Once Upon a Time . . .

With reality pressing down on the world like the closing lid of a coffin, a little magic is necessary to help light the darkness. I don’t mean hocus-pocus magic but the twinkle and mist contained in fairy tales.

We need and should honor the kinds of storytellers who can weave gold out of cotton and sprinkle the ceiling of an ordinary room with stars. Theirs is a rare talent to enchant with tales told from books and from their own rich imaginations.

I have known two true storytellers in my life: Alex Haley, who could spellbind an audience with episodes from his Tennessee boyhood, and Peter Dennis, who crosses the country reading--creating--stories of Winnie the Pooh. And now I know a third.

Her name is Nailah Malik. She’s a bright, flouncing, magical lady who learned storytelling at her grandmother’s knee and brings that talent and a headful of folk and fairy tales to Southern California and beyond.

I heard her in Encino’s Lanai Road Elementary School capturing a room full of children by tweaking their imaginations into believing that for a moment they could hear music. For a moment they could sense the footsteps of a big, scary thing in the forest. And for a moment they could understand what it meant to believe in themselves.

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Malik was born in L.A. and works with young adults at Jefferson Library on the South-Central side of the city. A cum laude graduate of USC’s theater arts program with a master’s degree in library science, she travels mostly to schools in L.A. reciting from memory the 40 stories in her head. She has also held children entranced in nations throughout West Africa.

Malik calls herself the “Vela” storyteller, a South African term meaning to rise and grow. For 13 years she has charmed young people with fairy tales and folk tales out of India, Africa, Latin America, Vietnam and from narratives rooted in her own African American heritage. She performs partly to entertain but mostly to encourage literacy among the young.

She has appeared on radio and television, in special performances on stage and at universities, libraries and museums. Two years ago one of her stories was included in the best-selling book “Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul.”

Most of the stories emerge from books, but she occasionally writes music to accompany them and infuses her tales of monsters, fish and dancing grannies with a passion that elevates them beyond the pages of their origin.

Dressed in a brightly colored, patchwork African dress, she held an auditorium full of kids spellbound at Lanai Elementary, imitating the sounds of music, voices and a monster’s roar in the story of Abiyoyo.

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It’s about a little boy who’s driving his South African village crazy playing a ukulele--plunk-plunk, clink-clink, teedle-teedle, bang-bang--and his magician father who annoys the village by making things disappear.

One hears the ukulele as she brings its sounds through her voice into the room and one sees the magic of that father as he sweeps a wand toward objects that vanish into the air. This is the art of the storyteller: to transport you to places you’ve never been without ever leaving where you are, and to make things disappear that never existed in the first place.

The children listen, laugh, clap and sing Abiyoyo’s name, their participation an integral part of the story Malik creates in a room that becomes a village an ocean away.

Then suddenly the room, and the village, blending into one, tense as the monster Abiyoyo himself comes clomping through the forest. The little boy begins dancing and playing his ukulele--plunk-plunk, clink-clink, teedle-teedle, bang-bang--and Abiyoyo, intrigued, stops to listen and then dances so hard he falls exhausted to the ground. As he does, the magician waves his wand . . . and the monster disappears.

The boy and his father are celebrated as heroes, which proves that if you believe in yourself and what you do, you too can win over monsters.

No good story is ever told into a void. One needs audience response to fuel the drama that conveys magic. To Malik, it’s the children--their eyes, their laughter, their shouts, their applause--that fires her imagination.

As I left the school I couldn’t help but think how lovely that moment of twinkle and mist when children can live in a world where every ending is a happy one. They will learn soon enough how intimidating reality can be.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Sundays and Wednesdays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com