James Earl Jones Interview (page: 8 / 8) National Medal of Arts	Print Interview

Is there anything outside of acting that you've always wanted to do?

James Earl Jones: I want to rebuild a world the same as the one I came out of. We had the Mississippi River, and in flood time, when the flood subsided, you could walk out and see catfish in the mud puddles. I'm digging a little lake now, a three-acre lake. I want to stock it with fish. I want to rebuild that self-sufficiency that I knew as a child. That's got nothing to do with show business.

What do you see as the greatest challenge to our society in the 21st Century?

James Earl Jones: We've got two big ones. One is health and one is sanity. I won't say "racism." I say "sanity," because racism is a form of insanity. Unfortunately, giving it a name almost sanctions it, as though we understand it. We don't understand it. Religion becomes a part of it, and that's insanity. Giving it a religious name almost sanctions it, and that's wrong. We shouldn't sanction these things, we should try to understand them. We have extreme psychotic situations that are disturbing our balance as a nation.

We have health imbalances, in the way we've gone about handling disease. Now there are doctors and scientists trying to find out what we did wrong with antibiotics. Where do we go from here to solve the serious health problems we're confronting? Including drugs. It's a health problem. To deal with it only as a crime problem won't work. Because as long as there's money involved, it's going to be as much a part of the economy as oil is. So you've got to deal with it in a whole other way.

When my mom came with her first bid to take me into her life, I didn't know her, because she had gone off with her new husband. They were migrant workers in the Delta region of Mississippi. They were grain harvesters, rice harvesters. In those days, large farmers would line the male workers up each morning and put a thimble full of cocaine into each shirt pocket, and the government sanctioned it, because it made them work happier and harder. I don't think the government knew what it was doing, but at the same time, there was not a lot of addiction that came out of that period. So the addiction has to do with something psychic, mental, rather than something physical. The addiction is the despair that drives you to want to stay asleep all the time, to knock yourself out all the time. That didn't exist then, so that cocaine itself was not addictive. So we've got to deal with it as a mental health as well as a physical health problem. That's all, then we're perfect!

What advice do you have for young people starting out today?

James Earl Jones: Carl Sandburg said, "Take no advice including this." I think I should stop right there.

What book or play would you choose to read to your grandchildren?

James Earl Jones: My son is 13, and he used to be read to all that I need! His room is full of books. His mom did most of the reading to him. If I'm able to utter a sound when he has a child, he'd have to start pretty early. I'd like to read him some of the books we read my son. I don't know when I'd get to a serious book, that is a book that I think would be meaningful to the child for the rest of his life.

You write in your book about your Irish and Native American ancestors as well as your black ones. Was it a source of anxiety or problems when you were growing up? Did that upset you?

James Earl Jones: Why should you be upset? You are who you are. Blacks have become as racist as racist white people, and have a hard time acknowledging it. But no, we had no anxiety about having white blood in us. How could we? We all did. So what? You end up being who you are, and if you can't come to peace with that, you're in a lot of trouble. To deny you had Indian blood, deny you had black blood, deny you had white blood, is part of the insanity I'm talking about.

People say, "What do you do about the bombings in the churches?" What do you say? You don't say anything. You have a response, hopefully a positive, a creative response. But the idea of talking about it? You can't rationalize insanity. You can't talk about it either. You lock it up. Or you treat it.

What does the American Dream mean to you?

James Earl Jones: I'm not a dreamer. I never acknowledged there was one. Each person has a place they want to get to. I just defined mine as this self-sufficient world, which is the farm. Is that the American dream? No! Most people don't want to be on a farm. I notice that Canadians are more inclined to be that way. Every urban Canadian has the dacha, or the shack out in the woods. I don't know if there's an American dream. Or that you'd call it an American dream. It might be a human dream. "Dream" sounds like fantasy. I think there are problems we have to solve, if you want to call that our dream. Solutions are our dreams.

Thank you very much for speaking with us today.

You're welcome.

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