Free Oprah by Kitty Kelley Page A

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in 2007. “Otherwise, I would not have had this life that I’ve had.”
    Whether or not that belief is correct, Oprah made the clear choice that secrecy was her salvation, and she closed her past even to her closest friends. “I dated Oprah for two and a half years in high school,” said Anthony Otey. “That’s why I [was later] so stunned to learn that the girl I thought I knew so well had actually had a baby before I even met her. How was she able to suppress it?
    “We never had sex, not even on prom night. We agreed when we first started dating as fifteen-year-olds in our old neighborhood in Nashville that we would never go all the way. It was a matter of our Christian upbringing and our determination to make something of ourselves as adults.
    “In all the time we dated, she never mentioned a single word about any of this to me. She never spoke about her past. Oprah never talked about her mother, and she never told me that she had a brother and a sister.”
    Her teachers, too, were dumbfounded. “I taught her every day atschool and traveled with her through the state and around the country to speech tournaments,” said Andrea Haynes, “and I had no idea of her travail. When I heard that she had had a baby I felt very sorry that she had come from such a sad place….I can assure you that Oprah did not emit any symptoms of an emotionally disturbed child when I knew her.”
    Luvenia Harrison Butler, her best friend in those days, was not surprised. She recalled Oprah as great fun but very secretive. “She had so many secrets, dark secrets. I didn’t know what they were but [I knew] there were reasons Vernon was so strict, and believe me, he was strict. Even in girl talk Oprah was guarded….I know she seems to be so open with her audiences, but that’s just because she’s a good actress….I’m not saying she needs to tell everybody everything, but she’s the one who says she’s so open and honest and truthful about her life. Fact is, she only shares her personal stuff when forced to….For instance, she admitted her drug use on the air only when someone was set to tell all in an article, and her pregnancy only when her sister outed her.”
    Oprah recalled that pregnancy as “the shaming, most embarrassing, horrible thing” of her young life. She illustrated the disgrace with a story about a girl in her senior class who was barred from graduation because she had become pregnant. “[T]here was this big brouhaha whether she would even be allowed to…walk with the rest of the graduating class. And the decision was no, she could not walk with the rest of the class. So my entire life would have been different [if anyone had known I had had a baby]. Entirely different.”
    Her classmates do not recall the story that Oprah tells. “I never heard about anyone being pregnant and not allowed to graduate,” said Larry Carpenter, the East alumni representative for the class of 1971. “We were a big class, about three hundred, but that’s something that would’ve been known.”
    “Not so,” said Cynthia Connor Shelton. “I was in Oprah’s class at East, and I had a friend who was seven months pregnant our senior year and she graduated with us….Certainly there was a social stigma attached to unwed pregnancy, but not enough to deny a girl graduation.”
    Whether or not a pregnant student was barred from walking with the class at East Nashville High, Oprah’s story reflects her own fearabout her situation, which she knew could have drastically altered the life she wanted. So she wrapped herself in secrecy as a protective coating. For a churchgoing child there were Ten Commandments to live by, but no stone tablets about how to bury the past. Whether her pregnancy was the result of sexual molestation or promiscuity, it was something she felt she needed to hide.
    The power of her denial through the years became evident when she entered the Miss Black Nashville contest in 1972 and signed