The actor stated that for a period of eight years from the time he was six until the time he was fourteen, he was virtually mute. His family and friends often accused him about lying about his inability to speak, saying things like, “We know you can talk. We have heard you talk.” He talked to his family in basic terms. He spoke to the farm animals at length and had conversations with himself.


In an interview with the Daily Mail, he stated, “I did communicate with the animals quite freely, but then that’s calling the hogs, cows, the chickens. They don’t care how you sound, they just want to hear your voice.”


He then stated that other children were not as accepting as animals. “Stuttering is painful. In Sunday school, I’d try to read my lessons and the children behind me were falling on the floor with laughter …. By the time I got to school, my stuttering was so bad that I gave up trying to speak properly.”


He put forth in Voices and Silences, “A stutterer ends up with a greater need to express himself, or perhaps a greater awareness of how you would like to say something. The desire to speak builds and builds until it becomes part of your energy, your life force. But when I was a boy, speech became a wall I could not surmount.”


Early on in the book, Jones wrote that he was still non- speaking when he entered high school but that the pivotal teacher for him was Donald E. Crouch, a former college professor who came out of retirement to teach his class English, Latin and history. He wrote, “The turning point in my ability to cope with my stuttering came in Professor Crouch’s English classroom.” James Earl Jones may have never made a bigger understatement in his life.


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