I was an adopted child of my grandparents, and I don’t know how I can ever express my gratitude for that because my parents would have been a mess. And there were considerations about that, where should I go, and that began to bother me when I’d hear those discussions at night. “Where should James Earl go?” But it was the journey itself that I really feel, the being ripped from the soil is what set me into a state of trauma. So by the time I got to Michigan I was a stutterer. I couldn’t talk. So my first year of school was my first mute year and then those mute years continued until I got to high school.