“There was another pupil who sat behind me who was also a stutterer and the teacher, who was young, would shake him, and I’d say, ‘L-l-lll-l-let me teach him’ and I took over his studies, or when he had to talk. I understood him. I understood that shaking him was not going to help. She was relieved.”
James Earl was lucky enough to be taught by English teacher, and poet, Donald Crouch, whom he calls “the father of my voice”. He was a contemporary of Robert Frost, and memorized a poem every day in case he ever went blind so he might have poems he could read in his head.
“I had started writing poetry in high school and he said of one of them, ‘Jim, this is a good poem. In fact, it is so good I don’t think you wrote it. I think you plagiarised it. If you want to prove you wrote it, you must stand in front of the class and recite it by memory.’ Which I did. As they were my own words, I got through it.”
His teacher argued that if James Earl wanted to be ‘involved with words’ he would have to be able to say them and read to the class and work on the stuttering problem.
“And he got me engaged in the debating class, the dramatic reading class and so on. He got me talking, and reading poetry – Edgar Allan Poe was my favorite.”
He said, “You have gone from having the voice of a child when you last spoke, to a voice of an adult when you resumed speaking. Don’t be impressed. It’s easy for you to start listening to yourself. If you do, nobody else will.”
“And what he meant was that if you become so conscious about it you become too busy making all those deep S-O-U-N-D-S,” and he lets the word echo in his booming voice.
James Earl went on to study drama at Michigan University, by which time, he says, he had got a grip on his stutter. He says that although some people grow out of their speech impediment, he will always be a stutterer.
“I’ve learned that sometimes the synapses in your brain trip up, like stumbling on a sidewalk.”
Certain consonants, he says, set off a stutter (such as M) so he avoids them. But there is a great advantage for stutterers, he says, as they develop a greater vocabulary because they ‘ have to have more choices of words at their disposal.
James Earl Jones: “I Felt Like I Was Cursed” was originally published on blackdoctor.org
