Cinema: Oprah Winfrey: Daring To Go There

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In her decade-long crusade to make Beloved ("If I were going to make Booty Call, I wouldn't need 10 years"), Winfrey has persisted despite a chorus of naysayers who argued that the novel's Rubik's Cube of a story line and potentially divisive subject matter would limit the film's commercial appeal. She shrugs off such criticism, contending that America's current race problem is rooted largely in its failure to confront its history honestly. "If you don't acknowledge the pain in truth, then you carry forward the pain in distortion," she says. "It's no different from your own personal history and wounds. If you don't heal your personal wounds, they continue to bleed. And so we have a country of people who have continued to bleed."

To prepare for the role of Beloved's protagonist Sethe, Winfrey decided to face that painful history head on. She consulted an organizer of Underground Railroad tours, who blindfolded her and dropped her off in the woods in Maryland as part of an effort to "regress" her back to the slave years. She was told she was no longer Oprah Winfrey but instead Rebecca, a freed woman captured overnight and brought there. Initially, Winfrey says, she thought of it as just an interesting exercise. But after hours of sitting alone and hearing horses gallop up carrying white men who harassed her by calling her "nigger" and threatened her sexually, she eventually lost control. "I became hysterical. It was raw, raw, raw pain," she says. "I went to the darkest place, and I saw the light. And I thought, 'So this is where I come from.'"

In "going there" Winfrey says she has been able to merge three of her greatest passions--black history, entertainment and self-examination. And, as is her custom, she is sharing those passions with her audience. At a crowded reception in Atlanta following a recent advance screening of Beloved, she stood beside co-star Kimberly Elise, who plays Sethe's younger daughter Denver, and trumpeted her film as a cinematic breakthrough in its sensitive and nonstereotypical rendering of blacks during Reconstruction. "You have never seen black people like these," she told the mostly African-American crowd that packed the reception hall of Hillside Chapel and Truth Center church. "There is not one head rag in this movie." While some in the audience said they were confused by the story line, most cheered Beloved simply for its warm, intelligent portrayal of their ancestors.

Whether or not it scores at the box office, Winfrey regards the film as her most fulfilling achievement yet. "On a grand scale, the film tries to do what my talk show does--introduce people to themselves," she says. "And it all comes together in one shining moment called Beloved." Surely those old slave spirits who visit Oprah know what she means.