Our unlikely griot: as a dyslexic who still appreciates the liberating power of books, as an actress and a producer in this multimedia age, Whoopi Goldberg holds fast in her distinctive way to the values of African American culture. (Cover Story).

In many ways, Whoopi Goldberg seems like an unlikely keeper of our cultural flame. After all, she's best known in American pop culture for the sly grin, the frenzied hair and the stream of Hollywood hits (and misses) that checker her career. We've laughed at Whoopi's routines as a standup comedian. We remember Whoopi as a singing nun. Whoopi as the voice of reason amidst an array of celluloid's confused, misguided white folk. Whoopi, dismissive to anyone--including her own people--who ever judged her superficially. Even Whoopi as Trekkie and the center Hollywood Square. But Whoopi as contemporary griot, as purveyor of true African American narrative? On the surface, that may seem like a stretch.

But take a closer look. One hundred and forty years after Emancipation, our people have accomplished feats far beyond our ancestors' wildest dreams. Yet even as we've become more entwined in the fabric of American society, some--like Whoopi--have sought to hold tight to the threads of our past. While Whoopi has all the accoutrements and awards that go with traditional acceptance in the entertainment industry mainstream (including the grand slam of an Oscar, an Emmy, a Grammy and a Tony), she also has an impressive body of work that pays homage to various aspects of our culture. Just this year, for example, Whoopi narrated the HBO special Unchained Memories, which gave voice to the reminiscences of former slaves. She also produced and starred in a Broadway revival of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, August Wilson's engaging tribute to one of the first ladies of the blues.

Yes, Whoopi was the first woman--and the first black person--to host the Academy Awards (in 1994, then again in 1996), the first black woman since Hattie McDaniel to win an Academy Award (in 1990, for her supporting role in Ghost) and, for a period during the early 1990s, the highest-paid actress in Hollywood. But don't let the bling-bling fool you. At her core, Whoopi is a rarity: the successful artist who became part of mainstream culture without ever forgetting who she is.

One of the ways Whoopi discovered who she is--and who her people are--is through books. A few years ago, in her imaginatively titled tome Book, Whoopi admitted that while she loved movies as a child, the images on the big screen often seemed flawed. "The casting always messed with the way I saw it [the movies]. It changed the terms" Whoopi says." In this way, books were more liberating, more magical, and so I started to read--to really read. Books opened the mind to all kinds of possibilities."

Whoopi's first acting role in a movie was that of Celie, the protagonist in Alice Walker's The Color Purple. After reading the novel, Whoopi wrote to Walker saying that she'd love to have a small role in the movie when it was cast. But Walker was one step ahead of her. The author, who had seen Whoopi perform her stand-up act in San Francisco, had been impressed enough by Whoopi's performance to tell director Steven Spielberg about her. Spielberg, in turn, invited Whoopi to his home where she was asked to perform her act in front of some of his friends--some eighty friends, to be precise--including Michael Jackson, Quincy Jones and the other producers of The Color Purple, the movie. It was perhaps one of the most pressure-packed auditions ever, but Whoopi aced it. When her performance was over, Spielberg offered Whoopi the role of Celie, the battered and sexually-abused heroine who eventually triumphed over her life's conditions. Whoopi's tour de force performance won her a 1985 Golden Globe and an Academy Award nomination.

Yet some of the roles that followed--particularly when Whoopi played a supporting role in a white cast--were questioned. "Early on in my career, a lot of the scripts I saw called for me to play a maid or a nanny, and I resisted it at first. I thought I was better than that," comments Whoopi. "But then I thought about it some more and realized that it didn't matter what the character's job was. Since when are we defined by what we do? We're defined by who we are, and if the stories that interest me happen to be about maids and nannies, then that's fine."

Although Whoopi talked a good game, what she really felt about some of the characters she portrayed was different. But while playing a maid in the 1990 movie The Long Walk Home--which put a human face on the everyday people behind the 1956 Montgomery bus boycott) Whoopi got a reality check. At first, Whoopi believed that had she lived in that place and time, she would have responded differently to situations than some of the maids and nannies did; that she would have stood up to the white employers who belittled her or she would have quit her job.

Then, while filming the movie, Whoopi got the chance to talk to some of the women who lived through those times, and her perspective changed. "You had to find ways to do what you did and stay alive--and it hadn't occurred to me. It hadn't been my experience. I'd never lived with the threat that if I spoke my mind someone would break into my house in the dead of night and take my child and cover him with hot tar and feathers and hang him in a tree. It never occurred to me because I didn't know our own history," says Whoopi. "I started to look on [these women] as heroic. They raised a lot of kids, white and black, who've gone on to do great things. They held their breath and their tongue until the world caught up to what was right. They kept the family together--theirs, and the upper-class white families they were working for. And they survived."

So has Whoopi. In fact, if her life story were made into a movie, few would believe it. Whoopi (whose given name is Caryn Johnson) never really knew her father, who left the family when she was just a toddler. Her mother worked hard to keep a roof over the heads of her children, Caryn and Clyde, and the small family lived in an interracial neighborhood in Manhattan's Lower West Side. Whoopi's early childhood memories have a Technicolor "it takes a village to raise a child" kind of feel. "Everybody's parents felt some responsibility in keeping all us kids in line" she says." If you messed up, some adult would swoop in out of nowhere and bust your ass." Despite this communal parenting, Whoopi strayed, largely because the older she got, the more frustrated she became with school. It wasn't until she was an adult that Whoopi was diagnosed as being dyslexic, which undoubtedly contributed to her scholastic struggles.

But by that time, the die had been cast. Whoopi dropped out of school at age 13 and her life began to fall apart. She moved out of her mother's home, had two abortions and fell into drug addiction. Eventually, Whoopi entered a drug treatment program, and after successfully completing the program, married a drug counselor that she met there. The couple had a baby, but the marriage was a mistake. By the time Whoopi was 20, she was divorced, living in California with her daughter, and on welfare. Her welfare check supplemented the meager earnings she took in as a bricklayer and doing dead people's hair at a funeral home. Life was no day at the beach." I had no high school diploma," she says. "I had me and my kid." Still, Whoopi also had three other things going for her: talent, drive, and a dream to make it in the entertainment industry. While working in regional theater, Whoopi developed and polished up her own one-woman show. And when a major Broadway director caught her performance and opportunity knocked, Whoopi was ready to answer. The rest, as they say, is history.

Besides Unchained Memories and The Long Walk, other historically based projects that Whoopi's had a hand in include Harlem Song (a musical revue that she coproduced last year at Harlem's Apollo Theater) and Ghosts of Mississippi, in which she starred as the wife of slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers. As for contemporary tales from the Diaspora, in 1992 Whoopi played an inspirational South African schoolteacher in Sarafina, and six years later, portrayed Angela Bassett's best friend in the screen adaptation of Terry McMillan's How Stella Got Her Groove Back. Last year, Whoopi co-produced and costarred (with Danny Glover) in the Showtime movie Good Fences, which adapted Erika Ellis's 1999 satirical novel about an upwardly mobile black family who meet the limits of assimilation in affluent Greenwich, Connecticut. Off-screen, now that Whoopi's got clout, she isn't afraid to use it; between 1994 and 1996, for instance, she raised money for over 60 different charities, including those that dealt with issues of homelessness, AIDS and abortion rights. She shows no signs of either slowing down or stopping.

"I believe I belong wherever I want to be, in whatever situation or context I place myself," Whoopi says. "I believed a little girl could rise from a single parent household in the Manhattan projects, start a single-parent household of her own, struggle through seven years of welfare and odd jobs, and still wind up making movies. You can go from anonymity to Planet Hollywood and never lose sight of where you've been."

Or, as it turns out, never lose sight of where your people have been, either. And one hundred years and forty years after Emancipation, that's cause for celebration, indeed.

Reading Whoopi

Book by Whoopi Goldberg, Avon October 1998, $6.99, ISBN 0-380-72979-2 Whoopi tells her own story.

For younger readers: Whoopi Goldberg; Performer With a Heart by Sandor Katz Chelsea House Publishing, November 1996 $7.65, ISBN 0-791-04450-5

Whoopi Goldberg by Ann Graham Gaines Chelsea House Publishers, March 1999 $22.95, ISBN 0-791-04938-8

Also mentioned in this story: Unchained Memories: Readings From the Slave Narratives (based on the HBO documentary, narrated by Whoopi Goldberg), Foreword by Henry Louis Gates Jr., Introduction by Spencer Crew and Cynthia Goodman Bulfinch Press, February 2003, $24.95, ISBN 0-821-22842-0

Joy Duckett Cain is a veteran journalist whose work has appeared in Essence, Heart and Soul, Sports Illustrated, Black Enterprise and the New York Times Book Review. She lives in Westchester, New York, and is currently working on her second children's book. Cain's look at our unlikely griot, Whoopi Goldberg, appears on page 38.