Morgan Freeman: The Latecomer

"Were you born in Mississippi?"

"I was born in Memphis because my parents were working there. They were both from Mississippi, but they were in Memphis in the same hospital--she was a nurse's aide and my father was an orderly. But my earliest recollections of life are in Charleston, Mississippi, at the age of about four. I was left with my paternal grandmother when my parents took the exodus. That was the journey so many blacks took out of the South, going into the industrial North in the early '40s. Going into the factories. And, of course, the war made that almost a must."

"Was your father in the war?"

"Well, no, he was in the Army for a minute, but my father wasn't much of anything, actually--my natural father. He didn't make it in the Army, not beyond basic training. My stepfather was involved, I think, in getting him out because of hardship and disability."

"When did the stepfather come in?"

Freeman laughs expansively. "Well, he was there all the time. He was the one I thought was my father--until I met my father, really saw him, when I was six. I knew he was my father because he was my grandmother's son."

"How many children was your grandmother looking after?"

"Just my younger sister and I. My mother had four kids, and the two of us were by this one man. Then my grandmother died, not long after I was six, and my father came and got us and took us to Chicago where he and my mother were living--in estrangement, in 1943. That was only for a minute or two. It wasn't meant to work, so then it was just my mother, my sister and I--in Chicago, and in Mississippi, back and forth. My mother, I think, really wanted to live in a city, where there was more opportunity. But, I don't know what she wanted--I really don't know."

"So most of your childhood was spent in--"

"Greenwood, Mississippi. My maternal grandmother was there. Turned out I had two other siblings she was taking care of, and then we all got to know each other."

"This was an era of complete segregation?"

"Yes."

"How was that explained to you?"

He laughs again, and there's a hint of impatience with the way white people still don't quite get it. "It wasn't explained. You don't have to explain segregation--you're born into it, that's the way life is, the way you perceive things. I mean, people say it was better in the North. Bullshit! It wasn't. In the South it was fact, out in the open. You weren't suckered. But in the North!" He shakes his head at the memory of the duplicity. "That was one of the reasons I went back to Mississippi."

"What was your school like in Mississippi?"

"An all-black school. But I had just come from an urban cesspool where getting to school was a problem. In school, you could manage, but the getting back and forth--violence, terrible violence. You couldn't live alone, function alone. You had to be with some gang--go along to get along. It was all predicated on violence and lawlessness."

Freeman grows very quiet, and it is easy to feel how often the young Morgan must have been on the edge.

"So you're forced into gangsterism," he continues. "Which is the legacy we have in South Central Los Angeles now. There is no other life. The only way out is to get out. How do you do that? Well, I was snatched out by my maternal grandmother. So, living in Greenwood during the early '50s--six years of high school--it was the best of times for me. I had great teachers who thought I was something. I became very well liked and supported by a community. You know Hillary Clinton's statement, that it takes a village to raise a child? She was dragged through the coals for that, but it works--when you're in a small community, where all of the kids are everybody's responsibility. Children need that line to tow. If they don't have it, that's what makes them angry. [They think] 'No one gives a shit? I'm just here?' I lived in a situation where if you stepped over a certain line--I mean, Mrs. Brown would say, 'I'm going to tell your parents.' And I would go home and get a whipping. And my mother was never going to go to the school and take a teacher to task--my mother was going to beat my butt if she found out I had embarrassed her by getting whipped in school. I was going to get it both ends. Nowadays, if you can't discipline children--if they have the power--how can you raise them?"

"So you had come back from Chicago as a pretty wild kid?"

"Someone who could have gone waaaay down the wrong road."

"Were you tall as a kid?"

"I was skinny."

"Pretty striking-looking?"

"I don't know. I think I was just kinda ... I don't know. I remember living in Chicago and feeling kinda nerdy. Because it was all in my imagination. And I was into books. I read constantly, because I didn't like being out there on the street alone. I got my library card when I was eight, and my first book was Black Beauty and from then on I read all of the animal stories, and then I graduated to Nancy Drew-types of stories. Then I got into 'deeper' books--I started reading Mickey Spillane and Peyton Place. And I was also very active in anything that had to do with the stage--plays, putting on skits. I discovered at 12 that I was born to pretend."

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