the fall of 1968 she started school as a soph.o.m.ore at East Nashville High, in the first cla.s.s to officially integrate the school. "We were lily-white up to that point," said Larry Carpenter, cla.s.s of 1971, "but we were under court order that year to admit black students, and it was the best thing that ever happened to the school, and to the country, for that matter."