Isabel Wilkerson Instagram – The world has lost a legend now embedded in our collective psyches, and I feel both a deep well of grief over the passing of James Earle Jones and an indescribable gratitude for having had the profound honor of sitting down with him as he shared with me in that basso voice his family’s migration out of the South.
Stunning to realize that the voice of Darth Vader in “Star Wars” and the voice of CNN — almost didn’t make it out to the world.
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 went 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 cows and chickens on the farm. “They don’t care how you sound,” he said. “They just want to hear your voice.”
He was still virtually mute when he entered high school. An English teacher took an interest and had him recite poems in class and helped cure him of his silence. He went 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.”
The day I met him a few years ago to talk about his recollections of the Great Migration, I knew I was sitting down with a lion of film and a national treasure. Now I feel the magnitude and beauty of having sat down with history.
RIP James Earle Jones. Deepest gratitude to you for all that you have given us and the world. | Posted on 10/Sep/2024 03:49:06
