When Diane Tells Me a Story

By the evening of December 7, 2013, I had listened to all of the condolences I could handle. It was the evening of my mother’s funeral, and over the past six days I had heard from friends, family members, and acquaintances whose names I had forgotten. Some graciously and some awkwardly expressed how deeply sorry they were for my loss. They wanted to know how I was doing and reminded me that if I needed anything, just ask. Like the ritual of call-and-response—their calls, my response—each conversation became scripted. Their standard apologies and my hollow thank yous were all we could muster. The pain was still too fresh, and if any of us had forgotten our lines, it was only a matter of moments before the conversation turned into a sobbing, weeping, moaning mess. As a result, we respected the script of loss and hung up our phones accordingly to cry in our respective corners. But on that sixth evening of mourning, while sitting in my mother’s favorite chair, shell-shocked from the day, I was surprised when my cell phone rang, echoing loudly in the quiet house so much that it startled my mother’s aging dog.

I was told by a family friend that the grieving process gets even more difficult after the phone stops ringing. After people who were in and out of the house on a daily basis stop coming by. After you realize that your mother isn’t coming home again—ever. I didn’t expect any more phone calls that evening. I had been on the phone most of the week and up until the moment I walked into the funeral home earlier in the day. I was ready for the phone calls to end—at least at that moment. I reached over and looked to see who was calling. Had it been anyone else, I would have silenced the ringer and gone back to flipping through the TV channels, but instead, I answered the call. It was Diane Ferlatte, the subject of my master’s thesis project. Diane is a Grammy-nominated professional storyteller and one of the most prolific African American storytellers of our time. She wasn’t calling because she knew my mother had died; she was calling because she knew that my mother was dying.

Diane and I had spoken on the phone a few times a month since August, when I had decided to withdraw from graduate school and move back home to become my mother’s caregiver. Our conversations were never very long. She would ask how I was doing and ask about my mother. I would ask her how she was doing and inquire about what stories she was getting ready to perform. Sometimes we video chatted, which allowed for longer conversations and reminded me of what it was like to sit at Diane’s dining-room table swapping stories. Or better yet, Diane telling me stories and me just listening in complete awe. We had done that so many times over the past year that every time I walked into her house, I headed straight for her dining-room table and took my usual seat.

The last time I sat at Diane’s table before my mother’s passing was on a Monday in late August. It was the day before my one-way ticket home. I walked into Diane’s house, placed my things on my chair at her dining-room table, and followed her into the kitchen. I kept my head down and focused my eyes on the sunlight reflecting off the hardwood flooring. I watched as our shadows moved through the space. Diane opened her cupboard, removed two mugs, turned on her electric teapot, and waited for the water to boil. I went into her pantry, removed two tea bags, the jar of honey, and retrieved a teaspoon from the drawer. There wasn’t very much to say and Diane understood that. So instead, she hugged me while tears formed in the corner of my eyes. We took our mugs back to her dining-room table, where she told me stories for the rest of the afternoon.

For Diane and me, gathering around her dining-room table, despite how haphazard it seemed, is never unintentional. As Black women, we understand that both knowledge and wisdom are shared around dining-room tables, inside kitchens where steaming pots are filled with greens, and in living rooms where mothers converse as they plait their daughters’ hair.

“Hi Diane,” I said, answering the phone.

I was happy to hear from her, but also heartbroken about the news I would soon convey. This time our just-checking-in conversation was going to take the same roller-coaster drop that all of my conversations had taken during the week.

“Hi Lashon,” she replied, in a sing-song manner characteristic of her personality. Everything about Diane is musical: her voice, her body, her movements. The space around her is cadence in motion.

“How’s everything? How’s your mom?”

I twisted the top of my left ear. The constant realization that my mother was gone had me feeling as if I was continuously being thrown against a brick wall.

“Today was my mother’s funeral.”

Diane gasped like I knew she would because everyone did once I unveiled the news. It felt like a cosmic collision. My pain had now been transferred to someone else again. Diane’s 3:00 p.m. Pacific Standard Time in Oakland and my 6:00 p.m. Standard Eastern Time in Miami had morphed and slowed down. I felt like the X-Men character Rogue, who destroys people with her touch. But like the writer I am, I was destroying people with my words.

“When did she die?” The concern in Diane’s voice made me want to cry, but I didn’t have any more tears. I hadn’t cried all day. I had walked into the funeral parlor that morning as if I was an event planner: blazer on, smile wide, napkins and plates in hand, and my mother’s eulogy on my lips. Before starting graduate school, I had been an event planner and facility supervisor; this get-it-done mentality was familiar to me. But now, hours after the funeral was over, sitting in my mother’s favorite chair watching, but not watching TV, I was finally starting to take it all in.

“When did she pass?” Diane asked again. “On Monday.”

“And what are you doing right now?” “I’m watching TV.”

“Alone?”

My brother was visiting with some friends and my sister was at a baby shower. Believe it or not, I was happy to be home alone. It was easier to wallow in my own sorrow without someone else there to distract me with their grief.

“I don’t mind,” I reassured her. “I would rather be by myself.”

Diane gave me her condolences like everyone else had done and I thanked her. I twisted my ear again because I was about to ask her the question I’ve wanted to ask her for the past year. About a month after we met, Diane told me she had cancer. She was diagnosed in 2011, but besides that we never talked about it. I was always too nervous to bring it up and Diane did not want to be confined by her illness. She had only mentioned it in passing. She’d tell me when her chemotherapy treatments were and I would try to go.

“Diane, if you don’t mind me asking, what stage are you?” The words tripped out of my mouth. I couldn’t bear having just lost my mother and not knowing when or if I might lose Diane too.

Diane would sometimes hint at her prognosis. I was never able to grasp the underlying urgency—I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t ready to acknowledge that two of the most important women in my life at the moment were battling colon cancer at the same time. I wasn’t prepared to lose them both. Sometimes Diane would tell me “Who knows how much longer I have?” or “This could be my last performance at Jonesborough.” She was referring to the National Storytelling Festival that occurs every October in Jonesborough, Tennessee. It’s the largest storytelling festival in North America and possibly the world. Diane had only performed at the festival four times in its forty years. When she was asked to perform in 2013 during the festival’s forty-first year, she believed that she might not live to see her next invitation.

“Stage IV.”

Now I gasped, feeling horrible that I let my emotions show.

Her tone had been full of acceptance, but mine was of disbelief. Now I knew exactly how she felt. Our roles had been reversed. Her response sunk deep inside of me, settling into my bones like I knew cancer could do, like it had done to my mother. What made it worse is that I now knew exactly what Diane’s body was going through, and I knew exactly what it could go through. I knew more about Diane’s body in ways I hadn’t predicted since the inception of my thesis project. Over the past eighteen months, I’d been watching Diane’s body like a critic, a theorist, a student, a folklorist, a fan. Through my research, I have determined that Diane possesses a culturally educated body—a body inscribed with family histories, social constructions, age and gender delineations, and ethnic style. As a performer with more than thirty years of stage presence developed within her, her body consists of rehearsed rhythms as well as improvisation, (un)choreographed facial expressions that if mapped would fall into a system of patterns, and corporeal gestures that range from innate sign gestures to American Sign Language. Her body inhabits multiple borders of intentions, demarcating the liminal lines between improvisation and routine. Accordingly, her gestures reveal those boundaries from which her body is constructed. It is her body that took my project from being the study of folklore to folklore as it embodies both tradition and modernity. In every performance, she displays a visible demonstration of her physical pedagogy. And now with the revelation of her diagnosis, her body became even more important to me.

“Are you dying?” I asked softly.

“Not if I have anything to do with it.” I could hear Diane’s confidence in the bass of her voice like she was standing her ground against death. “I have too many stories to tell. Speaking of—‘Bundles of Worries’ have I ever told you that one?”

“No,” I lied. I had heard her tell it before, but I was in the mood to hear her tell it again.

Before my mother had passed, and Diane and I had sat at her dining-room table during that last Monday in August, I had an irrational fear that she was going to shut me out of her life once I moved back home. I was nervous that maybe I would be a sad reminder to her of what cancer could do. That it could render you helpless and draw your youngest daughter back across three thousand miles to help take care of you. That it could subject you to grief you had yet to experience. That it could destroy parts of you—parts you never expected it to. I thought maybe it would be too painful for us to remain in each other’s lives. Especially now, looking back and seeing that not all of my friendships made it through my grieving process. But instead, Diane has drawn me closer—accepting me not only as her biographer but also as a daughter. The more time I spend with her, the more her presence has helped ease my grief—all five ubiquitous stages of it. Hence when our anger causes us to fight from time to time, because like mother and daughter we fail to meet each other’s expectations, we are quicker to forgive the verbal batting. I had learned the hard way with my mother that unforgiveness would remain living with me while it would die with her. I had to come to terms with the fact that, despite Diane’s miraculous longevity, her chemotherapy treatments could stop working at any moment. Her acceptance of this eventually became my acceptance of it too. There had even come a time with my mother that accepting her mortality allowed us more freedom to express our feelings because we knew that time was of the essence.

From another perspective, accepting my mother’s and Diane’s mortality has also allowed me to accept my own. I even occasionally imagine how tragically poetic it would be if the three of us all succumbed to colon cancer, and this essay, years from now, becomes the prelude to my losing Diane and the prologue to whatever health scares that could befall me as a Black woman prone to hereditary cancer. I have bargained with God in hopes that my life does not become so tragically poetic and, as a result, have wallowed in my own bouts of depression more than I care to admit. But like Diane, I have more stories to tell, and this story of Diane, my mother, and me is just the beginning. It is through telling this story that I have come to realize how connected and similar the three of us are, especially Diane and me. That is the power of the Black oral tradition: not only does it change lives, creates and solidifies bonds that may not have been formed otherwise, it also strengthens the connective tissues that unite Black women. When Diane tells me a story, she’s passing down generations of wisdom, morals, and histories—histories of Black women that have been pushed aside. She is also passing down stories of the oppressed, stories of rebellion, and stories of change. And rightly so, those stories give voice to other stories like the stories of my mother. This is the legacy of strength that Black women have embodied and encrypted within our DNA. Our narratives are being passed down in story, in song, in recipes, in words spoken around the kitchen table. It is these narratives that continue to give voice to my grief and fuel my desire to share my own stories of who I am as a storyteller and a scholar.

When I first heard Diane tell a story, it was at Cal Performances’ Fall Free for All in September of 2012. It was a festival that featured free music, dance, and theater concerts. Diane was scheduled to perform that Sunday afternoon. She was one of the few storytellers participating. I had researched her work and quickly realized how her interests aligned with mine. She concentrates on African and African American folktales, weaving American Sign Language, sung-texts, folk songs, and spirituals into her performances. So I sent her an email gushing about my interests in her work, not even noticing that I had mistakenly spelled her name wrong. I was elated when I received a reply from her husband to give her a call the next day. I wrote a reminder in my calendar to call Diane the following afternoon, and then watched videos of her on YouTube for the rest of the night.

When my last afternoon class let out, I called Diane while walking through campus toward home. She picked up after two rings.

“Hi Diane. This is Lashon. I sent you an email last night. I was hoping to do an interview with you after your performance.”

“That sounds fine.” Diane paused. “Lashon, where are you from?” “I’m from Miami.”

“You don’t sound like you’re from Miami.”

“Well, I just spent the last four years in New Orleans.”

“No, I’m from New Orleans. You don’t sound like you’re from New Orleans. Are you African American?”

“Yes, but Caribbean American; my mother is from Jamaica.” “Oh, that must be it,” she concluded.

I knew Diane was Black because I had spent hours scrolling through photos and videos of her the night before, but I never thought about whether my being Black would be of interest to her. I have had situations like this occur before. I would have a conversation on the phone with someone, and then meet them in person to only find out years later (after becoming friends) that their first impression of my voice was that I was not Black. Since childhood, hearing my name being sputtered out by elementary school teachers, I always assumed that my name marked me as Black. However, Diane’s comment caused me to wonder what kind of body she imagined when she heard my voice. For a moment, it made me reexamine the border identities of my body that I hadn’t thought about for some time.

Before our phone conversation had ended, we had made plans to meet an hour before her concert to have a quick interview. I hung up the phone and called my mother. She was number two on my speed dial after my voicemail. I spoke with my mother about everything, and I spoke with her about everything quite often—four-to-five-times-a-day often, but never long conversations unless I needed them to be. They were just to check in, a habit we began when I moved to Westchester, New York, to pursue my master’s in fine arts (MFA) in writing at Sarah Lawrence College. I was twenty-three years old and leaving home for the first time. I was ready for the new adventure, but I also had instilled within me my mother’s fears that I could be kidnapped, raped, or mugged, even though Westchester County’s violent crime statistics was rated twenty-one on a scale of one to one hundred, while Miami was a frightening eighty-four. But it was New York, after all, and my mother had watched too many episodes of Law & Order: SVU to believe that the statistics were true. She had seen it on TV and that’s all she needed to know. So I called her in the morning on my way to school. I called her in the afternoon between classes. I called her when I was leaving school. I called her when I got home. And I called her before I went to sleep.

These series of calls lasted throughout my two years in the MFA program and into my move to New Orleans. Then they subsided slightly as I settled into southern living, but picked up again once I moved to Berkeley because I lived a block away from the infamous People’s Park. When my mother helped move me in, she had seen all of the loitering for herself, so her check-in calls came in frequently, even though by that time I was twenty-nine and had lived on my own for six years.

I asked my mother what she thought about Diane’s question. She told me that it was because I had a proper way of speaking and that I shouldn’t be offended by such questions. I couldn’t help but wonder if I had an accent, and if so, what did it sound like? My mother’s Jamaican accent had never relented, but it could be watered down when she wanted it to be, which made her sound more like she was from England as opposed to the states. I wondered if that was what I sounded like: a watered watered-down version of my mother.

But I knew that it was more complicated than that. What did it mean for me to be a daughter of the African diaspora whose lineage seeped sweetened blood of sugar cane as opposed to the pure whiteness of cotton? The tension between the Afro-Caribbean and the African Americans’ relationship to Blackness was not new to me. My mother’s outcast status from both the white and Black communities after her immigration to the United States during the 1970s had never left her. And because it never left her, it never left me. But for Diane it seemed that I was Black enough, which meant that I had the golden ticket. The doors to the world of southern Black oral traditions were now open to me.

On the day of Diane’s Cal Free for All performance, I walked into the Martin Luther King, Jr. Student Union, took the curved staircase up to the grand Pauley Ballroom, and asked one of the attendants for Diane. The attendant told me that my mom was here a few minutes ago, but if I waited in the room, she would be back shortly. This would be the first of many times that I would be mistaken as Diane’s daughter. I corrected the attendant, letting her know that Diane was not my mother, but thanked her for the information. I walked into the room, taking in its size and the gloriousness of the light coming in from the large windows. There were a handful of people milling around: some staff and some a part of Diane’s entourage. I watched and waited, spinning myself in slow circles in order not to miss her entrance. I was nervous; I wanted to make a good impression. I was already taken with Diane—her stage presence, her musical abilities, and her talent. In my mind, I was just a lowly Cal graduate student of only three weeks. Surely, she would not be impressed by me. Then Diane appeared from one of the doors toward the back of the room. She wore a bright-red head scarf that outlined her round face and accentuated her dark braids. Her red-draped knit cardigan was paired with a sunglow-yellow top and black pants. Around her neck was a long necklace with a large pendant that looked like something I wanted to shake. She walked toward the front of the room while I walked toward her. We smiled at one another. I stretched out my hand, but she didn’t take it. Instead, she sang my name, elongating the L, and pulled me in for a hug.

“So nice to finally meet you,” I said, even more nervous than before. “Should I ask you questions now or wait until afterwards?”

“Now because I’ve got work to do.” Although, that’s not exactly what Diane said, that’s certainly what I heard. And it was true; Diane did have work to do. She had an hour-long set that was starting shortly, and I was taking up her time. We sat down in the front row. I pulled out my notebook. She turned her body toward me, but her light-brown eyes kept searching the room. I also couldn’t help but watch as it began to fill up with hundreds of children and their guardians searching for seats close to the stage. Most of them had been waiting in a long line that snaked down the stairs into the student union. That’s when I started to realize how famous Diane is in the storytelling world. The Pauley Ballroom can seat five hundred people, and almost every seat was taken.

The show finally started with the thumping of Diane’s rhythm stick hitting the floor of the stage as she sang, “I’m so glad I’m here to share my story.” She then quickly taught us a song and how to sign yes in American Sign Language. Our voices echoed against the walls, creating an uproar of song and laughter. Within minutes Diane had eased into her first story, a personal one about when she was a little girl, her father fought through a thunderstorm to return home to her. He knew she was scared of lightning and walked home in the pouring rain to hold her until the storm had passed. “That’s the kind of daddy I had—that’s love,” she said, finishing the story. I could see that she was holding back tears, but in the next moment, she effortlessly moved us into another song, and we all began to sing again.

When Diane’s performance had ended, I got to mill around much longer than her fans, who were obliged to exit the auditorium. Once she got her affairs in order, I went to thank her, giving her an awkward side hug. I was still nervous, but she was nice enough to ignore my awkwardness and invited me to her house anytime I wanted to come. I ended up visiting her about a month later. She was preparing for her performance at the Thirtieth Annual National Black Storytelling Festival and Conference, which was about three weeks away. She was one of three storytellers being featured at the Zora Neale Hurston Concert on the final night of the conference, a huge testament to her storytelling abilities. I watched as she sat at her dining-room table surrounded by thick books of folktales and folk songs. This is how she prepares for a tale: digging into the heart of stories until one of them speaks to her. She tried out the beginning of some of the tales on me, watching my facial expressions for clues on whether it might be a good pick.

Throughout the afternoon, Diane and I talked about the use of call-and-response in African American storytelling. She also taught me songs. We looked up videos of her storyteller friends. She showed me her catalog of work chronicled in books and awards she had received over the past thirty years. She asked me about my own history, but I didn’t have the answers she was looking for. I told her that I had not grown up in a southern Black church, that my mother never sang Negro spirituals to me. Instead, I talked about my mother’s Jamaican heritage, but even that I couldn’t speak about in full detail. She admonished me for not knowing the particulars of my African ancestry and told me to spend more time talking with my mother and grandmother. I agreed, explaining to her that my thesis project was one of the many puzzles I was piecing together to find out more about my family’s history.

“A lot of African American children are missing out on that,” she started. “Songs that brought African American people through hard times, gave them hope and strength. Kids don’t know them. You don’t know them.”

And she was right. The only Negro spirituals I knew were “Wade in the Water” and “Go Down, Moses.”

Soon the afternoon turned into evening and Diane asked if I wanted to stay for dinner. “Not only do you not know any spirituals, you also don’t eat meat,” she joked, walking into the kitchen. I followed, making myself comfortable in her breakfast nook and watched as she flowed through the space.

“Call me the ‘Quick Cornbread Queen,’” she said.

This was the second time that Diane and I had met. After being welcomed into her home and having an entire skillet of cornbread baked in my honor, I began to relax. I settled my weight into the nook, stared outside, smelling the scent of cornbread in the air, and thought to myself that Diane was someone who was going to change me for the better. That moment encompassed what years three, four, five, and beyond have continued to look like. When I ponder our cosmic connection, I consider that it stems from how similar Diane and I are—like a parallel-universe similar.

Diane and I both grew up under the rule of a strong, religious mother who understood the power of God’s grace and quoted from the Bible regularly. Both of our mothers were domestic housekeepers with minimal schooling, yet a determined work ethic. Mrs. Reed, Diane’s mother, told Diane about growing up in segregated Louisiana. My mother told me stories about growing up in the countryside of Jamaica. And both of our mothers were strict with us, Diane being the only girl in her family of three boys, while I’m the youngest girl with an older sister and three older brothers. Diane was very close to her mother, although she describes herself as a daddy’s girl. After her father passed and Mrs. Reed was plagued by Alzheimer’s disease, Diane and her husband, Tom, took Mrs. Reed in, nursing her until her death in 2006—a situation I know all too well. Besides our circumstantial similarities, Diane and I physically look alike. Our natural locks are about the same length, our brown skin just about the same shade. Even our wide smiles, high cheekbones, and smooth facial profiles match each other’s. However, at five foot nine, I tower over Diane’s five-foot-four stature, which for some reason makes commentators even quicker to assume that we are mother and daughter. Except for the one time in Winters, California, at an elementary school when a fourth-grade boy declared to his friend that I was Diane’s sister.

Diane and I also have similar personalities. We are the chatterboxes of our families: we are more inclined to talk, to perform, and to engage with people around us, especially when given the opportunity. And when there isn’t anyone around, you’ll find the both of us with our nose in a book, scribbling down notes in a journal, or doing online research about a particular character or characteristic. For Diane, those characters show up in her storytelling from the likes of Brer Rabbit to Harriet Tubman to Aesop. For me, those researched characteristics show up in my writing and become unique to the characters that exist in my work.

In addition, she and I are our families’ historians. We collect our families’ stories and share them whenever we can. Diane shares her stories onstage, and I write them down for publishing’s sake. I believe that it’s the thirty-seven-year gap between us that makes Diane more orally inclined and me more literary based: she grew up listening to stories on her grandparents’ porch, and I grew up checking out stories from the public library. We could have never guessed that we would both come into the world of storytelling in our early thirties—she as a storyteller, and I as an ethnographer.

Yet, despite our similarities, Diane and I also have some stark differences. When she was my age, she was married and had adopted her second child. She was a homeowner, along with her husband, and worked full-time for a union organization. As for me, I’m single, dependent-less, and recently completed my doctoral degree. Diane is a creative professional, while I’m a creative academic.

Over the course of my thesis project, these descriptors did and continued to place Diane and me on opposite sides of the creative spectrum. It is along that spectrum, that in-between space, where my constant analysis of Diane’s body prevents me from simply enjoying her performances. It is also in that space where I ask Diane for an explanation about the use of her gestures, the theory behind her process, and the appropriation of her folktales. Questions she rarely answers. Instead, she tells me a story, or teaches me a song, or asks me to share one of my own. Diane is not interested in my academic rhetoric. She has admitted to me frequently that she thinks I’m wasting my time. When it comes to her performances, she doesn’t see the necessity in knowing the “why” and the “how.” She only sees the necessity in the now. She explains that her body just moves in the way that it moves. There is no need for me to spend time writing it all down and trying to explain it. If I watch, I will understand why. And if I do it, I will understand how.

I finally started to understand the “now” when Diane was retelling me “Bundles of Worries” on that evening of my mother’s funeral. I imagined her gestures as she voiced the woman in the story who desperately wanted to swap her worries for anyone else’s because she felt that her worries were too much for her to bear. I could see Diane in my mind’s eye, hunched over with the imaginary heavy bundle on her left shoulder, and squinching her face in agony as she dropped the load to the floor. When she sighed, I no longer thought of Diane. Instead, I was transported into the narrative as the woman. Surely someone else’s worries were lighter than mine at the moment. However, after searching for hours through all the bundles, picking them up and checking their weight on my shoulder, I inadvertently picked up my own again. It was just the right weight to match the bundle of blessings that sat on my right shoulder. While the loss of my mother felt like it was too much to bear, it unfortunately was my loss to bear. Like the woman in the story, I had inherited just the right amount of blessings to bear my loss and my grief well. Those blessings included my mother’s unrelenting love and the stories she had gifted me. They also included the love resulting from my ever-growing bond with Diane and the stories she continues to tell me. Now, when Diane tells me a story, I am able to grieve my past, hope for my future, and abide in the present.