Oprah Winfrey Childhood

Oprah Winfrey was born on a small farm in Kosciusko, Mississippi on January 29th, 1954, and life was immediately rough for her. Her grandmother raised her for the first six years of her life, while her teenage mother was looking for work up north. Whilst living with her grandma, it was very primitive and poverty was a normality. She would often wear clothes made of potato sacks and garbage bags, having kids in the neighborhood laugh at her constantly. Her only friends at the time were the animals on the farm, but that didn’t stop her, as she would dress them up and have tea parties with them. Albeit she didn’t have an ideal upbringing, she was able to get by with her grandmother by her side. Oprah was taught how to read very early and by the …show more content…
Her mother, Vernita Lee, had been working as a maid when Oprah began living with her, and hardly had the time to work, care for Oprah, and her new born daughter and Oprah’s half sister, Patricia. Her mother was so busy between working long hours and taking care of the new born, that Oprah began running away to crave the attention that she used to get all the time. She thought that things could never get worse. Things got worse for her in a hurry. While her mother was out of their dangerous inner city apartment quite often working, her cousin would babysit her. He, a 19 year old adolescent, ended up raping young Oprah at the age of 9. For the next 5 years, she would end up getting raped by another cousin, her mother’s boyfriend, and an uncle that she used to look up to and love deeply. At the age of 14, Oprah became pregnant, and she thought that this would be the end of her life. To try to kill the baby growing inside of her, she would purposefully drink bleach and would fall down stairs to land on her stomach. As brutal as this sounds, it ended up working. This was hell on earth for her, and her mother thought she was becoming a problem child. She ended up moving to Nashville with her father,