“Aha!”, proclaimed Professor Crouch as he went to sit down. “We will now use this as a way to recapture your ability to speak.”
That recitation of his poem in front of his high school class was something that James Earl Jones always ranked as the biggest event of his life. It inspired him to recite Shakespeare to himself for hours on end, and to harness this fluent speech to take Professor Crouch’s advice to join the debate team, where he became a champion debater not only of his high school, but in high school competitions in Michigan. Naturally, this led him into acting. He wrote in his memoir of this high school metamorphosis, “I could not get enough of speaking, debating, orating – acting. I became the school’s champion public speaker. During those mute years, of course, my voice had changed, almost without my awareness, so in addition to the novelty of being able to speak, I could now speak in a deep, strong voice. People seemed to like to hear it, and I was overwhelmed to be able to speak aloud, in any voice at all.” It is safe to say that the rest is history.
However, Jones always maintained that he was by no means cured and had to always work to manage his speech. In an interview with NPR, he said, “I don’t say was ‘cured.’ I just work with it.”
Professor Crouch took an interest in Jones and noticed that he wrote great poetry. He encouraged Jones to not just write the poetry, but to get up and recite the poems in front of the class. Jones wanted no part of that due to his speech, but Crouch insisted. Jones wrote, “I was shaking as I stood up, cursing myself. I strained to get the words out, pushing from the bottom of my soul. I opened my mouth – and to my astonishment, the words flowed out smoothly, every one of them. There was no stutter. All of us were amazed, not so much by the poem as by the performance.”
He continued, “Professor Crouch and I had stumbled on a principle which speech therapists and psychologists understand. The written word is safe for the stutterer. The script is a sanctuary. I could read from the paper the words I had composed there and speak as fluently as anybody in the class.”
"In a very personal way, once I found out I could communicate again, it became a very important thing for me, like making up for lost time, making up for the years I didn’t speak."
Several weeks before Jones’ death, a children’s book on the actor’s stuttering was published on July 30, 2024. Ode to a Grapefruit: How James Earl Jones Found his Voice was written by children’s author and speech-language pathologist Kari Lavelle and award-winning illustrator Bryan Collier. The book tells the story of how the young James Earl Jones did not speak for eight years except to animals and close family members, and how in high school the famed Professor Crouch made him stand up and read a poem he had written titled “Ode to a Grapefruit.” The book describes in fascinating
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