The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (9 page)

The theft of the door marked a turning point that she would often refer to in later
years, a sign that the family’s struggles were becoming part of something larger.
The mob no longer had control of the streets (even though Cyrak’s wasn’t far from
Charlotte Avenue), and the neighborhood was getting bad. By the midseventies most
of the white families had moved out of the east side, and Black Monday finished the
exit. When Miss Sybil had graduated from East High School in 1964, the majority of
the student body was white, and after her class elected a black girl as homecoming
queen, a white teacher overruled the vote, saying “It’s not time yet.” But with every
year of the seventies, Tammy’s class photo had one or two fewer white kids, until,
by the time she entered high school in 1980, East was almost all black and Puerto
Rican. The high school was within walking distance of Charlotte Avenue, but in ninth
grade Tammy was bused to Wilson High on the south side for racial balance. Her best
friend, Gwen, was the only other black kid in math class, and the teacher would totally
ignore them when they had their hands up. She missed being at a predominantly black
school, so in tenth grade she transferred to East.

She took on bigger responsibilities at home, learning to do simple repairs, taking
the bus to shop for groceries and pay the bills. Eventually, Granny turned over ownership
of the house to her with a quitclaim deed. The roles were reversed: now she was taking
care of Granny.

And then, when she was fifteen, she got pregnant.

She wrote a letter to her mother and mailed it, even though her mother lived three
blocks away, because she was too frightened to tell her face-to-face. When the conversation
came, her mother got angry and demanded, “Do you want to get rid of it? How are you
going to take care of it?” Tammy said that she would take care of her baby, period.
The father was a debonair-looking boy, a year older, named Barry. His mother had been
Vickie’s probation officer, and she thought the Thomas girl so unsuitable for her
son that she called up Tammy’s father’s mother and told her that Barry couldn’t be
the one. But Tammy was in love with him, and she told her mother so.

“It’s just puppy love,” Vickie said.

Tammy insisted, “No, Mommy, I love him.”

“It’ll change.”

She and her mother had never talked about sex, even though Vickie was about to conceive
her third son in four years by Tammy’s stepfather (Tammy would be due five months
sooner). When Vickie was in sixth or seventh grade, Big Mama had told her that babies
came from under rocks and she had believed it, which was the sum of her education
on the subject. Granny wasn’t about to offer any information, either.

The worst moment came when Tammy had to tell Granny. Tammy couldn’t remember her great-grandmother
crying when Big Mama died, but she cried when she heard Tammy’s news, and that hurt
Tammy to her core. Years later, she understood: no one in the family had ever graduated
from high school, and Tammy was supposed to be the first. “Here’s another one that
is not going to graduate,” Tammy said. “Granny was saying that she’s worked, scrubbed
floors, cooked people’s food, spent time away from her family, and what mattered most
for her is that I was educated and had a home, and that hadn’t happened yet. We had
a home but nobody was getting educated.” Tammy’s father stormed into the house on
Charlotte and told her, “You’re never going to be anything but a welfare bitch.”

A resolve formed in Tammy then. She wouldn’t end up like those girls in the projects,
and she wouldn’t end up like her mother. She would stay in school and start taking
it seriously—she had been a mediocre student, but now she was going to work at it—and
then she was going to find a good job (nursing wasn’t realistic anymore, not with
her grades in chemistry), because her child was going to have a much better life than
she did, better than her baby brothers, with a mother who took care of her. She had
something to prove now, not just to her father and them, but to herself.

The baby girl was born on May 9, 1982. Barry didn’t show up when he was supposed to
sign the birth certificate, and Tammy learned that he was fooling around with other
girls. They quarreled, and she refused to see him anymore. She went back to school
in time to take her finals. A few months later, she ran into Barry at the West Lake
projects, where she had a summer job as a day camp counselor. He was standing in line
at the community center for some sort of giveaway with one of his girlfriends, who
was pregnant. That broke Tammy’s heart—but it was okay, it was all right, she knew
she’d rebound. She stopped going to church because her situation was considered shameful.
When Barry tried to get back together with her, she turned him away. “This is not
your job,” she told him. “She’s not yours. You didn’t sign the birth certificate.”
She didn’t want her daughter to grow up like her, having a tumultuous relationship
with a man who never seemed to care about her. She wanted her daughter to be loved
and wanted by everyone around her. She and the baby were on their own, while everything
on the east side went to hell.

Tammy got off her mother’s check and signed up for her own. She hated being on welfare—the
agency workers were nasty—but she needed it to pay for food and child care. She finished
high school on time, in 1984, and became the first person in her family to get a diploma.
The feminine style of her senior year recalled the forties, with the girls in their
yearbook pictures arranging their hair and dress and lipstick like Billie Holiday.
Tammy posed in a gray felt hat with a black ribbon and a mesh veil, but the look in
her eyes told of the life that had intervened since she was a girl in pigtails.

She got an associate’s degree at a technical college and worked for two years as a
supermarket cashier in the hope that she’d get a management job, but none opened up.
She had two more children, both by a man named Jordan: a boy in 1985 and another girl
in 1987. She was always careful with money—now that she could drive, she shopped in
the suburbs, where prices were lower, and she bought the kids’ Christmas presents
on layaway, securing the gifts at the store with a deposit until she could pay in
full. But with three kids, Granny, and the house on Charlotte to take care of, she
had to find more secure work.

By the late eighties, Youngstown was building a museum to its industrial history,
designed by the architect Michael Graves in the shape of a steel mill, with stylized
smokestacks. But up in Warren, the Packard Electric plants were still operating, with
eight thousand workers making wiring harnesses and electrical components for General
Motors cars. It was lighter, cleaner work than steelmaking, and two-thirds of the
employees were women, a lot of them single mothers like Tammy. She went in to interview
and was hired for the assembly line at $7.30 an hour. So in 1988 she got off welfare
and became a factory worker.

HER OWN: OPRAH WINFREY

She was so big that she owned the letter
O
. She was the richest black woman in the world—
in the world
—but she remained Everywoman and made that her theme song. Five afternoons a week,
forty million Americans in at least 138 markets (and millions more viewers in 145
countries) laughed and wept and gasped and gossiped and wished and celebrated with
her. Being a billionaire only made her more beloved. She was still just like them,
she knew them, came from them, from below them, and she made millions of women feel
they were not alone. What they felt she felt, and what she felt they felt (and how
you felt about yourself was the most important thing). When she learned to go with
her heart, they learned to go with theirs, and when she learned to say no and not
feel guilty about it even though it meant people wouldn’t like her (which was her
greatest achievement), they learned to do the same thing. She wanted to get the whole
country reading again. She wanted to destroy the welfare mentality and lift a hundred
families out of the Chicago projects. She wanted to lead a national conversation about
race and heal the wounds of slavery with a movie, because, she said, “Everything is
about imagery.” She wanted to help people live their best lives. She wanted her studio
audiences to get their favorite things every Christmas (Sony 52-inch 3-D HDTVs, Pontiac
G6s, Royal Caribbean cruises). She wanted to open a door so that her viewers could
see themselves more clearly, to be the light to get them to God, or whatever else
they called it. She wanted them to have it all, like her.

She exalted openness and authenticity, but she could afford them on her own terms.
Anyone allowed into her presence had to sign away freedom of speech for life. She
bought the rights to every photograph of herself and threatened to sue anyone who
infringed the inviolability of her image. She withdrew her autobiography just weeks
before publication after friends warned that it revealed too much about some parts
of her life even as it falsified others. Her face underwent drastic alterations year
by year.

“According to the laws of the Universe, I am not likely to get mugged, because I am
helping people be all that they can be,” she said. “A black person has to ask herself,
‘If Oprah Winfrey can make it, what does it say about me?’ They no longer have any
excuse,” she said. “Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Fannie Lou Hamer are all a part
of me. I’ve always felt that my life is their life fulfilled. They never dreamed it
could be this good. I still feel they’re all with me, going, ‘Go, girl. Go for it,’”
she said. “I feel tremendously powerful because I do believe I have reached a point
in life where my personality is aligned with what my soul came to do,” she said. “I’m
the kind of person who can get along with anyone. I have a fear of being disliked,
even by people I dislike,” she said. “Doing talk shows is like breathing to me,” she
said. “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
,” she said. “Nobody had any clue that my life could be anything but working in some
factory or a cotton field in Mississippi,” she said. “I was just a poor little ole
nappy-headed colored chile.”

The yellow brick road of blessings that led to the purple fields of her vast empire
(Harpo Productions, Harpo Studios, Harpo Films,
The Oprah Winfrey Show
, Oprah Winfrey Network,
O: The Oprah Magazine
—her picture on every cover—
O at Home
, The Oprah Radio Network, Oprah and Friends, Oprah’s Studio Merchandise, The Oprah
Store, Oprah Winfrey’s Boutique, Oprah’s Book Club, Oprah’s Favorite Things, Oprah’s
Big Give, the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls, Oprah’s Angel Network,
oprah.com
) began on a farm in the middle of Mississippi in 1954. Her name was a misspelling
of the biblical Orpah. For the first six years she was raised by her grandmother,
Hattie Mae Lee, a cook and housekeeper who was the granddaughter of slaves, and her
grandfather, Earlist, who scared her to death. They were so poor that she never wore
a store-bought dress, and her only pets were a pair of cockroaches in a jar. At least,
that was what she would tell interviewers. Her family would say that she was stretching
it to make a better story, that she was provided for and doted on, that her self-confidence
came from those years.

When Oprah was six, her grandmother could no longer care for her, so she was sent
to Milwaukee to live in a rooming house with her mother. Vernita Lee worked as a maid,
bore two more children by two more fathers, and went on welfare. Mother and daughter
didn’t get along, and Oprah grew up a wild child to the sounds of Motown, stealing
her mother’s cash, promiscuous at thirteen, doing “the Horse” with young men for money,
her sister would later say, while Vernita was at work. But she also attracted the
attention of white authority figures who admired her bookishness, her theatrical voice,
and her drive and wanted to promote her. At fourteen she was sent to Nashville to
live under the Christian discipline of her father, Vernon Winfrey, a barber (it turned
out that Vernon couldn’t have been her father—she never learned who was). In Nashville,
as in Milwaukee, she had better relations with white people than with her own family,
and later she would say that she never felt oppressed except by black people who disliked
her very dark skin or envied her success.

She quit Tennessee State before graduating and went to work at a local TV station.
When she got a job on an evening newscast in Baltimore in 1976, she was going to be
the black Barbara Walters, or Mary Tyler Moore. But she couldn’t write copy, and she
was too breezy and uninformed for news, so they moved her over to the morning talk
show. It was a comedown in her own eyes, but she became a local star. She was so likable,
so funny, wearing her heart on her sleeve, asking the juicy, borderline-rude questions
that the audience wanted asked (Did it bother Frank Perdue when people said he looked
like a chicken?). At the end of 1983, WLS in Chicago offered her a two-hundred-thousand-dollar
job on its morning show.

She was a figure of the eighties and Chicago, the center of a new black elite. When
she arrived, Harold Washington had just been elected mayor, Jesse Jackson was beginning
his first presidential campaign, Michael Jordan was about to be drafted by the Bulls.
There was a quote taped to Oprah’s mirror that she attributed to Jackson: “If my mind
can conceive it, and my heart can believe it, I know I can achieve it.” Empowerment,
entrepreneurship, the self-made celeb, wealth as the ultimate and inevitable emblem
of worth—that was her ethos (she had hated Black Power at Tennessee State in the early
seventies, didn’t care about politics at all). They said an overweight black talk
show host would never make it in racist Chicago, but it took exactly a week for her
to kick Phil Donahue’s butt in the ratings, and within a year he moved his show to
New York. She knew what the mostly white, suburban, stay-at-home moms in her viewing
audience wanted, and she wasn’t afraid to get down and dirty—“Men Who Rape and Treatment
for Rapists,” “Housewife Prostitutes,” “Man-Stealing Relatives,” “I Want My Abused
Kids Back.” She wasn’t afraid of racists or baby killers or the profoundly handicapped.
She could dish, she could empathize, she could mock herself, she could say
penis
on the air (
vajayjay
would take two more decades).