Into The Light

When OPRAH WINFREY read how one Black woman’s countless contributions to science saved millions, she turned the best-selling book into her next movie. This month she and RENÉE ELISE GOLDSBERRY star in the unheralded story of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

- Tamara Y. Jeffries

If you are ever in a position to meet a celebrity—to have any exchange longer than the time it takes to shoot a selfie—your friends are going to ask you the inevitable question: “What’s she like?”

The more exalted the star, the more breathless the question. (And the more it seems people want to hear some tea.) And so when you sit on a couch with Oprah Winfrey for 54 minutes—plus the extra time she takes after she tells you to turn off the tape recorder so she could share some wisdom off the record—you know you’d better have a good answer.

Mine is this: Imagine that you started life a dirt-poor Black girl shuffled around Mississippi, Wisconsin and Tennessee, where neither your dirt-poorness nor the abuses you experience can stifle your gifts or your talent for speaking. Imagine you get into newscasting, and despite being Black, a woman and a big girl to boot, you end up becoming an award-winning TV talk-show host. You spin that success into a media enterprise, producing magazines, movies, TV shows, stage plays and so on. (You even get nominated for an Oscar in the first movie you make.) Even your infrequent stumbles turn into experiences you parlay into life lessons that you can share with your audiences. Now you have so much money that a $43 million investment in, say, a weight loss company, represents just over 1 percent of your net worth. Imagine that you keep having good ideas and the energy and wherewithal to make them happen—and all objective evidence seems to prove that nothing you do will fail. And you are 63 years old—well past caring about people’s opinions of you—and rooted in a belief that you are, first and forever, a child of God and that you’re here for one purpose: to inspire people.