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A MAN WHO EARNS HIS LIVING ON STAGE BUT YET FEELS MOST comfortable working behind the scenes when performing nonprofit endeavors. A thoughtful man of strong opinions, yet one who consciously steers clear of political activism. A renowned actor but also one of the most recognized commercial voices in the country. An acclaimed Othello who is undoubtedly better known for the devilish, deep he gave to Darth Vader than for his interpretation of the Shakespearean tragic hero.
If it can be said that James Earl Jones is a man of contradictions, then it also can be said that those contradictions are somehow comfortably compatible. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Jones, who will be a featured speaker at ASAE's 2002 Annual Meeting and Exposition (August 17-20 in Denver), is simply a man of complexity, and that complexity starts with his ethnic background. Jones considers himself all of the above when it comes to ethnicity. "I'm part Irish, part African, and part Cherokee," he says. "I cannot be partisan in any direction."
Certainly, Jones embraces all that he is. Outside of his home, for example, stands a "great totem pole," as he calls it. Aware that totem poles are not specifically a part of Cherokee culture (they are from the Pacific Northwest Native American tradition) Jones says he erected it as an emblem of Native American culture as a whole.
Jones also embraces the fact that he is a stutterer. That's right: A man who chose acting of all vocations, the man gifted with one of the richest and most recognizable voices in America, emphasizes that he is--not was--a stutterer. Needless to say, he has come a long way. His stutter was so severe that in his autobiography he refers to himself as mute during his first eight years of school.
Culture: commonality and conflict
Considering his fascination in matters of culture and ethnicity, the topic Jones will be speaking on at ASAE Denver 2002 seems natural to his interests. He has entitled his presentation "Culture Quest: How Culture Affects Us and How We Affect Culture." In the presentation, Jones will reflect on what happens when cultures change, when they collide, and when they converge and connect.
In Jones's eyes, culture, whether it is ethnic or otherwise, is a driving force of human existence. Culture, he says, lies at the center of conflict--a noteworthy viewpoint coming from a dramatic artist: It is generally understood that at the center of all drama lies conflict, if there is no conflict, there is no play, no film, no story. "There are cultural grounds for every element of our lives, especially every conflict that we have," he says.
Jones, a Civil War buff, loves to study that American conflict "from both sides." But it's not just the differences behind the confrontation that interest him. "Sometimes it's conflict, and sometimes it's a discovery of how similar we all are as well," he says. "In the Civil War you had Irishmen who came over here directly from Ireland looking for citizenship who would participate in the war. That sort of thing is what fascinates me. You had Native Americans who were slaveholders. In fact, my ancestry includes both."
Diversity and the human condition
After all the talk of culture and conflict, Jones, in fact, appears more focused on similarities than differences. In his autobiography, Voices and Silences (by James Earl Jones and Penelope Niven, 2002, Limelight Editions), he speaks of his lifelong fascination with the characters of Othello in Shakespeare's play of that title and with Lennie in the stage version of John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, two characters--one complex, the other elemental--possessing a certain universality. "I have not yet solved the mystery of Othello," he writes in his autobiography, "and I have played him many times, at different ages in my life."
During his half-century career, Jones, in fact, has played Othello no fewer than eight times and Lennie, who of course is not written specifically as an African American character, at least twice. Universal human experience and culture play heavily into both those stories: Othello illuminates the alienating experience of a foreigner in a strange land, while Of Mice and Men tells the tale of two rootless travelers, longing for a small piece of land of their own.
So, with his inclination toward universality and commonality, Jones is not a fan of the term diversity, a hot topic in the association world these days, yet he doesn't entirely dismiss the concept.
"It's like focusing on ethnicity--it becomes more and more ethnocentric, and I think that has to be avoided," he says. 'You have to be looking both ways. You have to pay attention to diversity and you have to focus on how we are all exactly alike as well." Rather than focusing on diversity, Jones says, the emphasis should be placed on ways in which "we're all exactly alike, our needs and aspirations and what defines us as human beings."
That is the direction that the movie industry needs to head, Jones says: putting diverse faces in roles that are not ethnicity-specific. "It's great to see a movie, for instance, that includes the face of a minority, whether it's Asian or African, and make nothing of it," he says. "They're just part of this society and country." Jones cites the casting of Morgan Freeman as CIA director Bill Cabot in this summer's The Sum of All Fears, the latest Tom Clancy thriller to hit the big screen, as an example of such color-blind casting.
Believing that films have the capability to "distill culture," Jones saw firsthand the positive cultural force that movies can be when he starred in 1995's Cry the Beloved Country, based on the Alan Paton novel set in apartheid-era South Africa. Recently Jones met someone who said that his s father, "a staunch racist," had seen the film. The son told Jones that the movie "had a profound impact" on his father. "The movie turned him around because he saw a character played with such basic humanity, which is what I was aiming at," says Jones.
Note that once again, he points to the concept of humanity. In Jones's character of Steven Kumalo, the man who saw the film "was able to see a fellow human being in terms of what Alan Paton has written," Jones says.
Getting his hands dirty
With his clearly cefined views, one might think that Jones would be an activist. That's hardly the case. Jones, who has enjoyed participating in such nonprofit organizations as Harvest with Heart, which distributes excess crops to the poor in the New Paltz area of New York, and Christmas in April, Washington, D.C., would much rather help out in the trenches than perhaps testify on Capitol Hill or be involved in other more abstract ways. "It's what I insist on," he says. " will get out with a paintbrush and go help paint somebody's fence as part of the Christmas in April program. That's the only area where I feel comfortable-to do something directly--[as opposed to being] involved philosophically."
That attitude resonates with the current volunteer challenges of associations, which hear often that a good way to attract new volunteers is to assign specific tasks, complete with tangible end results. "I think the appeal for volunteerism has to be defined by that so that people know that there are different ways they can volunteer," Jones says. "I think we all think of marching down to the town hall and passing out soup. There are all kinds of ways to volunteer. I think that those who appeal to us [to volunteer] have to do a better job of defining what we could do. It's very important, and probably everybody is more keen to participate now after 9/11. There's a need to harmonize a bit more."
On mentoring and meaningful relationships
Jones has had some close and influential relationships in his life. One that he mentions is with Donald Crouch, his high school English teacher who drew out his voice through poetry after Jones spent eight years virtually mute in the school setting. Jones dedicated his autobiography to Crouch ("father of my resurrected voice," Jones calls Crouch in the dedication).
So how does Jones feel about mentoring? Has he had any mentors? "There are some relationships that I wouldn't reduce by calling them mentoring," he says, speaking of Crouch as well as his grandfather. "They were very rich relationships." Again sharing a viewpoint as original as his very own voice, Jones, in fact, says that he doesn't buy into the idea of role models, nor does he care for the concept of mentoring. "I get very uncomfortable when someone is guiding his life by somebody else, by somebody else's shadow or by their light. It doesn't quite make sense to me," he says. But doesn't he think one can learn from other people? "I don't think so," he says. "I think what other people do is inspire you to find your stuff in yourself, not to be guided by them, In the army you have a guide who gives you direction when you're marching. I don't think in real life that that is what we want."
James Earl Jones might as well be speaking about himself: marching not by the direction of any external guide, but to his own internal drummer.
Carl Levesque is senior editor of ASSOCIATION MANAGEMENT. E-mail: clevesque@asaenet.org.
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