He began working in the fields when he was 8 years old, and attended classes in a church on the plantation where he was born. When he was 15 he moved to Vallejo, California, where his mother and stepfather lived. There he visited a library for the first time. He liked 19th-century Russian writers such as Turgenev and Chekhov, as well as the works of Faulkner, Steinbeck, Willa Cather and Zora Neale Hurston.