James Earl Jones
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Before the student matinee of "August in February" on Feb. 13, James Earl Jones met with some students from Perry Traditional Academy, as I reported the next day. Here are some lines from the poem read then by Perry student Sterling Freeman (and isn't that a wonderful August Wilson name?). The quoted passages come from Wilson's plays:
Larry RippelJanis Burley Wilson of the Cultural Trust with student poet Sterling Freeman.
Click photo for larger image."I found out life's hard, but it ain't impossible."
"Who can you be, if you can't be who you are?"
Wise quotes from a famous man ...
Poet, playwright, musician of words
"Words are free," free as leaving blood on the page
Little traces of you left behind
DNA forming characters that we wish we had met,
Characters we felt that we'd known all our lives
"Some people build fences to keep people out. Others build fences to keep people in."
"It ain't nothing to find a starting place in the world. You just start from where you find yourself."
Your "Fences" brought more people into your yard
The giant yard that is Pittsburgh
Your home, our home, now the world's home
You "confront[ed] the dark parts of yourself,"
Teaching us to confront ours.
You said, "Your willingness to wrestle with demons will cause your angels to sing."
Angels sing each time your plays are read and seen
Even as we, here on the ground, mourn your passing
"Everyone has to find their own song."
Thanks for letting us join in yours while we learn to play our own.
Christine Rendulich helped represent Verizon, which made Jones available. Christine Peterman was the Perry teacher whose students made such a good showing.
In welcoming Jones, Mayor O'Connor remembered taking his son to see "Field of Dreams" and crying, because he lost his dad young: "I would almost give my right arm to have played catch with him."
Based on his own knowledge of Wilson, mainly from when he starred in "Fences," Jones praised Wilson as a poet: "His plays are about black Americans ... [but] in his poetry, you can't tell where he's from. [He's] a great universal writer."
Wilson created people, he said, "you wish you could have known." Some of them might seem like those who, if you saw them on the street, "you'd roll your windows up. But August wrote people ... [to make] you want to roll your windows down."
First Published February 24, 2006 12:00 am
