James Earl Jones: It wasn’t that I stopped talking, it’s that I resolved that talking was too difficult. You see, in the move from Mississippi to Michigan, you would think it would be a jubilant journey for a young boy of — I was then five years old — going to the promised land, you know. For me though, it was leaving the soil that I had touched with my bare feet, and I didn’t know if I’d ever touch soil with my bare feet again, and that was traumatic for me. I was leaving a Huck Finn world. Forget social problems, I was leaving the earth of Mississippi, the clay soil along the banks of the Mississippi River. And that was a trauma for me.