He was born during a tropical storm on September 3, 1907, in the peaches-country town of Justin, Georgia. The initial in his name stood for Justin, the name of the community’s founding family in whose home Calvin’s maternal grandmother, Sarah, had once worked as a house girl and a slave.

The last surviving member of the Justin family, Mr. Osborne Justin—attorney, town clerk, elderly practical joker as well as the inheritor of certain traditional roles—had offered old Sarah ten dollars if her daughter would name the baby Judas, but the old lady was both too proud and too shrewd. She named the baby after the white man’s family, despite—or perhaps because of—the fact that according to local legend their relationship in their younger days was far more than that of slave girl and master’s son, and fully aware that custom demanded that the old white man make the gift to the child anyway, to acknowledge the tribute paid to his family name.

Calvin grew up as a rural Negro. As long as he was in Georgia he never heard himself identified without an emphasis on the middle name—Calvin Justin Priest—and it was perhaps this link with a privileged background and portent of proud things to come which led him to be allowed extended schooling. He was a religious boy who enjoyed the drama of prayer meeting and for a long time he thought he would be a preacher. It was a happy boyhood, despite the fact that both his parents were carried off by the epidemic of influenza that leaked into the countryside from the cities, tardy but just as deadly, in 1919. Three years later Sarah knew that although God had granted her a rich and long life, it was nearing its end. She dictated a letter to young Calvin, who transcribed it painstakingly and sent it off to Chicago, the place of opportunity and freedom. It offered Sarah’s burial money, one hundred and seventy dollars, to former neighbors named Haskins if they would take her grandson to their home and to their bosom. She was certain that Osborne Justin would see to her burial; it was a chance for one last joke at his expense.

The reply came in the form of a penny postal card on which someone had scrawled in pencil:

SIND THE BOY.

Before he returned to Georgia he was a man.

Moses Haskins turned out to be a mean brute who beat Calvin and his own brood with regular impartiality, and he ran away before he had lived with the Haskins family a year. He sold the Chicago American, shined shoes, then lied about his age and labored in a stockyard packing house. The work was bitterly hard—who would have thought dead animals could weigh so much?—and in the beginning he did not think he would last, but his body toughened and the money was good. Still, two years later, when the opportunity arose to become a roustabout with a traveling carnival, at less money, he seized it eagerly. He traveled the wide country with the show, drinking it all in, the glories of it, the high places and the remote valleys, the different kinds of people. He did a little of everything that required a strong back, packed and repacked the canvas, raised and lowered the tents, fed and watered the miserable animals: a few mangy cats, some monkeys, a pack of trained dogs, an old bear, a clipped-winged eagle that sat chained to its perch, white tailfeathers drooping. The eagle died in Chillicothe, Ohio.