The voice. The words.
James Earl Jones recites the rhythmic cadence of Michigan's "Song of Hiawatha."
"Tata tata tata tata tata/ Tata tata tata."
He remembers writing a poem, in the same cadence, to classmates in northwest Michigan.
He was instructed to do so by his teacher, to push the nearly mute student to speak from his heart. Possibly to help this young teen to get past his stuttering. Possibly to judge plagiarism. It is hard to know the teacher's motive. He has been gone now, 32 years.
The outcome is undeniable.
I receive a private recital. Jones never stammers, now or then. Think of the mahogany voice.
"By the shores of Gitche Gumee/ By the shining Big-Sea-Water/ Stood the wigwam of Nokomis," Jones says by memory, in that resonating baritone. He speaks calmly, not projecting, as if on stage. But it is ... his voice.
I tell him, "I am speechless."
"So was I," he responds.
James Jones. The name is direct, uncomplicated. Two syllables, and 10 letters. Not Jimmy, old friends say, in the tiny Manistee County communities where he was raised and schooled.
Just James.
This year is the 25th anniversary of the iconic movie, "Field of Dreams." He agrees it is his signature film, but it far from defines him.
And we hardly talk about that, or the Academy Award nomination, or the two stage Tony Awards for best actor.
We talk about Michigan.
James Earl Jones (OK, now 14 letters, three syllables) and I were fact-checking an earlier 30-minute interview. We only had a short time, minutes. Then we talked an hour, actually 58 minutes and 22 seconds exactly.
We discuss poetry and Longfellow. We talk about how he barely spoke for years, overcome with stammering after he moved from Mississippi to Michigan. He lived with his grandparents after his parents broke up.
They took the train, buying land sight unseen, to find a better education. They left the Ku Klux Klan of the South and its growing energy. They settled in Dublin, in Manistee County, a tiny town in the tiny Brethren School District.
The still-small town's name has nothing to do with Ireland. Local lore is that trains traveling a steep grade separated their cargo, then doubled back. "Doubling" became Dublin.
Jones, 83, was raised here, just north of Lake County. He now lives north of New York City.
Michigan memories
Grass bends in the breeze on his family's old homestead. Wind whispers to no one but a pair of visitors. The house, a converted chicken barn, clean and tidy by local accounts, is gone. A foundation remains, and pine trees sprout from inside.
Black and white photographs from that period show a small boy in a one-room schoolhouse, in the background. In another, outside, he wears a cap, and a half-smile. The school is well integrated. This would be during his mute period.
IN SEARCH OF JAMES EARL JONES
Follow one reporter's odyssey to explore the famed orator's humble roots in northwest Michigan, and hear Jones relive memories of growing up poor here.
• Finding Jones' true Field of Dreams and the tiny town of Dublin.
•Aileen and Donald, childhood friends, still beloved some 70 years later. "He was just James."
• The voice. Jones recounts his youthful stutter, how he was essentially mute, and the teacher he calls "the father of my resurrected voice."
• Memories to know from James Earl Jones.
Today, it is a newer building, well kept, a friendly, helpful staff. The older building, Dickson Rural Agricultural High School, is across and up the road, within walking distance. A wall of bricks collapsed and windows are broken. It is open to the elements. There are discussions about making it a community center and museum for the arts.
"It's a noble old building that went to hell," Jones would tell me later. "The rain started leaking through the roof and so it's totally derelict."
Standing near the school, I buy a book of poems, written by bespectacled English teacher Donald Crouch, deceased since 1982. He was 91. That is a good life. Crouch was, Crouch is, Jones' mentor, among the most influential people he has known. Money from book sales goes toward the community center.
"I credit him as 'the father of my resurrected voice,' " Jones writes in a foreword to the book.
"Once he realized I was writing poetry secretly, he insisted that I read it out loud," Jones said. "He understood somehow that poetry — being a very subjective language — I should be able to share it vocally as well as with pencil. That sort of gave me some confidence in uttering words."
It was during the Depression, when the federal government brought citrus fruit from the South to the northern states in winter to protect against rickets and scurvy. Crates of grapefruit were dropped by train, all along the rail path, Jones said.
"I just thought it was the most wonderful food in the world, and I wrote an 'Ode to Grapefruit,' set in the Hiawatha-Kalevala cadence," Jones recalled. "Donald Crouch said, 'This is pretty good. In fact, it's so good I don't think you wrote it. To prove you wrote it, get up in front of the class and recite it out loud by heart.'
"And I did it, and I could speak, and he said 'OK.' "
Donald Crouch unlocked his stuttering, mute, voice.
The only reason Jones and I talked so long, I believe, was because of his love for where he was raised. There is so little here. It is really just a wooded crossroads, but, for him, it is clearly so much more.
From Dublin to Broadway
James Earl Jones is among Michigan's best-kept secrets. In this tiny corner of Manistee County, about 160 miles from the state capital, his legacy is known – but not pervasive statewide, or even here.
At the one large business in Dublin, a general store, employees cannot remember a single tourist asking where James Earl Jones lived. At the gas station across Hoxeyville Road, a young clerk doesn't even know who James Earl Jones is. The station is within walking distance from his boyhood home, which no longer exists.
There is a tile, multi-copper-colored silo on the property. There also is a concrete foundation or two, a pair of pines rising from one. They appear to be spruces. There is a rusting metal clothes-line hanger, an aging lawn mower. A few bottles. Bricks. Nothing to note this is where a world-class actor was raised.
Jones has played Shakespearean "Othello." He was the mistakenly menacing neighbor in the coming-of-age "Sandlot." He has been the voice of CNN, Verizon Wireless, and the patriarchal Mufasa, father of the "The Lion King."
He was famously the intimidating father for which he won a Tony Award for the Pulitzer Prize winning "Fences" in 1987. (The scene, "How come you ain't never liked me?" is breathtaking, intimidating, and tender.) He was the boxer in the racially tinged, Academy-nominated "The Great White Hope." He was on stage this summer with Angela Lansbury for "Driving Miss Daisy" and is back on Broadway this month for "You can't take it with you."
For many, Jones is an actor for a generation, a voice not to be forgotten, partly because of what he told farmer Ray Kinsella, acted by Kevin Costner, in "Field of Dreams," 25 years old this year.
"Ray, people will come, Ray," Jones says, imploring Costner not to sell his cornfield and his improbable ball diamond. "They will come to Iowa, for reasons they can't even fathom. They'll turn up your driveway, not knowing for sure why they're doing it. They'll arrive at your door as innocent as children, longing for the past ... And they will walk out to the bleachers, sit in their shirtsleeves on a perfect afternoon. ... It'll be as if they dipped themselves in magic waters. The memories will be so thick they'll have to brush them away from their faces."
Jones wipes his right hand past his eyes. "Oh, people will come, Ray. People will most definitely come."
Rarely, a person becomes larger than life. But this much is true. There are more famous lines in moviedom, but not many. And people do come. VIP tickets for the anniversary in June at the Field of Dreams in Dyersville, Iowa, were $3,500; $2,500 if you bought a second ticket.
There is a field of dreams in Michigan, too. Or there was.
Barnstorming players would pass through in the 1930s and '40s, where a storeowner had removed sugar maples and red pines, and his successor built 90-foot base paths in the expansive forest.
"I thought that was the greatest thing next to a circus I'd ever seen in my life," that young boy would tell me many years later, recalling uniformed baseball players with flowing beards from the traveling House of David team competing on the remote diamond.
Tigers, Yankees or Mets, I ask the now resident New Yorker?
"I'll tell you something interesting," he says. "I was not into baseball, but my grandfather's favorite player was Satchel Paige. And this was in the days before Jackie Robinson, before baseball big leagues were integrated. So we had no great affiliation with the Tigers because my grandfather was the only baseball fan in the family, and he liked Satchel Paige, who was playing in the Negro leagues. You understand?
"We didn't have electricity until just before I went off to college. We didn't have any TV, of course. Baseball was listened to on a radio hooked to a car battery. And if you've had that experience, it's pretty dull. Later on, the programmers started adding sound effects. You know, like 'clack,' the bat hitting the ball and the crowd cheering. But until then, baseball was not much to listen to."
As the actor in many productions of sports figures, including baseball, it is a testament to his craft, to him.
Jones did not talk much for many of his younger years. He stammered. He was the child of a broken family, adopted by his grandparents, intimidated by northern accents, the hard consonants, the speed with which we talk.
This small town in Manistee County is where it began, where he experienced his own field of dreams, where he found his voice, where he graduated from the tiny Dickson Rural Agricultural High School and went on to the University of Michigan to study pre-med, serve in the Army – go through Ranger training – and begin his acting career.
"I need to know whether you heard what I meant to say," Jones says to me. The famous baritone is friendly, direct. "Brethren is too important for me in my life, and if you do a segment on Brethren I want you to know that I had a great time there. "
We chatted a bit more. It was no longer an interview, really. I told him I write for exercise, 15 to 30 minutes a day lately. Only for me and, someday, my family.
"God bless you," he says. "God bless you."
It was quiet, not whispered, but almost.
The voice of Mufasa. Of "This is CNN." Of reclusive Terence Mann.
Of James Earl Jones, from smalltown Michigan.
I share the blessing, only because of what it says about him.
Listen to the longer interview with James Earl Jones