Oprah Winfrey’s portrait reveal was deeply personal for me. Here’s why

A personal reflection on the portrait reveal of Oprah Winfrey, the legend I once hung up on as a child.

At the unveiling of Oprah Winfrey’s new portrait at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery on Wednesday, she recalled a story about her grandmother once instructing her to boil clothes outside to get them clean. The family was so poor they had no running water, and her grandmother said Winfrey would one day have to do the same. But Winfrey noted that she knew at an early age her grandmother’s destiny would not be her own. “I could feel inside my being when I was very young, I think as early as four when I first started speaking in the church,” Winfrey said. “That’s where my broadcasting career began with ‘Jesus rose on Easter day [hallelujah, hallelujah] all the angels did proclaim.’ Y’all remember when we used to get Easter pieces?” Boy, did I ever remember. Like Winfrey, I, too, was the little girl growing up in a Black church who was prodded, hair perfectly pressed and dress stiffly starched, to stand in front of the congregation to offer up a memorized piece. But one year we had a guest speaker, a then young television journalist named Oprah Winfrey, who I watched on WJZ TV in my hometown of Baltimore.