Free Oprah by Kitty Kelley Page B

an affidavit swearing she had “never conceived a child.” During a 1986
Oprah
show on racism, a white man said to her, “You [black people] took over Chicago….In twenty years, Chicago became eighty percent black…so you have to be breeding.” Oprah said, “I haven’t bred one person.” And in 1994 when she hosted a show titled “Is There Life After High School?” she asked a panel of five former classmates from East to relate the most humiliating moment from their high-school years. Each gave an example of adolescent mortification, which made Oprah laugh. “I did not have any embarrassing moments in high school,” she said. “Nothing humiliating.”
    After the pregnancy Vernon had tightened the reins on his “wild runaway horse” and led her back to the stable, where, slightly tamed but still spirited, she started her run for the roses. “I became the high-school state champion in speaking and winning drama contests, trying to prove myself, prove that I was a good girl,” she said.
    A week after giving birth, and almost a month before her baby died, Oprah pulled on her knee-highs, ribboned her hair into two ponytails, and returned to East Nashville High, where she began to reinvent herself. Gone was the sullen student with swollen ankles crouched in the back row wearing a baggy sweater. In her place was a bright-eyed, energetic sophomore with relentless confidence who demanded to be recognized beyond the confines of her school and her church.
    Andrea Haynes, who taught Oprah speech, drama, and English at East, recalled their meeting in the spring of 1969. “I still remember her bounding into my classroom, saying, ‘Are you Miss Haynes? Well, I’m Oprah Gail Winfrey.’ ” She later announced that she was going to be an actress—“a movie star.” She did not say she
wanted
to be a star; shedeclared firmly she was
going
to be a star. “I’ve got to change my name,” she told Ms. Haynes. “Nobody has a name like Oprah. I could go as Gail. I’ve already told my family to call me Gail.”
    The teacher immediately saw a student with marquee ambitions. “You stick with Oprah,” she said. “It’s a unique name and you have a unique talent.”
    On her own, Oprah started making a name for herself in the black churches around Nashville after Ms. Haynes introduced her to readings from
God’s Trombones: Eight Negro Sermons in Verse,
by James Weldon Johnson. “I used to do them for churches all over the city,” said Oprah. “You sort of get known for that.”
    Gary Holt, the former student body president of East, remembered her performing at the Eastland Baptist Church on Gallatin Road. “She did a reading from a Negro spiritual in which she was the Preacher; she delivered a sermon with that great big voice of hers, and she was wonderful.”
    Those performances earned Oprah a trip to Los Angeles to speak to other church groups. During that time, she toured Hollywood’s Walk of Fame in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, which further fired her fantasies. “When she came back, she said, ‘Daddy, I got down on my knees there and ran my hand along all those stars on the street and I said to myself,
One day, I’m going to put my own star among these stars,
’ ” said Vernon. “That was the foreshadowing I had that she would one day be famous.”
    Oprah did not hide her ambitions. In junior high in Milwaukee, when she filled out one of those “Where Will I Be in Twenty Years?” forms, she checked “Famous.” She said, “I always knew I’d do great things in my life. I just didn’t know what.”
    “She knew what she wanted very early in life,” said Anthony Otey. “She said she wanted to be a movie star and she was willing to put aside a lot of things.”
    “She was driven, even back then,” said Gary Holt, who considered Oprah, an only child who was always well dressed, to be one of the more privileged in their class. Ironically, at East High she looked like one of the students