Daring To Go There

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Winfrey has been drawing on that legacy for support since childhood. Throughout the years of being shuttled between her mother's apartment in Milwaukee, Wis., and her maternal grandmother's farm in the segregated town of Kosciusko, Miss., young Oprah maintained a fascination with black history and with slavery in particular. Her mother discouraged her studious child from reading books for leisure, viewing the activity as irrelevant to the realities of a poor, illegitimate black girl. But while under her grandma's care, Winfrey spent most of her time at the library and curled up at home reading such slave books as Jubilee, Margaret Walker's 1966 novel about a black woman during the antebellum, Civil War and Reconstruction years, and God's Trombones, the 1927 collection of folk sermons in verse by James Weldon Johnson. "For me," she says, "getting my library card was like getting American citizenship."

By the time Winfrey was a teenager, her gift as an orator and dramatist had won her considerable popularity at both church and school, and she often recited moving depictions of slave life. She began using the iron-willed protagonists she found in black literature to fire her dreams of rising beyond the back-breaking work that seemed the destiny of most of the black people she knew. "I remember Grandma trying to teach me how to wash clothes and lay them across the line with clothespins, making lye soap, killing the hogs, wringing the chickens' necks, and she'd say, 'Watch me, 'cause you're going to have to learn how to do this,'" Winfrey recalls. "And I remember thinking, 'Don't need to watch Grandma, because my life isn't going to be like this.'" Watching Diana Ross and the Supremes preening glamorously on The Ed Sullivan Show or Sidney Poitier stepping out of a limousine on Oscar night in 1961 made her fantasies seem possible: "I was thinking that could be me."

By the late 1980s, as Winfrey became a major player in television and the movies (she won an Oscar nomination in 1986 for her supporting role in The Color Purple), her personal interest in slavery had turned into frustration that the subject was so rarely dealt with in popular culture. Even Alex Haley's sweeping slave epic Roots left her wanting. "While Roots was magnificent and necessary for its time," she says, "it showed what slavery looked like, rather than what it felt like. You don't know what the whippings really did to us." Then in 1987, she sat home one Saturday and read Toni Morrison's Beloved. "I was overwhelmed and stunned," she says. "I never felt that I'd ever touched that part of our history." That same evening, Winfrey reached Morrison by phone and--after some cajoling--convinced her that Beloved should be adapted for the screen.