Jackie Torrence, 60; Storyteller Focused on Cultural Lore

The four little 5-year-olds were adamant. They had come to the library to hear a story, and “L’il Red Riding Hood” would not do.

They also rejected “The Three Little Pigs.” Way too boring.

Jackie Torrence, assigned to pinch-hit for the absent children’s department story lady, was getting desperate when she remembered a tale from her own Appalachian childhood.

“How about Sody Salleradus?” she said, and the preschoolers were hooked.

With word and gesture and facial expression, she wove the tale of forest creatures who each go down the hill in search of baking soda to make biscuits but pass a hungry bear who eats them all up. Finally, a wily little squirrel succeeds in the mission and makes the bear laugh so hard he bursts, releasing all the squirrel’s friends. They all go home to bake biscuits.

The children liked the story so much Torrence retold it four times, and the library promoted her to story lady.

Torrence, who quickly evolved into a story lady for the nation, died Nov. 30 at her home in Salisbury, N.C., of a heart attack. She was 60 and had crippling arthritis, which caused her to use a motorized wheelchair.

“If I were forced to name the top five storytellers in America -- and perhaps the world -- Jackie Torrence would be on that list,” Jimmy Neil Smith, executive director of the National Storytelling Assn. and founder and president of the National Story Center, told the Kansas City Star in 1998. “She is the matriarch of storytelling in America.”

From her accidental beginning in a small public library in High Point, N.C., that snowy winter day in 1972, Torrence spun stories across the country for three decades -- at the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tenn., on CBS’ “Sunday Morning” with Charles Kuralt, on NBC’s “Late Night with David Letterman” and on her nationally televised Halloween special, “The Teller and the Tale.”

She traveled 280 days a year and performed in nearly every state, mesmerizing young audiences in school auditoriums and older crowds at Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and Lincoln Center in Manhattan. Fortune 500 companies -- including Dreamworks SKG, Disney, IBM, General Motors and AT&T; -- hired her to inspire creative teams and salesmen with her low-tech ways to put a story across.

Torrence wrote two books: “The Importance of Pot Liquor” and “Jackie Tales: The Magic of Creating Stories and the Art of Telling Them.”

She also recorded several albums and earned Parents Choice or American Library Assn. awards for five. A recently completed recording of two dozen stories is scheduled for release next spring by Dan Zanes’ Festival Five Records.

She was included with Rosa Parks and Oprah Winfrey in Brian Lanker’s 1989 book, “I Dream a World: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed America.”

Steeped in the lore of her Appalachian, Cherokee and African American heritage, Torrence told ghost stories, “Jack” stories about various adventures of the Jack of beanstalk fame, Uncle Remus tales and “jump” stories, which end with such a startling one-word twist they make the listener jump.

Picturing each of her 300 or so stories and then vividly describing the pictures rather than memorizing words, she told a yarn with her whole being, using her expressive face and energetic hands as well as her versatile voice to convey both emotions and information.

No story ever came out the same way twice as she adjusted characters’ ages, words, actions and reactions to her audience.

“Now years ago, back in the days when animals could talk like you and me, there lived Br’er Possum and old Br’er Snake,” she would begin an Uncle Remus tale, rolling her eyes and raising her eyebrows.

The audience would hardly draw breath for the half-hour it took her to get to: “And the moral of the story is: When you walkin’ down the road and you spot trouble -- don’t never trouble trouble, till trouble troubles you.”

Torrence, whose work has been praised by the National Education Assn., disagreed with modern critics who consider the Uncle Remus folk tales recorded by Joel Chandler Harris as demeaning to African Americans.

“As a teaching tool, the tales implied great morals when they told of the sly ways the slaves had outsmarted the master,” Torrence, the granddaughter of slaves, once told the anthology Notable Black American Women. “They were warning devices and were used as signals to those who were hiding -- needing information about people who could and would help. Why do we resent them now? ... Whatever the reason, we are making a grave mistake. These stories are important to the black as well as to the white heritage of America.”

Born in Chicago on Feb. 12, 1944, Torrence was sent to live with her maternal grandparents in the farming community of Second Creek, N.C., for her first six years. She learned a library full of stories from them.

“They had no idea under God’s sun what to do with a magpie like me who talked constantly,” she told The Times in 1992 when she was in Southern California to perform at UC San Diego’s Mandeville Auditorium. “So my grandparents told me stories to keep my mouth shut.”

When it was time for her to start school, however, Torrence moved into town -- Salisbury -- to live with her spinster Aunt Mildred.

She studied education at Livingstone College, dropping out to marry a student at Hood Seminary, both in Salisbury, then followed her itinerant minister to impoverished churches in Georgia, Mississippi, Arkansas, Oklahoma and Texas.

But the marriage ended in divorce, and she found herself back in North Carolina and struggling to support her daughter, Lori, who survives along with Torrence’s six sisters, three brothers and three grandsons. Torrence took a job as an uncertified reference librarian in High Point, and that’s where she told the story that changed her life.

Soon she was telling stories at birthday parties, senior citizens’ book groups and schools. The Charlotte Observer published a story about her in 1977 that brought her to the attention of Smith of the National Storytelling Assn. After he invited her to speak at Jonesborough, she booked 50 paying appearances.

In 1980, she was in Chattanooga, Tenn., for a performance when a man, curious that she received six phone calls in a few minutes, approached her restaurant table and said, “You sure are popular. What do you do?”

“You sure are nosy,” she retorted. “What do you do?”

He showed her -- writing a front-page article about her headlined “Br’er Possum, Meet Br’er Snake, but You Better Be Careful” for his employer, the Wall Street Journal.

National television, Lincoln and Kennedy centers and recording companies came calling.

“And that,” as Torrence liked to close each presentation, “is the end of that.”