Oprah_ A Biography Part 3

As part of the seventy-thirty black minority, Oprah went unnoticed for most of her first year at East, unlike her arrival at Nicolet. She attended cla.s.s every day but sat quietly in the back, a peculiar departure for someone who always sat up front and antagonized other students by knowing every answer and constantly waving her hand to ingratiate herself with the teachers.

"I could walk into any cla.s.sroom and I was always the smartest kid in the cla.s.s....I was raised to believe that the lighter your skin, the better you were. I wasn't lightskinned, so I decided to be the best and the smartest."

When she brought home her first report card from East, Vernon was irate.

"Troubled teen or not, I wasn't having any of that. My expectations of her were a mountain most high. I told her, 'If you were a C student, you could bring me C's. You are not a C student! Hear me?'

" 'Yes, Daddy.'

" 'If you bring me any more C's, I'm going to place heavy burdens on you....Heavy burdens.' "

He explained that "heavy burdens" were biblical weights for a daughter he saw drifting aimlessly in 1968, who had announced that she wanted to be a hippie.

"She was only fourteen, but I didn't care if she were forty. No child of mine was going to stick wildflowers in her hair and light that Hindu incense--or light any other nonsense. Oh, no. Not in my house! Maybe it was a costume thing. Maybe the tie-dyed das.h.i.+kis and bell-bottom pants enchanted her, the sandals and beaded necklaces. Maybe the hippie life looked fun, fas.h.i.+onable. But I knew better. A life of drugs and s.e.xual freedom would bring all her promise to ruin."

The hippie phase pa.s.sed, but Oprah continued to drift. "I talked to her about her studies," said Vernon. " 'What happened to you, Oprah? You used to love school. You used to love to lead the cla.s.s.' "

He recalled her sad response: "School was fun when I was little. Things are different now."

That year, during the winter, Oprah began wearing her heavy coat in the house and complaining of being cold. When her legs and ankles swelled over her shoes and her belly looked distended, her stepmother took her to a doctor, who told Oprah what she already knew. She was pregnant.

"Having to go home and tell my father was the hardest thing I ever did," Oprah said later. "I wanted to kill myself." She admitted she had spent half her time in denial and the other half trying to hurt herself to lose the baby. After her pregnancy she told her father what his brother Trent had done to her, and that he could be the baby's father.

"Everybody in the family sort of shoved it under a rock," Oprah told Ebony Ebony's Laura Randolph. "Because I had already been involved in s.e.xual promiscuity they thought if anything happened, it had to be my fault and because I couldn't definitely say that he was the father of the child, the issue became 'Is he the father?' not the abuse....I wasn't the kind of kid who would persist in telling until someone believes you. I didn't think enough of myself to keep telling."

For Vernon, having a daughter with a child out of wedlock was considered so shameful that he and his wife considered getting Oprah an abortion or sending her away to have the baby and then putting it up for adoption. "We thought about it all and then I just decided whenever it comes I'll just have me a grandson or granddaughter."

The stress of having to tell her father and stepmother that she was pregnant sent Oprah into labor in her seventh month. On the evening of February 8, 1969, a few days after her fifteenth birthday, she gave birth to a baby boy in Hubbard Hospital at the allblack Meharry Medical College. Her name appears on the birth certificate as Orpah Gail Lee, not Oprah Winfrey. She named her little boy Vincent Miquelle Lee.

"He was premature and born very ill," recalled Vernon. "They kept him in an incubator because he was having such a tough time." Oprah, who stayed in the hospital only two days, said she was psychologically disconnected from herself and never saw her child. The baby died one month and eight days after he was born, and his body was given to Meharry Medical College.

"I don't know what happened after the baby died," said Vernon. "I don't know what they did with the body--whether they used it in experiments or what. We tried to keep the fact of the baby quiet, even within the family. There was no funeral, no death notice."

Vernon did call Vernita, who came to Nashville to be with Oprah for a week, but few others knew what had happened. "Oprah never talked about her lost baby," said her sister, Patricia. "It was a deep family secret that was almost never discussed within the family." In 1990, Patricia, in desperate need of drug money, sold the secret to the tabloids for $19,000.

When Vernon told Oprah her baby had died, he said, "This is your second chance.

We were prepared, Zelma and I, to take this baby and let you continue your schooling, but G.o.d has chosen to take this baby and so I think G.o.d is giving you a second chance, and if I were you, I would use it." They never said another word about the tragedy. "We didn't talk about it then," Vernon said in 2008. "We don't discuss it now."

Three.

SPRINTING FORWARD, Oprah blocked out her pregnancy, confident that no one would ever find out. "I went back to school and not a soul knew. n.o.body," she told the historian 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 s.e.x, 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 at school 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 a.s.sure 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 embarra.s.sing, horrible thing" of her young life. She ill.u.s.trated the disgrace with a story about a girl in her senior cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s. And the decision was no, she could not walk with the rest of the cla.s.s.

So my entire life would have been different [if anyone had known I had had a baby].

Entirely different."

Her cla.s.smates 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 cla.s.s of 1971. "We were a big cla.s.s, about three hundred, but that's something that would've been known."

"Not so," said Cynthia Connor Shelton. "I was in Oprah's cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s at East Nashville High, Oprah's story reflects her own fear about 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 s.e.xual 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 an affidavit swearing she had "never conceived a child." During a 1986 Oprah Oprah show on racism, a white man said to her, "You 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 t.i.tled "Is There Life After High School?" she asked a panel of five former cla.s.smates from East to relate the most humiliating moment from their highschool years. Each gave an example of adolescent mortification, which made Oprah laugh. "I did not have any embarra.s.sing 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 soph.o.m.ore 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 cla.s.sroom, 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 wanted to be a star; to be a star; she declared firmly she was going going to be a star. "I've got to change my name," she told to be a star. "I've got to change my name," she told Ms. Haynes. "n.o.body 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 G.o.d's Trombones: G.o.d's Trombones: Eight Negro Sermons in Verse, by James Weldon Johnson. "I used to do them for 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, One day, I'm going to put my own star among these stars, ' " said ' " 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 cla.s.s.

Ironically, at East High she looked like one of the students she used to envy at Nicolet.

"You've got to understand that East was lower, lower, lower middle cla.s.s," he said. "Most of us--black and white--were poor kids whose parents, if they worked at all, had bluecollar jobs. Vernon Winfrey had his own business--being a barber is a good cash business--and he also owned his own house. So he was definitely middle cla.s.s to us."

Having had a lifetime of "bad jobs, low-paying jobs," Vernon emphasized to Oprah the need for getting an education. "She complained sometimes about other children dressing better than she dressed," he said. "And I said to her, 'You get something here' "--he tapped his head--" 'and you can dress like you want to in days to come.' "

At school Oprah joined the National Forensic League and worked closely with Ms. Haynes on dramatic interpretations to prepare for compet.i.tions. The goal was to win the Tennessee State Forensic Tournament and qualify for the nationals. By her junior year she was the school's best entry.

Again enacting the role of the Preacher, who tells the story of the Apocalypse from G.o.d's Trombones, G.o.d's Trombones, she won the first place dramatics trophy on March 21, 1970. "It's she won the first place dramatics trophy on March 21, 1970. "It's like winning an Academy Award," she told her school newspaper. "I prayed before I competed and said, 'Now, G.o.d, you just help me tell them about this [The Judgment Day]. They need to know about the Judgment. So help me tell them." Then, as she had seen Oscar winners do on television, she said, "I want to thank G.o.d, Miss Haynes, and Lana [Lott], also Paula Stewart for telling me she wouldn't speak to me anymore if I didn't win." After winning at the state level, Oprah went to the nationals in Overland, Kansas, but she was eliminated before the quarterfinals.

That same year she was one of twelve finalists sponsored by the Black Elks Club of Nashville, a service organization formally known as the Improved Benevolent Protective Order of Elks of the World.

"I can't remember what I said but my topic [for the two-and-a-half-minute speech]

was 'The Negro, The Const.i.tution, and The United States.' I delivered it in front of 10,000 people in Philadelphia and I felt really comfortable up there. I had always worried whether my slip was hanging down whenever I got up to speak but in front of 10,000 people you realize n.o.body can see if it's hanging down. You can't get scared when it's a sea of people everywhere you look."

Oprah won the compet.i.tion at the Seventy-first Grand Lodge Convention, which honored Mayor Charles Evers of Fayette, Mississippi, with its highest award. The mayor was the older brother of Medgar Evers, the civil rights worker murdered in 1963 by a white supremacist.

While the Black Elks were meeting in Philadelphia, the white Elks met in San Francisco and voted to keep their "whites only" members.h.i.+p requirement. They maintained that G.o.d did not make a single black man acceptable to their "brotherhood."

At the time, a spokesman for the white Elks said their discussion, barred to the press, had been "amicable" and "in the spirit of brotherly love."

The next year, Oprah competed in the Tennessee State Forensic Tournament, again won first place, and went to the 1971 nationals at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. "I don't recall any other black student at the nationals that year," said Andrea Haynes, "and there certainly weren't any among the finalists. Oprah was the only one.

She performed and won almost every single day of that week, ending up in the top five."

During a five-hour break between presentations, Oprah went shopping in San Francisco and bought a silk scarf for her teacher, who recalled the incident with delight.

"She was so impressed that she had paid fifteen dollars for that scarf, and so impressed that she had bought it at Saks Fifth Avenue." The scarf was a splurge for a seventeenyear-old girl from Nashville, Tennessee, who, in 1971, spent seventy-two cents for two pieces of Minnie Pearl fried chicken.

Losing the national tournament disappointed Oprah, who had presented a stirring reading from Margaret Walker's novel, Jubilee, Jubilee, the black version of the black version of Gone With the Wind, Gone With the Wind, in which a female slave named Vyry is doused with urine by the slave master's wife, who is jealous of her beauty. Vyry is later whipped to a b.l.o.o.d.y pulp while trying to escape.

"In retrospect, it was a bold selection, putting the slave experience in the faces of whites, but Oprah, who was not an activist in any way, captured the humanity of the character and presented her without anger or bitterness," said Ms. Haynes.

Dressed in a long cotton skirt and an old shawl, and with a white knit hairnet covering her long black hair, Oprah delivered her oration to her cla.s.smates before the state tournament.

"I will never forget the force of energy when she walked to the front of the room, already in character, her eyes sweeping across the room, making eye contact with as many of her fellow students as possible," recalled cla.s.smate Sylvia Watts Blann more than thirty-five years later. "Without much ado, she launched into a powerful performance, relating the first-person story of a female slave as she was examined, [offered but not sold] on the block, eventually tied to a post and whipped for having too much spirit and had salt rubbed into her wounds.

"I wasn't the only one that morning with tears in my eyes as the cla.s.s was transported back one hundred and ten years to a horrifying time when white people presumed to own black people in this very nation--in this very state. I have always been struck with the way she, rather than las.h.i.+ng out in personal anger, chose to mirror back to us the legacy of this crime against humanity. Over the years, as Oprah went about building her career in public life, I thought back many times on the heart-wrenching reality conveyed by her performance. We knew she was special even back then."

While the Civil Rights Act had mandated integration in public schools and public facilities, the social line separating blacks and whites remained firmly in place in Nashville in 1970. "We were all friends during the day, but you didn't do anything with them [the black kids] after school," said Larry Carpenter. "Oprah tried to socialize with whites and she was chastised for it. The black kids felt she dealt with the other race too much."

"That's when I was first called an Oreo [black on the outside, white on the inside]," Oprah recalled. "I crossed the lines and sat with the whites in cafeteria....In high school I was the teacher's pet, which created other problems. I never spoke in dialect--I'm not sure why, perhaps I was ashamed--and I was attacked for 'talking proper like white folks,' for selling out."

As a teenager, Oprah was embarra.s.sed by the images of Africans she saw on television and in films. "I was ashamed if anybody asked, 'You from Africa?' in the school. I didn't want anybody to talk about it. And if it was ever discussed in any cla.s.sroom I was in, it was always about the Pygmies and the...primitive and barbarian behavior of Africans....I remember, like, wanting to get over that period really quickly.

The bare-breasted National Geographic National Geographic pictures? I was embarra.s.sed by all of it." pictures? I was embarra.s.sed by all of it."

Being in the minority, the black students at East strengthened their numbers by voting in a bloc, especially for student body offices and superlatives, the prized designations of Most Popular, Most Handsome, Most Talented, Most Likely to Succeed, Most Bashful, etc. They banded together, nominated one person, and voted only for that person, while the white students, with several nominees, inevitably split their vote, which usually enabled the black candidate to win. "That's why my getting elected student body president was considered such an upset," recalled Gary Holt. "I was one of two whites running against one black, and I couldn't have won without black support."

At the same time, Oprah was the only black student running for vice president.

Her campaign picture carried the slogan "Put a Little Color in Your Life. Vote for the Grand Ole Oprah." She held her birthday party in the school gymnasium, and promised better food in the cafeteria and a live band (half-black, half-white) at the prom instead of records. She, too, was elected because she pulled black as well as white votes. She also won one of the coveted superlatives because, according to Cynthia Connor Shelton, she was bold enough to nominate herself. "That speaks to her self-confidence and her determination to be recognized," said her cla.s.smate. Many years later a member of the black nominating group confirmed that Oprah had indeed nominated herself Most Popular Girl, and had won because of the all-black bloc vote.

Vernon Winfrey was not impressed by her victory. "Any dog in the street can be popular," he said. "Who was voted Most Likely to Succeed?" He had not encouraged Oprah to run for Miss East Nashville High or Miss Wool, and he was unsympathetic when she lost both contests. He didn't care that she wasn't homecoming queen, tulip queen, prom queen, or even a cheerleader. He was disappointed that she was not in the National Achievement Scholars.h.i.+p Program for Outstanding Negro Students, because he wanted her to graduate as valedictorian, but he settled for the good grades that put her into the National Honor Society. Tapping her on the head, he said, "Get something up there that no one can take away from you."

From the beginning he and Zelma insisted she go to the library once a week, choose a book, and write a book report for them, which exposed Oprah to the lives of Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and Fannie Lou Hamer, and to the poetry of Langston Hughes and Maya Angelou. "Not only did I have homework from school, but homework at home," said Oprah. "Plus, I was only allowed an hour a day to watch television, and that hour was always before Leave It to Beaver Leave It to Beaver came on! I hated that." came on! I hated that."

She complained bitterly and constantly about her father's strictness. "Vernon was a tough old bird," said Gary Holt, "and he made sure he knew where she was every minute of the day....There was not much socializing between the races in those days, but if it had been acceptable, Oprah and I might have gotten together....We were great friends and shared the same strong Christian beliefs--then."

Oprah wrote in Holt's yearbook: You have showed me more by your actions, by the way you live from day to day, that there is truly only One Way, Jesus Christ! And that without Him taking control, without Him running the whole show, life is just an endless go-round with no meaning.

"Interracial dating was really not tolerated when we were in high school," Holt said, "but Oprah wanted to pull a fast one on Vernon. So she invited me to her house and made him think I was her date. Vernon was stunned when he opened the door and saw me standing there. He was cordial but obviously concerned about a white boy calling on his daughter. It was like Guess Who's Coming to Dinner Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and I was Sidney Poitier. Oprah and I was Sidney Poitier. Oprah made him sweat for a while; then she started laughing and told him we were working on plans for the prom."

Oprah and her black friends teased their white speech teacher in the same way. "If we were in a department store or a restaurant, they would yell at me from across the room: 'Hey, Mama. Come on over here.' Then they'd roar with laughter when all the white people turned and saw that I was their mama." Ms. Haynes frequently drove her forensic students to tournaments in the state in her little red Mustang. Once, to get an early-morning start, she suggested Oprah spend the night and share a bedroom with her younger sister, who was visiting. "My sister was coming out of the shower and Oprah was talking on the phone to one of her friends: 'Yeah, she's in the shower right now,' she said. 'You know how these white girls love to wash their hair. All the time was.h.i.+ng their hair.' "

The struggle for civil rights had hit Nashville hard in the 1960s, with boycotts, sitins, protests, demonstrations, and marches--all part of the racial turbulence rumbling across the South in those years. By the time Oprah was in high school, affirmative action was taking hold to give blacks, so long denied, a lift toward equal opportunity.

As the first black student body officer at East, and someone known in all the black churches of Nashville, Oprah was selected as one of the delegates to the 1971 White House Conference on Children and Youth. The director, Stephen Hess, had promised "an honest cross-section of American youth...not just...white middle-cla.s.s student activists."

He said the fourteen-to-twenty-four-year age group would reflect the demographics of the country. In the end, minorities, who comprised 30 percent of the delegates, were intentionally overrepresented, so as not to smack of tokenism. In later years Oprah would say she was "the only student selected from my state," but her slight exaggeration does not diminish the honor.

She attended the conference in Estes Park, Colorado, with one thousand delegates, most of whom were clean, crew cut-wearing Christians. James S. Kunen, author of The The Strawberry Statement, also attended. "I didn't think they could find this many straight also attended. "I didn't think they could find this many straight kids in America," he said. As traditional as the young delegates looked, their recommendations from the conference were anything but conventional.

For five hours in one session, some of the crew cuts sat in the front rows openly smoking pot as their drug task force made its report on legalizing marijuana. The conference attendees denounced the invasion of Cambodia, opposed the war in Vietnam, supported a withdrawal of U.S. troops by year's end, and asked for an end to the draft.

They proposed a guaranteed income of $6,500 for a family of four, stipulated that one quarter of the national budget be allocated for education, condemned slavery and its evil legacy as "the country's darkest blemish," and asked President Richard Nixon to proclaim racism "the cancer of American society."

Despite the antiestablishment resolutions of her delegation, Oprah did not return home a political activist. Quite the contrary. "The only march she ever took part in," said her boyfriend Anthony Otey, "was the March of Dimes."

That march led Oprah to WVOL, the black radio station in Nashville, to look for sponsors.h.i.+p. "She explained that she walked so many miles and I would have to pay for the number of miles she walked," said John Heidelberg, one of the disc jockeys, who later became president and owner of the station. "I said, 'Sure, I'll do it.' "

A few weeks later Oprah returned to collect the money. "I admired her voice," he recalled. "She was very articulate. Her grammar was good....I'm from outside the boondocks of Mississippi. The concept and image that people get of blacks living in the South can sometimes be very negative....[When I heard Oprah] I thought, 'Hey, here's a young lady who can go places.' "

He asked if she would be willing to make a tape. He took her into the newsroom, ripped some copy off the wire, and listened to her read in a rich, deep, clear voice without a drawl or dialect. He promised to give the tape to the station manager.

"[For years] it was hard for women to get into radio," he said. But when the FCC required radio stations to begin affirmative action programs, things began to change.

"Station managers hired them because they needed a minority. They felt like, 'Well, we've got to protect our license, so we'll hire some females.'...We were a training ground for a lot of young blacks who otherwise wouldn't have had a chance to make it in radio."

Heidelberg soon convinced WVOL management to take a chance on the seventeen-year-old and give her on-the-job training. "Oprah knew she had something on the ball," he said. "She didn't feel intimidated or threatened by anything. Nothing bothered her."

"She was aggressive," said Dana Davidson, who worked at WVOL with Oprah.

"She knew where she was going."

Shortly after Oprah started working part-time, the station manager's house burned down, and the fire department responded so quickly that the manager decided the radio station would partic.i.p.ate in the upcoming Miss Fire Prevention contest. Each year several Nashville businesses selected a candidate, usually a white teenage girl with red hair, to represent them in the contest. WVOL, whose call sign derives from Tennessee being known as the Volunteer State, volunteered Oprah. "I was the Negro surprise of the day,"

she said.

"Miss Fire Prevention was a big deal back then," said Nancy Solinski, who held the t.i.tle in 1970. "It was not a beauty contest. The prize was based on your ability to speak, your poise, and your presentation, because your main responsibility was to go around to school a.s.semblies and talk about the importance of obeying fire safety rules.

Up to 1971, all the winners had been white. But that year Oprah was one of fifteen contestants. She was the only black, but she never blinked because she had it all and she knew it. She was absolutely color-blind to herself. The judges were all white old men, and when she walked out to present her piece you could almost see them thinking, 'What does she think she's doing here?' "