Story power Talking it over with Diane Ferlatte BY JOHNETTE RODRIGUEZ

Stories pour from Diane Ferlatte like water from a jug, spilling over as though she’s just telling you what happened to her on the way to the supermarket. And that makes sense because she spent her childhood listening to her family relate the everyday events that formed their days and their lives, first in Alexandria, Louisiana, and then in California, where she moved when she was a teenager. In the past 20 years, she’s taken her stories across the country and around the world, and this weekend she will bring them to the National Black Storytelling Festival in Providence (November 14 and 15 at 7 p.m. at the RISD Auditorium).

"I grew up with a lot of talking and a lot of singing," Ferlatte recalled, in a phone conversation from a motel in southern California. "I knew my mother was awake when I heard her singing in the kitchen. And they were all always talking about things that mattered, things about their lives, family members, tragedies or things that were happening around the community.

"My father was the main person who kept a lot of the family stories alive," she continued. "Even though my family members might have known the same stories, he was the one who was chosen because he was so good at it. He’d make it funny or ham it up. So storytelling was just part of your life. Everybody just talked to each other."

When Ferlatte made the momentous decision to quit her day job in Oakland and tell stories full-time, her father said, in disbelief, "They pay you to do this?" But after someone saw her telling stories for a Christmas program at her church and asked her to come to an elementary school to perform, there was no turning back. After several years of accepting jobs in schools and libraries, she found that she was "making up stories to get off work to go tell stories."

"I saw, as I was doing it, the kids’ eyes and the adults’ faces, who had forgotten the power of a good story," Ferlatte remembered. "I thought, ‘There’s something to this. We’ve gotten so far from talking to each other, we have to pay somebody to come do it!’ "

Ferlatte had first re-discovered the mesmerizing quality of listening to stories when she and her husband adopted a three-and-a-half-year-old boy. The boy’s foster mother, with too many kids on her hands, had placed him in front of the TV all day long, and when Ferlatte tried to read bedtime stories to him, she realized she was reading to "a TV brain."

"I dumped that book and got one with more interesting characters in it," she related, "and I called on all the things I grew up with to get his attention. I began to use my voice a little differently; I used pauses, sound effects, my face. I became the character. If there was a dog, all of a sudden, I’d start to bark. And he was listening like it was live TV. And I said, ‘Aha!’ "

Those early years in schools and libraries not only sustained Ferlatte but are still a big part of her performances today, because she feels that those are places where she can connect most directly to young listeners. She spun out several examples, including one from a group home in Illinois and one from a high school in Florida.

At the group home, she told her mother’s story: "The day my mother was born was the day her mother died. That’s not a good way to start, is it?" She went on to tell the troubled teenaged girls before her that her mother endured foster home after foster home but much later she told her own daughter, "Tough times come. They don’t last. Tough people do. You gotta hang on." One young girl told her, "Nobody’s ever talked to me like that. You made me feel better."

At the high school, she was somewhat surprised when a group of students, usually thinking themselves way too cool for storytelling, crowded around after her performance to shake her hand, to ask how she knew so many stories, and to beg her to return. She was even more surprised to learn from the vice-principal that one of them had often been suspended for racist remarks and sayings on his T-shirts, and that his father was known to be a member of the Klan.

"But he was hearing my stories from my mouth, not from his parents," Ferlatte noted. "That’s the power in story."

And that power happens with adults as well. From Ferlatte’s prestigious appearances at the Kennedy Center before President Clinton, in an 800-year-old castle before the mayor of Graz, Austria, and for the governor of Hawaii to more humble performances at senior citizen centers or at a home for mentally disabled adults, she has felt the connection that happens in storytelling.

"Sharing a story is sharing of your time, sharing your gift," she stressed. "And the audiences help shape how I tell a story. By their reactions, they help me go in a certain direction, to continue where that story takes me."

And Ferlatte’s stories have, quite literally, taken her places: to the mountains of Kentucky to study the history of African-Americans there; to Sapelo Island, Georgia, to talk with the elderly descendants of former slaves to whom the Georgia Sea Islands were ceded by General Sherman in January 1865 (she created a one-woman show based on their stories); to New Zealand, Australia, Bermuda, Austria, and Sweden.

She has received numerous awards: from her storytelling peers, from parents’ organizations, from the American Library Association, and from the National Endowment for the Arts. But as much as the recognition has validated her storytelling career, Ferlatte still meets many people who don’t understand its significance.

"We’ve gotten so far from talking to each other that we’re typing to each other," she reiterated. "Things aren’t being passed on to kids anymore around the dinner table. Computers and the media — TV, radio, videos, DVDs — have changed things. Storytellers are trying to keep a balance, so that people can still talk to each other eye to eye, heart to heart. There are a lot of us around who realize the importance of telling our stories and knowing our stories and sharing our stories with each other. It’s the bridge that connects us."

Other tellers at Friday’s concert are Mitch "Gran’daddy Junebug" Capel, Linda Gorham, and Nothando Zulu. Saturday’s concert will feature Victoria Burnett, Derek Burrows, and Rhode Island’s own Len Cabral. For more information, call (401) 273-4013.