Isabel Wilkerson Instagram – What a thrill to have gotten the chance to spend time with James Earl Jones, who turns 93 today, and to hear firsthand that the most iconic voice of our time — the voice of Darth Vader in “Star Wars” and the voice of CNN — almost didn’t make it out to the world.
He was born on this day in 1931, in Arkabutla, Mississippi, to artistically inclined but struggling domestic workers who separated after he was born. He was four years old when his grandparents, under the pressures of caste, spirited him out of Mississippi and settled in Michigan, on land the grandfather bought sight unseen, during the Great Migration.
But James Earl Jones was so traumatized by the loss of all he had known and of especially his mother, who had gone off to find work elsewhere, that he developed a debilitating stutter and then went more than five years without speaking. “In Sunday school,” he once told the Daily Mail of London, “I’d try to read my lessons and the children behind me were falling on the floor with laughter.” So he talked to the hogs and the cows and the chickens on the farm. “They don’t care how you sound,” he once said. “They just want to hear your voice.”
He was still virtually mute when he entered high school. There, an English teacher took an interest and had him recite poems in class and helped cure him of his silence. He went on to the University of Michigan for pre-med but switched to theater after taking acting classes. He would go on to play King Lear and Othello, win Tony Awards for his work in August Wilson’s “Fences” and in “The Great White Hope” and appear in Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove” and Kevin Costner’s “Field of Dreams.”
It was an honor to sit down with him a few years ago for Smithsonian Magazine as an extension of The Warmth of Other Suns, the book that set me on my journey to understand caste in America and the ways it still haunts us as Americans, and to situate this legend of our culture in the timeline of American history.
#caste #thewarmthofothersuns #history #jamesearljones | Posted on 18/Jan/2024 05:20:42
