Word: slaving
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...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...
...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...
...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...
Thin love ain't no love at all," says Sethe, the fiercely defiant runaway slave in Toni Morrison's Beloved. Oprah Winfrey's love for the book was thick, warm, abiding. With eyewitness immediacy and the God's-eye view of fictive art, Morrison brought the intimate evil of slavery to life in the story of a mother's ultimate sacrifice. When Winfrey discovered the novel upon its publication in 1987, she was moved as a reader, as an African American, as a woman who suffered the death of the child she gave birth to when...
...imagine how Jerry Springer would herald her performance: Oprah makes love with a naked Danny Glover! Oprah squats and urinates! Oprah as Sethe: Victim or murderer? The story is based on the true case of Margaret Garner, a renegade slave who tried to kill her children rather than allow them to be returned to the plantation from which she had escaped. In the novel, Sethe is pursued by the spirit of the one child, Beloved, who died at her hand. But the film is really about the things we do for love, about the fatal consequences of moral strength, about...