Keeping Up with the Joneses

James Earl Jones, his father Robert Earl Jones, and the brief window of time I shared with each of them.

Photo of James Earl Jones, Glascow Film Festival 2010. Stuart Crawford via Wikimedia Commons

1

Robert Earl Jones stands near a high-rise window, quietly apart from the other guests. I stand across from him. In a few days, I’ll be on the telephone with his son James Earl Jones, who is gearing up for the role of Oedipus Rex on a New York stage. But that comes later. For now, there is only this moment by the window. And as everyone knows, each moment is a window on all time.

The expanse of glass that forms the particular window framing Mr. Jones and me displays a sweeping view of the City That Knows How. The TransAmerica pyramid, tall and white in the distance. The spiraled egg-shaped dome of city hall. The flickering lights of the Oakland Bay Bridge. A cable car making the steep climb up Nob Hill. Somewhere out there is my renovated 1920s flat at the top of Russian Hill, but I can’t see it from here.

What I can see

is a certain down-home aspect to Robert Earl Jones, which he makes no effort to hide. He is originally from Tate County, Mississippi. His sharecropper origins are a striking contrast to our reason for being here. It’s a social event hosted by a member of the San Francisco Arts Commission. Mr. Jones is one of several inductees into the recently created Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame. I’m here to help promote the event, having volunteered my services as a journalist.

Before this moment by the high-rise window, the only thing I know about Robert Earl Jones is that he played Robert Redford’s grifter-partner in the opening scenes of The Sting back in 1973. But my volunteer work for the Hall of Fame project has revealed plenty more.

During the Harlem Renaissance, Robert Earl Jones appeared in several theatrical productions, including a role in Don’t We Want to Be Free?—a 1938 play by Langston Hughes.

By the time we meet in the present

Robert Earl Jones has appeared in nearly two dozen films. Thoughtful, respected works like 1964’s One Potato, Two Potato. Yet, he is largely unknown. Which is why the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame was created. Its goal: To recognize and honor the contributions of people like Mr. Jones and many other African Americans, often unsung, who work in the film industry.

The organization’s Oscar Micheaux Award aims to correct the Reconstruction-era stereotypes adopted during the early days of filmmaking, detailed in Donald Bogle’s groundbreaking book Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks.

Standing by that high-rise window with the glittering white city at our feet, Mr. Jones and I exchange small talk typical of events like this, the details of which escaped me long ago.

What has remained

is an impression of his humility, even shyness. We are in a room filled with beautiful people, beautifully dressed. A cloud of perfume and alcohol floats around us. As if the cosmetics counter at Nordstrom’s is on a date with a hotel cocktail lounge.

Laughter, gaiety, and the escalating trill of women’s voices contribute to the atmosphere of celebration. Yet here is this tall former sharecropper, chauffeur, and boxer turned actor standing by the window, a man apart. Separate but not really alienated. In it but not of it, you might say. And me standing with him. As if looking in a mirror.

Probably I have read somewhere

that Mr. Jones left his wife before their son James was born in 1931. But it hardly seems appropriate to ask a man I’ve just met about a matter as personal as this. What am going to say? So, I hear you walked out on your family back in 1931 and took off for Chicago. How could you do a thing like that?

Later, I will understand that not every man who leaves is a shiftless ne’er-do-well. I will learn that Jones’s separation from his wife occurred during the Great Migration. And it will occur to me that in 1931 this particular husband and wife had a strong difference of opinion over “should we stay or should we go.”

Should we remain in this nothing life, sharecropping a Mississippi farm? Or get out while we still can? Make a better life for ourselves up North like thousands of other Black folk.

But while I’m speaking with him

I don’t understand that the full truth of that life-defining moment can only ever be understood or told by Robert Earl Jones and his former wife. And by the time this awareness comes to me their time on the planet will have been long over. He left, she remarried, and handed the child to his grandparents to raise. That much is the documented truth.

And although all that history exists within the window that is this particular moment as Mr. Jones and I face each other—there is also another truth. And a different history.

In that history, which came much later

Robert Earl Jones reconciled with his son in the 1950s when they lived together for the first time after James’s honorable discharge from the Army. And for a number of reasons, that matters a great deal.

It means the elder Mr. Jones survived the difficult path of individuation and became an actor—moving from that doomed sharecropper’s existence into the hoped-for life that followed. It means that he and his adult son understood that theirs could never be a parent-child relationship. Far too late for that. But they could be friends.

Which was a very good thing indeed

Because whether he was called father or friend, it was Robert Earl Jones who opened the door of the actor’s life for his son James Earl Jones. Who stepped across that threshold and kept on going. As if headed to a galaxy far, far away.

A galaxy where the word father escalated poignantly as this once “abandoned” son became a much-praised father figure in the celluloid universe. A cosmos with stars named Mufasa, Anakin Skywalker, King Jaffe Joffer, Martin Luther King, Sr., Papa Jenkins, and surrogate dad Terence Mann in Field of Dreams.

And to think—all that history and make-believe was utterly transformed to an astonishing degree and captured in the real life moment of this photograph of the Jones men. Robert Earl, James Earl, and Flynn Earl—three generations strong, actors all.

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2

When I telephone James Earl Jones

a day or so after speaking with his father, I’m a little nervous. I’ve interviewed dozens of celebrities in the past. But Jones is one of three film icons I admire most. Along with Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte.

Jones is in New York at the time of our call, performing the title role in an off-Broadway production of Oedipus Rex. I’m in my flat on Russian Hill, watching the sun burn through the fog over the Golden Gate. And I fanboy a little, telling him how much I admire his work, adding that he’s been an important role model. But James Earl Jones isn’t buying it.

“Had to be somebody besides me in your life for you to be where you are today,” he says in that famously powerful voice. And I feel caught-out by his frankness. I know he’s right. My father, my uncles, the men in my community when I was growing up. Musicians, teachers, postmen, Knights of Columbus. They were all my role models.

Although flattery has often worked

as an effective icebreaker when I’ve interviewed other celebrities and especially politicians, James Earl Jones is letting me know that he sees through bullshit—and neither likes nor wants it. I’m chagrined at the unmasking. But I’m also grateful. It puts the rest of the discussion on a more honest footing.

The reason for the call has to do with the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame, of course, and his father’s award—why he thinks the program is necessary and important, and so forth. But after we cover the business at hand, he speaks freely about other things. He tells me about his approach to acting, what judges look for when choosing Oscar winners, and a backstage incident that occurred during his Broadway run with The Great White Hope.

That play premiered in October of 1968

after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.—and during the Black Power Movement. Jones won a Tony Award for his portrayal of a fictional boxer who bore a strong resemblance to the historical Jack Johnson.

Like the real boxer, the fictional character is a prizefighter in the early 1900s, the first African American to win boxing’s heavyweight championship, easily defeating his white opponents. He publicly flaunts his wealth and his relationship with a white woman. And his racist antagonists don’t like any of this. They are constantly on the lookout for a white boxer—a great white hope— who can put this brazen Negro in his place.

Jones tells me he was confronted by an African American teenager, who’d come backstage after a matinee performance.

“I didn’t like what you were doing up there on that stage, fooling around with that white woman,” the teen told him. “It makes all Black men look bad.”

Jones listened to the youngster

then tried to enlighten him. “What I was doing onstage was not how I would behave. This a play is about a man who did act like that, and my job is pretending to be him.”

“But why would you want to pretend to be a man like that, especially now?”

“Because the play is about what happened to that man during a time when anti-Black racism was so widespread.”

Jones is not boasting when he describes the incident. We’re just talking. But he’s reminding me that there’s a cultural and educational gap, as well as a lack of financial resources, which can leave young African American students in the dark about even the most basic premises of theater.

As I listen to his famously sonorous voice

I can see him being as patient with that kid as he’s being with me now. Taking the time to explain to the youngster that The Great White Hope is about the conflict between that successful Black boxer and the society that tries to bring him down because of the color of his skin. And how that conflict leads to tragic consequences.

James Earl Jones strikes me as a kind and generous man. He’s suffering from congestion this morning and apologizes for it. I should probably say goodbye. He’s got to take the stage as Oedipus the King in a few hours, a performance I’d love to see. But I hang onto him a little longer. It feels good to talk with this man.

I ask if he’s a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and if he gets to vote on the Oscars. When he says yes, I push the envelope. I want to know why the Oscars usually go to famous actors in big name projects. Aren’t there any small films with outstanding performances?

Of course there are, he tells me

But financial success is part of the equation. A film has to be able to attract a large audience in order to get the attention of Academy voters. This answer does not surprise me, since the televised Oscar ceremony looks to me like a gigantic public relations gimmick.

Before letting him go, I ask about his process as an artist. What’s your approach? How do you decide which roles to accept?

“If I play a policeman in one film, I want to play a thief in my next role,” he says. “That gives me an opportunity to live in each world for a while. To look at life from different perspectives. To keep balanced. And not become typecast in my career or lopsided in my views.”

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3

I think about that answer

whenever I watch a James Earl Jones movie. As I learned more about art over the years, I realized he was telling me that art can be a path to wholeness, a way to become more fully human.

I’ve chosen the photograph at the top of this page because Jones was 79 years old when it was taken in 2010. And his expression seems to convey that he found the balance and wholeness he spoke to me about during our one and only conversation.

When I learned of his transition from this life into the next on September 9th of this year, I marveled at the unfathomable mystery at the center of all existence. How in the world did a child born into poverty on a Mississippi farm during the Great Depression reach the apex of success? One of the rare performers known as an EGOT, winning an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony Award during his 93 years on the planet.

The cards seemed terribly stacked against him

His stutter was so bad, he rarely even spoke during the first eight years of his life. You’ve probably heard the story of how a teacher noticed that the stutter disappeared when he read poetry out loud. And how that teacher made all the difference in his life by having him recite as much poetry as possible.

That certainly is part of the answer, though not the entire truth of it. I think something remarkable happened when Jones reconciled with his father. The father he did not know growing up but who became the father/friend he needed later on. When Robert Earl Jones ushered his son into the actor’s life where he could become his own best self.

I believe some ineffable inner thing happened to both those men, which accounts for their transformation. I only had a moment, a brief window of time with each of them. So I’d be hard-pressed to define it. You can give it a name if you must. Or just look again at that photograph of James Earl Jones at the top of this page. The answer is right there on his face.

©2024 Andrew Jazprose Hill

Thanks for reading/listening.