Oprah Winfrey sheds light on childhood struggles with abuse

Oprah Winfrey recently weighed in on all the abuse she underwent as a child growing up in Mississippi.

The TV show host discussed her traumatic past in her new book titled What Happened to You?

She discussed her book at length with Dr. Oz and detailed one of her most heartbreaking memories. “As I was bringing the water back, I was, like, playing with the water with my fingers like that in the water and my grandmother was looking out the window.”

“And when I brought the bucket in and I’m sloshing the bucket cause I’m a little girl, and she’s like ‘Were you playing in the water? Did you have your fingers in that water? That’s our drinking water.”

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“I was like, and I said, ‘No ma’am’ and she said, ‘I saw you and your fingers in the water,’ so she grabbed a switch and I got a really bad whipping for it.”

“Later, when I put on my clothes to go to church, one of the welts from my back opened up and bloodied the, bloodied the dress, so, my emotion now is not because I feel such deep pain about it, I just feel pain for that little girl.”

She went on to say, “My grandmother and I slept in the bed together. My grandfather was in a room on the other side of the wall and one night in the middle of the night, my grandfather gets out of bed and comes into the room and I wake up and he has his hands around my grandmother’s neck and she is screaming.”

“She manages to push him off of her and step over him. He falls. She steps over him and runs to the front door. I run out of the bed with her.”

At that point, “Cousin Henry comes down the road in the middle of the night to help my grandmother get my grandfather up off the floor. And after that my grandmother put a chair underneath the doorknob and some tin cans around the chair.”

“And that is how we slept every night. I’m sleeping, I always slept with, listening for the cans. Listening for what happens if that doorknob moves.”