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Chapter Twelve Oprah
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ou have to start somewhere, and it may as well be with the talk show host, as that is the route Oprah Winfrey took to fame and fortune. But she is so much more than that. She is probably the most powerful woman in the United States and perhaps even the world. Her influence can shape elections in the world’s most powerful country; her talk show is the highest rated and best known ever. She is a producer and a businesswoman who runs a huge empire. According to Forbes, she is the richest black person in the world – and she was at one point its only black billionaire. And yet, for all this, she is utterly accessible, has the common touch in abundance and is seen every day in millions of homes empathizing (often to the point of tears) with ordinary people. Born in Mississippi in 1954, she was the daughter of a teenage single mother and a soldier and grew up in the kind of poverty and hardship that was common in the rural South at the time. Her parents split up shortly after she was born, and as a child she has said she wore dresses made from sacks and kept roaches as pets. She was clearly very bright, as she was taught to read by her grandmother before she was three. When she was six, her already straitened circumstances got far worse: she moved to inner-city Milwaukee. There she was raped by a cousin and an uncle, and she ran away from home at 13. At 14 she became pregnant, but the child died shortly after birth.