Interview with Oprah back from 1991

As a young child, did you have any idea, any vision, of what you wanted to accomplish?

As a young child, I had a vision, not of what I wanted to accomplish, but I knew that my current circumstances --I was raised on a farm with my grandmother for the first six years of my life -- I knew somehow that my life would be different and it would be better. I never had a clear cut vision of what it was that I would be doing. I remember absolutely physically feeling it at around four years old.

I remember standing on the back porch -- it was a screened-in porch -- and my grandmother was boiling clothes because, you know, at that time, we didn't have washing machines, and so people would, you know, physically boil clothes in a great big iron pot. She was boiling clothes and poking them down. And I was watching her from the back porch, and I was four years old...

  ...and I remember thinking, my life won't be like this. My life won't be like this, it will be better.   

And it wasn't from a place of arrogance, it was just a place of knowing that things could be different for me somehow. I don't know what made me think that.

Did you ever consider any other career besides talking, broadcasting, acting?

I always wanted to be an actress for most of my adolescent and adult life. My father didn't want me to be, because his idea of "an actress " was one of these "lewd women," and "how are you going to take care of your life?"

So I always wanted to be an actress and have taken, I think, a roundabout way to get there because I still don't feel fulfilled as an actress. I still feel like, okay, once I own my studio, but I'm thinking, I did all of this just to be an actress. I just want to be able to act.

For a while, I wanted to be a school teacher. In the fourth grade, Mrs. Duncan was my greatest inspiration. In the fourth grade was when I first, I think, began to believe in myself. For the first time believed I could do almost anything. I felt I was the queen bee. I felt I could control the world. I was going to be a missionary. I was going to Costa Rica. I used to collect money on the playground to take to church on Sundays from all the other kids. In school we had devotions, and I would sit and I would listen to everything the preacher said on Sunday and go back to school on Monday morning and beg Mrs. Duncan to please let me do devotions, just sort of repeat the sermon. So, in the fourth grade, I was called "preacher."

The kids used to poke fun at me all the time. It didn't bother me because I was so inspired. And a lot of it was because of Mrs. Duncan, Mrs. Duncan, Mrs. Duncan. We did a show not too long ago, and I had favorite teachers on, I just broke down. First of all, it was the first time that I realized that Mrs. Duncan had a name other than Mrs. Duncan. You know, your teachers never have names. I said, sobbing, "Her name's Mary!" I couldn't believe it.

I understand that it's kind of a fluke that your series is not called "The Oprah Winfrey Show." Maybe you could just tell us the story of your name.

Well, I was born, as I said, in rural Mississippi in 1954. I was born at home. There were not a lot of educated people around, and my name had been chosen from the Bible. My Aunt Ida had chosen the name, but nobody really knew how to spell it, so it went down as "Orpah" on my birth certificate, but people didn't know how to pronounce it, so they put the "P" before the "R" in every place else other than the birth certificate. On the birth certificate it is Orpah, but then it got translated to Oprah, so here we are. But that's great because Oprah spells Harpo backwards. I don't know what Orpah spells.

How did you come to live with your grandmother?

I came to live with my grandmother because I was a child born out of wedlock, and my mother moved to the North. She's a part of that great migration to the North in the late 1950s, and I was left with my grandmother, like so many other black youngsters who were left to be taken care of by their grandmothers and grandfathers, aunts and uncles. It actually probably saved my life. It is the reason why I am where I am today. My grandmother gave me the foundation for success that I was allowed to continue to build upon. My grandmother taught me to read, and that opened the door to all kinds of possibilities for me. And had I not been with my grandmother and been with my mother struggling in the North, you know, moving from apartment to apartment, I probably would not have had the foundation that I had.

So I was allowed to grow up in Mississippi for the first six years of my life and allowed to feel somewhat special because I was a precocious child; I guess by any standards now.

I was taught to read at an early age. By the time I was three, I was reciting speeches in the church. And they'd put me up on the program, and they would say, "and Little Mistress Winfrey will render a recitation," and I would do "Jesus rose on Easter Day, Hallelujah, Hallelujah, all the angels did proclaim."

 And all the sisters sitting in the front row would fan themselves and turn to my grandmother and say, "Ida Mae, this child is gifted."   

And I heard that enough that I started to believe it. Maybe I am. I didn't even know what "gifted" meant, but I just thought it meant I was special.

  So anytime people came over, I'd recite. I'd recite Bible verses and poetry.   

By the time I was seven, I was doing "Invictus" by William Ernest Henley: "Out of the night that covers me, black as a pit from pole to pole. I thank whatever gods there be for my unconquerable soul." And at the time, I was saying it, I didn't know what I was talking about, but I'd do all the motions, "O-u-t of the night that covers me," and people would say, "Whew, that child can speak." And so that's, you know, whatever you do a lot of , you get good at doing it. And that's just about how this whole broadcasting career started for me.

You hear about child prodigies on the violin, but you definitely were a prodigy as a speaker. That's very unusual.

I was an orator for a long time. I've been an orator really, basically, all of my life. Since I was 3 and a half, I've been coming up in the church speaking. I did all of James Weldon Johnson's sermons. He has a series of seven sermons, beginning with "The Creation" and ending with "Judgment." I used to do them for churches all over the city of Nashville. I've spoken at every church in Nashville at some point in my life. You sort of get known for that. Other people were known for singing; I was known for talking. By the time I entered college, what I really wanted to do was be an actress, but I got hired in television, and so I was never able to make any of the play rehearsals. Story of my life.

There was a pretty bad patch after you left your grandmother. Maybe you can talk a little bit about what that was like when you were living with your mother.

I was living with my mother and living under circumstances that a lot of young children have to deal with even today. We weren't living in the projects, and if you had asked me at the time if we were poor, I probably would have said, "no" because when you are living it and you don't know anything else, you think that's the way life is. And I was raped when I was nine by a cousin and never told anybody until I was in my late twenties. Not only was I raped by a cousin, I was raped by a cousin, and then later sexually molested by a friend of the family, and then by an uncle. It was just an ongoing, continuous thing. So much so, that I started to think, you know, "This is the way life is."

And not until, I'd say, a year ago, did I release the shame for myself. I was in the middle of an interview with a woman named Trudy Chase, who has multiple personalities and was severely abused as a child. I think it was on that day that, for the first time, I recognized that I was not to blame.

I became a sexually promiscuous teenager, and got myself into a lot of trouble, and believed that I was responsible for it. It wasn't until I was thirty-six years old, thirty-six, that I connected the fact, "Oh that's why I was that way." I always blamed myself. Even though, intellectually, I would say to other kids, I would speak to people and say, "Oh, the child's never to blame. You're never responsible for molestation in your life." I still believed I was responsible somehow. That I was a bad girl.

So it happened on the air, as so many things happen for me. It happened on the air in the middle of someone else's experience, and I thought I was going to have a breakdown on television. And...

  I said, "Stop! Stop! You've got to stop rolling cameras!"   

And they didn't, so I got myself through it, but it was really quite traumatic for me.

You must really be very loose and open emotionally for that to happen on the air. I'm sure there are very few people who would have a similar experience.

Yes, I think so.

But, you know, my openness is the reason why I did not do so well as a news reporter. Because I used to go on assignment and be so open that I would say to people at fires -- and they've lost their children -- "That's okay. You don't have to talk to me." Well, then you go back to the newsroom, and the news director says, "What do you mean they didn't have to talk to you?" I'd say, "But she just lost her child, and you know I just felt so bad."

So, I didn't do very well. I was too involved. I'd go to funerals of people and not go in. I wouldn't want to talk to them, disturb them, cry on the air.

In reading about that period in your life, it's obvious that there was a lot of anger in you, and you just didn't have the proper place to put it, and so you started to rebel.

Now I know. I do know it now.

Obviously, that experience has made you much more empathetic to a lot of your guests than you might be otherwise.

Well, do you know what I think? I think the lesson that you learn from allowing yourself to be abused as a child is an ongoing lesson. What I recognize is that the same thing, in some cases, that causes a child to be abused, is the same thing that causes you to be abused as an adult. It is the same thing in your adulthood that allows you to never to be able to say "No" to people. And I realize that I was the kind of child who was always searching for love and affection and attention, and somebody to say, to look at me and say, "Yes, you are worthy." Unfortunately, there are adults who will take advantage of that and misread your intentions.

And, you know, part of the process for me as an adult has been recognizing that my inability as an adult female to say "No," my disease to please as a female, is the same thing that caused me to be victimized as a child. Because many times, I would get myself into situations as an adult where I didn't want to say "No" because I didn't want to hurt anybody's feelings. I didn't want to say "No" because I didn't want anybody angry with me.

I didn't want to say "No" because I didn't want people to think I'm not nice. And that, to me, has been the greatest lesson of my life: to recognize that I am solely responsible for it, and not trying to please other people, and not living my life to please other people, but doing what my heart says all the time. That's the biggest lesson for me.

The other big lesson for me has been to learn: not only do you have the right to do whatever you want, you have the right to change your mind. Which has gotten me into so much trouble in my life. Like I'd say, "Oh, but, I have to go. I said I was going to do it." And then later you think about it, and you realize "I shouldn't be doing this, but I said I was going to do it, and I don't want to make anybody upset." It has taken me 37 years to figure that out, to get that straight. I think, "Oh, my goodness, if I had learned this twenty years ago, look at all the time I could have saved. Look where I could have been."

I don't know if men have this problem. I think men who are, for instance, abused sexually or physically, manifest outwardly in some way, that their anger and their rage takes on a different kind of direction. I think women, to a greater extent, and I know m-a-n-y, m-a-n-y women who were sexually abused, internalize it, and then allow themselves to abuse themselves later on in life. You know, you just don't allow yourself to be all that you can be. Whereas, a man will make it more external and will be angrier. I don't believe that anything happens without a reason. I don't believe it. And in order to believe "That is the truth, " you have to believe it in all circumstances.

So I say, if you are going to take responsibility for your life, then you have to take it all forms. I certainly wish that I had been the kind of child who told the first time, but because I wasn't, a part of my mission in life now is to encourage every other child who has been abused to tell. You tell, and if they don't believe you, you keep telling. You tell everybody until somebody listens to you. If nothing else, that's part of something good that came out of that experience, because I don't want it to happen to another child. I don't want another child to be afraid of saying, "This is what happened to me."

 Interview from Feb. 21, 1991

Chicago, Illinois

Entertainment Executive