Daring To Go There

By Ron Stodghill/Chicago

There are times, though perhaps not many, when even the Queen of Talk is at a loss for words, when her lively brand of armchair wisdom collapses under the weight of personal revelation. Oprah Winfrey calls these her "go there" moments, spiritual episodes of divine guidance that far transcend the chatty exchanges with her studio audiences--about her fiance Stedman, her best friend Gayle or even her dogs Sophie and Solomon--that often masquerade as intimacy. It is during these moments, usually while jogging the winding trails on her Indiana farm, that Winfrey becomes overwhelmed by the sense that old spirits are trying to get in touch with her. And it is during these moments that the woman who loves to talk stops dead in her tracks simply to listen.

Sometimes the epiphanies carry the voices of Negro slaves--Joe and Emily and Dara; Sue and Bess and Sara. Winfrey says she has come to know each of them personally and calls them in at will to guide her in her work. The spirits began visiting her a few years ago, shortly after she bought the property records of various plantations at a Sotheby's auction. A collector of slave memorabilia, Winfrey cherishes the slave papers because these documents serve as the best vessel for connecting her--through name, age and price--to the real human legacy of slavery. While filming Beloved, she kept the slave inventory in her trailer on the set. She dedicated scenes to individual slaves by lighting a candle and praying aloud to them. Often, though, she became so emotional that she couldn't perform the scene.

The film, she says, has changed her life. "I always thought I knew my black history, the essence of my roots," says Winfrey, sitting in her spacious, comfortable office in Chicago. "For years I have talked about my ancestors being the bridge that I crossed over on, that the reason Oprah Winfrey can exist is because Sojourner Truth did, because Fannie Lou Hammer did and because Ida B. Wells did. But I have gone from an awareness to a knowing...I now have a sense of what slavery felt like instead of what it looked like."

For the past decade Winfrey's obsession has been to share such feelings with all of America--to recast the discussion of slavery, presenting it not merely as a brutal, exploitative era in our history but as a kind of roll call of individual tragedy in which, as chattel, "you died with no salvation and no honor in your spirit." She argues that painting slavery with a broad brush in literature, film and even political debate has kept us from knowing the real horror and heroism of the institution. "We got it all wrong," she says. "For years we've talked about the physicality of slavery--who did what and who invented that. But the real legacy lies in the strength and courage to survive."

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.

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.