Obit: Jackie Torrence

Subject: Obit: Jackie Torrence
From: Charlie Baum
Date: 02 Dec 04 - 12:33 PM

One of the great storytellers of our time, Jackie Torrence, 1944-2004.

From the Salisbury (NC) Post:


Wed, Dec 1, 2004
Beloved storyteller dies
Rowan's Jackie Torrence succumbs to health problems

Jacqueline Torrence GRANITE QUARRY — Jacqueline Carson Torrence, 945 Byrd Road, died Tuesday (Nov. 30, 2004) at her home. Rowan Funeral Service is in charge.

We knew Jackie Torrence was a storyteller, a world-renowned and nationally acclaimed storyteller, who'd been featured in all the major newspapers in the country and, to tell the truth, throughout the world.

Featured in papers like the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times and so many more.

So why should we be surprised that for years, as her health grew ever worse, that she laughed and told people not to worry about her?

She was a doctor, wasn't she?

Didn't she have a doctorate (honorary, of course) from Catawba College?

And another from Livingstone?

So why wouldn't we believe her when she'd complain to friends who worried about her health and laugh it off, taking the easy way out.

"You know, I'm a doctor!" she'd declare. "So why can't I cure myself?"

"She was always clowning, even though she was on oxygen," says old friend, Al Hargraves, owner of Rowan Funeral Service. "She never really let on how sick she was."

But she was very sick, and her doctor's degrees didn't do any good.

She died Tuesday at 12:21 at her home.

"She'd said she wasn't feeling good," says her daughter, Lori Seals, "and she'd been trying to get to the doctor. She had made an appointment for yesterday."

But she missed it. Lori's van had trouble and wouldn't go. And the Rowan Transit van doesn't go her way on Tuesdays.

"She told me she was having pains in her chest," Lori says, " but she didn't complain any more than normal, and I went to work."

But she got a call from police about 12:30.

Lori needed to get home as soon as possible, the caller said, and she got there in a hurry.

"She was still here," Lori says, but she had fallen.

Betty Walker, who helped her on Tuesdays and Thursdays, was with her and had called the emergency service, "and they told me they think she had a heart attack."

"It's a loss to the area," says local attorney Glenn Hayes, who knew her well.

"Jackie had suffered a long time, but she fought the good fight, handled her health and handled her eroding fame (going because of her health) and did all of it elegantly and very lady like.

"I cared for her and hate to see this passing and this loss to Rowan County."

"Her health has been spiraling down hill since at least the late '90s," says Hargraves,"but she was a fighter."

Dionne Byrd of Salisbury, an employee of Rowan Funeral Service, took her death personally.

"I knew her when I was in elementary school," she says. "She came to my school when I was in the fifth grade and told the story about Old Brer Rabbit and made you feel like you were right there."

Frances McCray had known her since school days.

"We went to Price High School together, and she was a very self-directed person. She knew she had her family to take care of, and she decided on a goal and she went for it.

"And she was a very pleasant person to know, bless her heart."

Bless her heart, that heart that gave out on her, say the legions of us who have known her, appreciated her wit and how much she cared for all the people she entertained and her talent -- and her desire to share it with the world, even after it became a struggle.

"She's brought light to Rowan and Salisbury," Frances says.

McCray; Eleanor Quadirah, another old friend; and Richard Perkins, who was mayor of Granite Quarry, where she lived, all rushed to help her when she became critically ill in 1998 and ran out of money to treat her illness.

They set up a public fund to which people responded and helped her enormously.

But she was never able to really hit the road again, though she attended the National Storytelling Association festival in Jonesboro, Tenn., several months ago -- and brought home more awards to go with the vast collection she already had.

And she brought home something more important, Quadirah says.

She brought a feeling of enormous warmth because of the tremendous outpouring of love she felt from the people there, she told Eleanor.

And all of that, some have said, was the result of a bit of -- well, you might call it aberrant behavior.

Some people, she used to say, sing in the shower.

But not Jackie.

She cackled, high piercing black-witch cackles that iced the blood and prickled the skin.

Or moaned, moans like a lost ghost crying for the past.

Or groaned, her voice becoming a heavy door opening to a dark, dank great room in an abandoned castle.

And yowled and howled and neighed and bayed -- all sounds that she might need in the stories she told.

So she practiced them where she could.

In the shower.

In the car, tootling along to another school full of children or auditorium full of adults or party of people ready to be entertained, all of them with no notion -- until they heard her -- what was in store.

But oh! did they listen once she started -- and watch the faces she made and the earrings that danced around her shoulders and loved their new friend instantly.

Not that she expected to tell stories all over the United States and in Canada and Mexico and Sweden and who knows where else?

While she was still a high school student at Price, she knew she wanted to be somebody.

When she had to choose a quotation to put beneath her picture in the annual, she chose, "What shall I do to be forever known/And make the age to come my own?"

Unfortunately , her teacher wasn't too pleased.

"She told me that was selfish," Jackie told me much later.

"But I told her, 'That's the way I feel. I don't want to just live and die and nobody know I did anything on this earth.' "

But she became a storyteller through a series of happenstances, all unplanned.

She had Abna Lancaster for English at Price -- and she was "an incredible storehouse of Afro-American literature and she made us learn it."

And Dr. Mason Brewer at Livingstone College excited her with his Uncle Remus stories.

But she didn't think of becoming a storyteller until her marriage broke up and she was trying to support her daughter as an assistant at the High Point library.

And she started telling stories to keep the children from tearing the place up.

As a result she was asked to tell a story at a community event -- and the rest is history.

First she got a few jobs.

Then many.

Her name became known all over the nation -- and she was asked to be on the David Letterman show.

Other guests that night were Michael Keaton and Mickey Mantle and then she told a Brer Rabbit story.

She had expected Letterman to make fun of Granite Quarry, where she lived, because he'd been joking about a town with that name for weeks before she arrived. And she planned to be thick-skinned about it.

But it never happened.

By that time she was recognized as one of the top story tellers in the world and had conducted workshops and told tales in 47 states and Great Britain, New Zealand and Guam as well as all those other places.

And in Rowan County.

Before her health knocked her off her feet, Jackie Torrence was always looking for a good story, always practicing the sounds she'd use when she told it, always making children's eyes look like they were going to pop right out of their heads and always making those same children poke their mamas and whisper, "That's her," if she passed them in a mall after she'd told a story at their school.

When that happened, she used to feel good -- and remembered that quotation she chose to put under her picture in the old Price High School annual.

"What shall I do to be forever known .... "

She did it, many times over, telling stories to children -- and to grown-ups, too.

"Rowan County,"says Eleanor Quadirah, "has lost a gem."

Nobody who knew her -- or heard her -- would ever argue that.

She was a treasure we all recognized -- and loved.

Contact Rose Post at 704-797-4251 or [e-mail].

Subject: RE: Obit: Jackie Torrence
From: wysiwyg
Date: 02 Dec 04 - 02:28 PM

Oh, that IS too bad. I was lucky ebnough to see/hear her once, and I have an LP of her Jack Tales. That lady gave me a LOT.

Rest in Peace.

~S~

Subject: RE: Obit: Jackie Torrence
From: GUEST,winterbright
Date: 02 Dec 04 - 03:53 PM

Sitting here in tears in the library. I am a storyteller, too, and it grieves me that Jackie is no longer here. But I can certainly picture her up on a big puffy cloud somewhere with a gaggle of cherubs gazing up at the big black lady with the wings and halo telling those wonderful tales.

Subject: RE: Obit: Jackie Torrence
From: Hollowfox
Date: 02 Dec 04 - 04:52 PM

*sigh* She was a big part of my storytelling life as well. She was at the first National Storytelling Festival I attended, 'way back in the 1970's. She, all unknowingly, was in a vignette that embodied the festival and the town it's held in for me all these years. Remember, I was from New York State, a northerner in the South. For years I'd seen news broadcasts of the Civil Rights movement and all its strife. But that day, as I was walking along, I saw two friends come together and hug their greetings. One was Jackie, a large Black woman, and the other was Kathryn Windham, a slender white woman from Selma, Alabama.

Subject: RE: Obit: Jackie Torrence
From: Bev and Jerry
Date: 02 Dec 04 - 05:08 PM

We are saddened. There was no better teller of Jack tales. We shall miss her.

Bev and Jerry

Subject: RE: Obit: Jackie Torrence
From: open mike
Date: 02 Dec 04 - 05:32 PM

All the more reason we must continue to tell stories
now that she is no longer here to do it!
http://www.storynet.org/
more info and memorial donation here:
http://www.storynet.org/don/JackieTorrence.htm
and here is a list of story telling festivals.
there used to be a nice one in North Columbia
in the hills above Nevada City at an old one-
room school house, it was cancelled for a year
or two but may be held again by popular demand.
see one of these gatherings...
http://directory.google.com/Top/Arts/Performing_Arts/Storytelling/Festivals/
there is a tradition of holding tellabrations on
the weekend before thanksgiving...a good tradition to uphold!
it looks like the http://www.sierrastorytellingfestival.org/
is held as well as the the http://www.upliftingstories.org/
there are many tellers out there with stories...some with
music, costumes, even "cat's cradle" string figures to illustrate
why not plan to go to a story telling festival in Jackie's memory?!

Subject: RE: Obit: Jackie Torrence
From: GUEST,Art Thieme
Date: 02 Dec 04 - 06:24 PM

I knew that Jackie was very ill, but this, as a death always is, is very sad. The one story I most remember Jackie telling was her version of Roark Bradford and Lyle Saxon's ANNIE CHRISTMAS. (They invented Annie Christmas in their column for the New
Orleans Times Picyune.) Annie, like Jackie Torrence, was a larger than life woman. Annie stood seven and a half feet tall and was of the lower Mississippi River. Her famous necklace was made of eyes and ears and teeth of men she had beaten in fights--all strung together ;-) I told my version of it for many years---ten of those years on excursion (not gambling) steamboats on the Mississippi River. It always was in tandem with the song "Catfish John". Some of my telling of it was definitely taken from Jackie Torrence.

I never had a chance to meet her, but she was a great storyteller who definitely influenced me. She will be missed.

Art Thieme

Subject: RE: Obit: Jackie Torrence
From: CapriUni
Date: 02 Dec 04 - 06:33 PM

:::Sigh:::

One more voice gone from the world.

But look at how many people were inspired to raise their own voices because of it...

Subject: RE: Obit: Jackie Torrence
From: Azizi
Date: 02 Dec 04 - 06:35 PM

Somewhere in heaven angels are smiling. I'm sorry to hear of Jackie Torrence's passing. The world is a better place for her having been here.

I'm also a storyteller. It's good to know there are others here. We're called to carry on the tradition, each in our own way.

Subject: RE: Obit: Jackie Torrence
From: MAG
Date: 03 Dec 04 - 01:15 AM

Jackie was unquestionably one of the best storytellers ever.

You may sense a "but" coming.

As someone who eats compulsively myself, it waw quite obvious to me that Jackie was a seriously compulsive overeater. May other people who knew her up close and personl will confirm this.

She weighed several hundred pounds. She was a diabetic who could not stop overeating even to save her life.

I say this as a person who has learned teh hard way about enabling   behavior.

Twenty years ago maybe it was funny when Jackie pulled a couple of chocolate bars out of her pouch DURING a performance "for emergency use."

Overeating was an addiction which took this talented lady away before she had to go.

In NA, AA, Alanon, they tell you to be honest about what the problems are.

Not too long ago a popular college professor here crossed a street against a red light and was killed. The outpouring of grief was large and sincerre. And nowhere did anyone say a word about the fact that this man was an alcoholic and that it killed him.

These things cost us, people. The truth needs out.

Subject: RE: Obit: Jackie Torrence
From: Ellenpoly
Date: 03 Dec 04 - 03:34 AM

I'm grieved to hear of the loss of such a magnificent story teller.

I was lucky to hear her on more than one occasion when she came through Hawaii. She was so powerful and warm and full of life. I sat there with everyone being mezmerised by her.

..xx..e

(PS-MAG, I do understand what you wrote. To see someone brought down because of her own addiction is just sad beyond words. But for anyone who has understood from the "inside" what she faced, it must be not only sad, but deeply frustrating. My commiserations.)

Subject: RE: Obit: Jackie Torrence
From: GUEST,Art Thieme
Date: 03 Dec 04 - 11:52 PM

With all due respect, please take care of your own problems and allow other folks to live their lives out the way they want to. Nobody can say their life was too short or bad or sad. It was what it was, and it was what they needed (and possibly wanted) it to be.---and we who are left go on from there-----with or without our chocolate or our booze or our Prozac or Sadam Hussein or our pornography or football or baseball or. . .

Nobody can ever tell me that Fred Holstein didn't enjoy living out his life on his own hook. His time here felt better to him because of the substances that buffered the slings and arrows.

Really, live and let live.

Art

Subject: RE: Obit: Jackie Torrence
From: wysiwyg
Date: 26 May 05 - 09:01 PM

See/hear her tell a story:

A Cure for Bad Dreams

~S~