by Anna Deavere Smith: The following essay is part of a series in which dozens of women will reveal what women they most admire. The series is part of “Women Rule,” a unique effort this fall by POLITICO, Google and The Tory Burch Foundation exploring how women are leading change in politics, policy and their communities.
Jimmy Carter was president. I worked for a woman on the Upper East Side of New York. I walked her miniature Doberman. I moved her Volvo from one parking spot to another depending on the day of the week. When she returned from a trip, she would unload small audio tapes onto a table in the back room of her large apartment. The core task of my job was to transcribe those tapes into notes to be sent out to her clients. She coached newscasters. The field of news as entertainment was starting to explode. Women were becoming viable candidates for jobs.
I was hard at work in the back room. She entered and instructed me to follow her. In the living room, by the grand piano, stood an African-American woman with an Afro hairstyle.
“This is Oprah Winfrey,” she said. “She is the best actress in America.”
My boss was tough, candid and rarely smiled. Yet she smiled when she introduced me to Oprah. The interaction lasted just that long, and I returned to my work in the back room. Oprah Winfrey was then a little-known local television personality in Baltimore, Md.
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Oprah Winfrey is an extraordinary actress — no doubt about it. What the introduction did not foresee was the full magnitude of Oprah’s talent. It certainly did not predict what her business acumen would yield, nor did it predict that Oprah would become among other things, America’s Chief Confessor.
Like the rest of the world, I came to admire Oprah. In the early ’90s, I had a performance in New York that garnered attention. Soon afterward, a photograph of me appeared in Glamour magazine. I was seated, straddling a cafe-style chair, my arms resting on its back. I returned to San Francisco, where I was still fighting my way up the academic tenure ladder at Stanford University. You can imagine my surprise when, in the middle of a normal workday, I received a call from Oprah Winfrey — her own by then worldwide-iconic self.
My twice-a-week assistant came to my desk and said ”Oprah Winfrey is on the phone.”
It sounded both like a hoax, and perfectly normal — because there is something about Oprah that is both extraordinary and perfectly ordinary. She began the conversation as if we were old friends: “I was taking a walk with my trainer and when we got back he showed me your picture in the magazine. What were you doing sitting on that chair like that, girl?”
She invited me to come to Chicago and meet with her. The agenda was that she was looking to hire a writer for a one-woman Broadway show in which she planned to perform. My employment never came to be, but Oprah after that time, invited me to participate in a variety of things she created.
Oprah’s couch or chair became a place where anything could happen and anything was possible. My boss’s call about Oprah’s inherent gifts did not project that Oprah would teach the world the very thing my boss was trying to teach her clients: how to be your “real” self on-air or off-air. No one could have imagined, at that time, an “Oprah Winfrey.”
Oprah has laid the ground, raised the bar and opened a future for men and women worldwide. No one needs to be any one thing, to fit into any one box, even when a specific virtuosic talent is evident.
A theater genius and sage, Joseph Chaikin, once described “presence” in the following way: “Presence gives you the feeling that the person on stage is standing right next to you.” As society strove and continues to strive away from division and toward unity, unifying figures such as Oprah become essential. It’s not going too far to say that she has played her part in America’s great experiment of becoming a more perfect union.
I attended the opening of the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls in South Africa. During the ceremony there was much honor given to the African concept of ubuntu: “I am because we are.” This idea of what it means to be an “am” or what it is for us to be an “are” suggests an urgency about making real, for example, theologian Martin Buber’s “I and Thou.”
It helps inspire what Martin Luther King Jr. called for in his Letter From a Birmingham Jail. Anything less than a truly humanistic society turns people into “things.” I believe that what America and the world have responded to in Oprah Winfrey is her ability to inspire us to believe that our human dignity is there, someplace, for the taking.
Oprah was a keynote speaker at one of those conferences at which female leaders search for the perfect helmet to don while blasting through glass ceilings. Someone shouted from the audience: “Run for president!” That would have been a wasteful use of her gift. Presidents lead from podiums and must attend to politics. Oprah has led from her core self, that self that makes us believe one conversation to the next, and that opening our hearts, our minds and sometimes saving lives and invigorating futures are within our reach, if we just try.
Anna Deavere Smith is an American actress, playwright, activist and professor.
