Photography by Kevin A. Roberts
Even surrounded by the coffeehouse’s morning bustle—steamer hissing, beans grinding, names yelled every few seconds—the famous storyteller speaks softly, his demeanor as calm as those of the Zen monks he’s learned from. I poke and prod, trying to fathom the contrast between Bobby Norfolk with a mug of tea in his hand and Bobby Norfolk with a mic. Is this really the guy who did standup comedy, opening for Lou Rawls and B.B. King and slaying the crowd in Haight-Ashbury before losing out to Louie Anderson? The actor who starred at the Black Rep, playing a gang leader so plausibly that two older women were terrified to meet him at the after-party? The guest artist who can have a clutch of cranky toddlers shrieking with glee in seconds and can melt even the most hard-edged students, in the toughest classrooms in St. Louis, into a worshipful puddle?
“He’s a shy guy,” his son tells me, “a fly on the wall at a party—but when he’s performing, he flips a switch.”
Nan Kamman-Judd, the first executive director of the St. Louis Storytelling Festival, says it’s more “like a rocket takes off.” She remembers showing up at the Ronald McDonald House for an experiment in community outreach: “I walked in the door, and I could hear him jumping and shouting up on the second floor. I thought, Oh my gosh, there must be a huge audience up there. When I got to the top of the stairs, a parent and two kids were sitting on the floor. Bobby did the whole 45 minutes, giving everything he had to those three people.”
I look across at this man quietly sipping his tea and ask if he’ll tell me his story.
“That would go back to my childhood,” he says, “when I stuttered.”
After dinner—roast pork, mustard greens, cornbread, and bubbly candied yams—Bobby’s parents trade one-liners, trying to crack each other up. “I knew a girl so skinny, she could Hula-Hoop with a Cheerio,” his mom says, and his dad groans, then flashes back: “Why did the baby bottle of ink cry? Because his daddy was in the pen, and he didn’t know how long the sentence would be.”
As soon as the three boys have cleared the table, their father dims the lights and flips on the huge Magnavox radio he bought with his discount at Stix, Baer & Fuller, where he runs the elevator. They all settle in, Bobby hardly blinking as he stares at the huge glass tubes in back, waiting for them to glow gold so the signal will kick in. They listen to Inner Sanctum, The Lone Ranger, The Shadow, Amos ’n’ Andy…
Later, they’ll buy a television set, but Bobby will always prefer radio’s theater of the mind. One day he hears “Big Bad John,” and he loves it so much, he memorizes the lyrics—then realizes with a whoop that he can recite them without stuttering. He hears Mel Tillis sing, smooth as silk, on The Tonight Show, then stutter his way through the interview, and thinks, That’s me!
He reads fluently, but when he has to say something out loud at school or church, sentences twist themselves into knots in his throat. The words are there, just stuck. He takes a run at them, machine-gunning the consonants. Later he’ll learn about selective mutism and realize he went quiet in self-defense, sometimes shutting down altogether, sometimes clowning around to ease the tension.
When the afternoon bell springs them free, he and his brothers sometimes take the streetcar to visit their mother, who works as a store clerk at a Jewish confectionery in Wellston. “Boys, you have free rein,” Mr. David Bean announces, and they grab chips and soda and a Dagwood sandwich and stuff their pockets with Mary Janes. Other days, Bobby drags his little brother, Paul, from store to store, looking for the next Marvel comic.
By eighth grade, his favorite reading material is heavier. “Hey, man, treat those books gently,” Bobby scolds Paul. Books are sacred; they hold knowledge, which is treasure. At Sumner High School, there’s more to learn, and the bullying eases up.
“Bobby wasn’t a guy you would tease,” his friend Carlton Jones, a quarterback on the football team, recalls. “He was quiet and reserved, but you always knew something was going on with him, and we were smart enough to let that happen. You know how someone’s deep in thought and you touch their shoulder and they jump? We didn’t touch Bobby’s shoulder—and he kind of transformed right before our eyes.”
The shift starts sophomore year, when Bobby joins the Glee Club and gets involved with drama. It’s not an obvious choice for a guy who stutters, but the idea of losing himself for a while and crawling inside someone else’s skin is a powerful draw. He even loves the iconic masks, the pathos of tragedy paired with his favorite, the laughing mask of comedy.
Sumner’s young drama teacher, Claire Lockman Boyce, watches from the corner of her eye as Bobby’s photographic memory swallows five-page poems whole. His quick wit cracks her up daily—and goes deep. “He’d say something, and his tone would make you laugh,” she will remark later, “but then you’d go back and think about what he said and say, ‘Oh my God,’ and laugh again.”
Lockman Boyce relies on Bobby to keep harmony. No one gets bullied in their tight-knit theater group, because whenever one kid starts to bully another, Bobby somehow spins the insult into a compliment to both of them.
Still, he has to get past that stutter. A teacher suggests studying relaxation techniques, and because The Beatles are over in India studying transcendental meditation, he decides he’ll try that, too. He shows up at a TM studio and finds out that the fee is $250. Just to teach me to sit in a corner and be quiet? he thinks. I can do that without dropping $250! He goes to the library and reads a dozen books on meditation.
By senior year, he has stopped stuttering.
Meditation makes him calmer, and compassion floods in. He pays attention to other people, listens carefully. He’s still funny but without desperation. When Paul comes to see Sumner’s Soul ’69 variety show, done Laugh-In–style, he is gobsmacked: He didn’t even know Bobby could sing, let alone be this funny onstage.
The next year, Paul watches his brother win a martial arts competition and is blown away all over again. From gymnastics, Bobby has moved to karate, and his body is now eloquent, scotching any notion of weakness or timidity.
What he takes from the martial arts, though, is more spiritual than macho. He is a Pisces, after all, and the list of traits—“introspective, intuitive, mystic, secretive, passionate, great listeners, lovers of nature and people”—gives him a framework in which sensitivity makes sense. Camping in the Ozarks, he stops Paul from swatting a giant wasp, instead gathering it into a towel and releasing it. When his sensei says, “Be like water and conform to the shape of the container in all situations,” Bobby knows instinctively what he means.
After graduation, he goes to St. Louis Community College to figure out what to do with his life. It is 1969, and black guys have stopped slathering on Nadinola cream to lighten their skin. The civil rights struggle rages, black pride boils hot, and Bobby realizes how coddled he was at Sumner. “I never even knew who Malcolm X was,” he groans to his new friends in the Association of Black Collegians—which is modeled after the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, which did not start out violent at all. Now the poetry Bobby memorizes is by Leroi Jones (later Amiri Baraka) and Nikki Giovanni, and the comedian he adores is Dick Gregory—a St. Louis–born civil rights activist who first makes you laugh, then follows with fiery oratory that makes you think.
That’s what I want to do, Bobby decides.
He wins a scholarship to the University of Missouri–St. Louis, then a Metropolitan Leadership Institute fellowship. He studies psychology, philosophy, journalism, history. Senior year, a friend tells him the Gateway Arch is hiring summer workers. The chief park ranger listens to Bobby’s impassioned words on history and asks, “Can you start tomorrow?”
By now the civil rights movement has lost steam, and Bobby has lost his militant fire. Instead, he’s been studying Rosicrucianism, yoga, and mysticism, “like Moses roaming around in the desert trying to figure out where Canaan is.” The idea of teaching people about history feels so right, he leaves college to do it full time. He will finish years later, and UMSL will eventually grant him an honorary doctorate in humane letters.
He has gone from wanting to overthrow the government to working on its behalf.
Ignoring the Appalachian mountain trails, Bobby scales a cliff wall like Spider-Man. When he reaches the summit of the first mountain he’s ever seen, he lies down on a huge flat rock in the sun and falls sound asleep.
Something tells him to wake up. When he opens one heavy eyelid, a buzzard stands a few yards away, beady eyes trained on Bobby, waiting to pick his bones. They surprise each other, the buzzard squawking and flying away when he realizes that the young man is alive.
So alive. He walks to the edge and looks down at the confluence of the Shenandoah and Potomac rivers, filled with elation. He broke away from the other park ranger trainees to climb up here, wanting to do it alone, not dilute the experience with conversation. Now he has to shimmy back down backward.
“Man, you could’ve died up there!” his roommate exclaims. But Bobby is still young enough to feel immortal, and he’s convinced that spirits protected him. That night he celebrates with a feast of crab cakes, baked potatoes, hot biscuits, and his first-ever apple butter. “This stuff is good,” he tells the waitress. “Give me three more biscuits so I can sop it up!”
He took his first plane ride to get here; saw his first “pink trees”—the cherry blossoms in D.C.—then rode Amtrak to Harper’s Ferry and climbed his first mountain. It was something he’d always wanted to do, but he hadn’t known how badly. Head-over-heels in love with nature, he seeks out the wilderness more and more often.
After another ranger training course, this one at the Grand Canyon, Bobby treats himself to a massive book heavier than his coffee table, The Mystic Warriors of the Plains, and creates a set of stories about the indigenous peoples of North America, how they revered and conserved nature. Their emphasis on earth, wind, and fire—his favorite band—resonates. His work now is all about nature, history, and spirit.
At night, though, his life turns edgy and urbane, influenced by Dick Gregory and Richard Pryor. Bobby’s talent for standup comedy startles his family. Improv comes as easily to him as breath. He doesn’t mind telling a few blue jokes, and after studying Don Rickles, he knows how to heckle the crowd before they can heckle him. Adding a little pantomime, George Carlin wordplay, and his beloved Three Stooges’ slapstick, he takes the mic at the Funny Bone, Bilbo Baggins, the Crazy Horse Saloon at Kiel Auditorium. Bob Costas comes up to tell him, “You made Steve Mizerany laugh so hard, he fell out of his chair.”
What Bobby really wants, though, is to wake people up and make them think. He warms up the crowd with a little risqué humor and eases into political satire, a few cheerful insults peppering the routine. But when the guy in the plaid jacket heads to the men’s room and Bobby says they could use that jacket as a tablecloth, and then the guy comes back with the jacket wadded under his arm and only the lining showing, Bobby knows he embarrassed him too much and lets it go.
He hones his material in the backroom of Maurice’s Gold Coast Lounge, in Midtown. One night, something comes over him, and he recites “True Blues” instead. Full of solemn fire, the lyrics were written by The Last Poets, a group in East Harlem, in 1966, and they sum up 300 years of race history in three and a half minutes. Thirty seconds in, drunks in the crowd start yelling, “Hey, where’s the comedy?” but Bobby just keeps going. One of the other park rangers, Jan Dolan (who will later become his agent) is in the audience that night, and afterward, she blurts, “That was beautiful. What are you doing in front of all these drunk people? Why don’t you take your poetry into the schools, use it to reach children?”
He shrugs off the suggestion. When he isn’t working standup or his day job, he’s acting with the Black Rep. His starring role is the lead in Charles Fuller’s Zooman and the Sign, but his favorite role is the royal gatekeeper to Oz in The Wiz. He wears a bright-green Afro wig the size of a beach ball, a matching cape, sequined green hip boots, and Elton John sunglasses; it’s how he figures Richard Pryor would do the Royal Gatekeeper.
Bobby knows how to tell history’s true stories to Arch visitors, and he knows how to tell bedtime stories to his little boy, Damon. Other parents sit with books in their laps, but when Jack climbs the beanstalk, Bobby jumps onto his son’s bed to scale the stalk, then booms down in the giant’s voice. Still, he doesn’t think of stories as art.
In 1980, the first St. Louis Storytelling Festival is held at the Arch. Bobby shows up for work and stands listening as some of the best tellers in the nation animate stories he thought were just a way to put the baby down at night. When Arch staffers are encouraged to tell history stories, Bobby’s experiences in psychology, nature, comedy, music, gymnastics, and drama whirl together, lassoing the audience.
This is what he wants to do.
As soon as the festival ends, he asks his boss, a little breathlessly, whether he could work weekends and be off Mondays and Tuesdays so he can practice telling stories in the St. Louis Public Schools. His friend Carlton Jones, who’s laughed at his comedy routines for years, marvels at this new side of Bobby: “You can be sitting there talking to him, you take a few breaths, and all of a sudden he’s somebody else.”
Bobby’s folk and fairy tales are advertised for older kids, but so many frazzled parents bring antsy toddlers that he learns to “babify” a story, not dumbing it down but instead simplifying the words, hyping the animation, leaning hard on repetition and sound effects. He also learns how to back down troubled kids in middle school, dredging up his old Don Rickles persona to cut through their posturing.
In 1988, he meets Jackie Torrence, whom he deems one of the finest storytellers on the planet. Just as delighted with him, she introduces him to her record producer and her agent, which leads to more gigs, books, CDs, and tours through Hawaii, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Ireland, Wales, Indonesia…. He quits the Arch and snags a gig with KMOV to host a children’s show, Gator Tales, winning three regional Emmy Awards by using stories to solve all the crazy problems a puppet named Grouchie Gator confides.
Bobby has his own problems, but he keeps them to himself. When he was a kid and Stix installed self-service elevators, he thought they had so disrespected his dad that they’d handed him a lady’s pink slip. Money was a worry from then on. Plus, Bobby had to marry soon after high school, because Damon was on the way. The rushed marriage soon lost its sparkle, but Bobby stuck it out until his son finished high school, making sure Damon had a solid, civil family life.
“I can’t say what was really hard for Bobby,” his brother Paul remarks, “because whatever obstacle he came up against, he transformed himself and overcame it. Getting bullied? He learned karate. Stuttering? He learned to sing. I think a person would be missing the point if they didn’t write about the transformations.”
Now, Paul adds, there’s another one coming: Bobby wants to get back into standup.
I do yet another double-take: This beloved world-class storyteller? I’m dubious until Bobby’s son tells me the same thing, then laughs: “I told him he’d better keep his jokes clean, in case there’s a teacher in the audience and he’s coming to their school the next day.”
Photography by Kevin A. Roberts
Bobby Norfolk performs for students at Jana Elementary School.
On the very last day of the National Storytelling Festival, the tellers are all wrung out, and the audience has heard just about everything. Bobby walks to the front of the tent and recites “The Cold Within,” about six men who would rather freeze to death than share their firewood with someone of another race, class, or creed.
James Patrick Kinney wrote the poem in 1961, when the civil rights movement was just heating up. Bobby gives the poem his all. Ten of the other featured storytellers are in the audience, and they jump to their feet when he finishes, leading an ovation that lasts twice as long as the reading.
“That poem found me,” Bobby says now. “I was going to do a keynote at Harvard for a storytelling conference called Sharing the Fire. I had my remarks, but I didn’t have an ending. I was at a high school in Atlanta, centering myself backstage, and I looked over at a table, and a track light was shining on a sheet of green paper. I went over and looked but it was blank. So I turned it over, and there was this poem, ‘The Cold Within.’”
He counts on coincidence, trusts karma. In his telling, he uses humor to wheedle attention, surprise for a spurt of adrenaline, movement and sound to appeal to all kinds of learners, putting them into a reverie he calls “story hypnosis.” Kids lean forward, their jaws loose, their eyes on Bobby, transfixed.
He and his second wife, Sherry Norfolk, give a workshop for fourth-
graders in Atlanta. The kids are taking turns telling a story, but their teacher can’t take her eyes off one boy. “Is anything wrong?” the Norfolks finally ask.
“Oh, no,” the teacher whispers, her eyes still glued to the boy. “It’s just that I’ve never heard his voice before.” He had not spoken in class since kindergarten. Yet he told his story fluently, with complete composure, to a thunderclap of applause. That, says Bobby, is the power of story. And with all our digital devices, we are in danger of losing it.
The isumataq (the Inuktitut word for storyteller) is someone who creates an atmosphere in which wisdom reveals itself. Stories help us cry and give us an excuse to laugh; they honor mystery but drop clues about its underlying truths; they forge a safe path so we can go deeper into the scary woods. In The Moral of the Story: Folktales for Character Development, a book Bobby and Sherry wrote together, they give their version of an Eastern European tale about the beginning of time. Truth walks naked upon the Earth, and no one will listen to him—until Story shows him how to dress himself in purple velvet trousers and a jeweled vest and weaves ribbons into his hair. “Don’t you see?” she asks. “No one wants to listen to the naked Truth, but everyone will listen when it’s clothed by Story.”
Theatricality is what lets Bobby bring history back to life, imitating Satchel Paige or dramatizing the Underground Railroad. It lets him fulfill school requirements for character education without preaching, by using animal tales and bits of whimsy to talk about kindness, loyalty, or honesty. It takes him into the mythic past, with its folk tales about discovery, redemption, and transformation. It lets him use Jungian archetypes of the witch, the demon, the hero, the dragon, the ogre, the king, the queen—and the trickster, who feels like kin to him.
In Bobby’s award-winning children’s books, Anansi, an African trickster spider steals hot beans, which burn his hair off; he tricks the whale and elephant with a piece of string so they will respect small creatures; he conspires with Ant to get to heaven when they’re told they’re too small. Anansi weaves a ladder, and Ant chews an opening in the clouds.
When Bobby tells an Anansi story—or any story—the kids go into that storytelling trance, giggling along with him, yelping at the funny bits, holding their breath. I ask whether he’s heard of Uri Hasson, a Princeton researcher who found that the brains of the listener and the storyteller actually come into sync as a story is told.
“Neuroscientists thought they were coming up with something new,” Bobby says, “that the ancients have known for centuries.” Not content to see stories only as entertainment, he did years of research. “Everything we see, hear, taste, touch, and smell revolves around story. There is this primal thing going on in our brains that grasps onto narrative and connects us; it’s like we’re plugged into a cosmic wall outlet.”
What’s new is technology, he adds, which has shut down a lot of wonder. “It has made some brain cells go dormant. You don’t have to do deep thinking anymore; you just pull out your device.” Social media posts fracture people’s stories into a thousand slivers, and this “sucks us into a false reality,” he says, “that is totally different than imaginative reality.” He waits a beat. “If you’ll notice, there are no electronic devices at Hogwarts.”
In a narrow storefront on Skinker, Caph Guei, a drummer from Côte d’Ivoire, in West Africa, hunches over djembe drums, tying them together for the evening rehearsal. Susan Colangelo, founding president of the Saint Louis Story Stitchers Artists Collective, sets aside a sweatshirt for the other star performer, Norfolk. The kids fondly decide that “he’s bigger than he seems,” his shoulders broad enough for an XL.
Just then, he comes through the door, greets everybody, and makes himself one of each day’s many cups of tea. They discuss the acoustics of the Washington University auditorium where they will next perform. “I’ve been told it’s echo-y,” Colangelo warns. Bobby says he might come up through the audience from the rear at the opening, because he will be doing a chant, almost a dirge, as Guei drums the rhythm. Then he’ll talk about the power of story: how the first tellers spoke to people gathered around a fire (Colangelo pulls up a flickering fire video for backdrop) and the flames created shadow pictures against a cliff wall or forest, “firing the imagination.”
Then he’ll segue into “True Blues,” which still needs to be heard. “We need to find our place in the universe,” Bobby says. “That’s what stories do. They tell us why we’re here, why there is unrest in the world, what can bring us all together.”
“You ready, Integrity?” Colangelo calls to the sound engineer. Storyteller and drummer have never met, so Bobby starts speaking “True Blues” to show Guei the beat. The two men fall into sync, setting an elaborate driving rhythm with voice and hands, building to a climax. At the end, everybody claps, and they fist-bump. “One take,” Bobby jokes.
Story Stitchers was formed to let kids who had experienced gun violence redirect the energy, turning that anxious pain into art. Bobby has been volunteering for years, performing with the teenagers and coaching them individually. One girl had lost several people she loved, and she wanted to read a poem about it, but getting up in front of an audience felt like walking into a bolt of lightning. Bobby helped her find purpose and courage, and he gave her tools, showing her how to still her mind, enunciate her words, pace herself, give the audience time to build up mental images. The crowd gave her the rest with its response.
Early in their Taiwan tour, the tiny storytelling troupe walks through a courtyard to the Taichung school’s auditorium. Children are sitting cross-legged on every inch of the floor and crammed into the balcony above. The storytellers are to follow 12 Scottish bagpipers in full regalia. “How do we compete with that?” Sherry Norfolk whispers to a friend, who hisses back, “Let’s hope they send Bobby out first. Half these kids don’t even speak English!” As they settle into chairs under the balcony, Sherry leans over to ask Bobby what story he’s going to tell. He shrugs; he’ll decide on his way to the mic.
He rises, makes his way to the front, and begins, his legs as limber as Gumby, his voice squeaking high or rumbling low. Beth nudges Sherry, nods toward the audience. The children’s faces have lit up like glow sticks. Eyes open wide, they shoot one another looks of delight, then lock onto Bobby, rapt. No fiddling, no squirming. Belly laughs.
His genius, says his wife, is his ability to read people and know instantly what will tickle or intrigue them. Her genius is more linear: “‘There’s not a single left-brain cell firing in that brain,’ I will tell him. But he spins those threads out—you know, they call it spinning a yarn—and I can almost see them reaching the audience.”
He first caught her attention at a storytelling festival: “Every single story he told was a story that’s in my repertoire—which is almost impossible. Storytelling’s a very personal thing, because once you decide to tell a story, it’s inside you, and you will live with it for the rest of your life. And he was telling folk tales I’d never heard anyone tell except me!”
She invited him to Atlanta for a storytelling gig and afterward asked how he wanted to spend his afternoon. Courteous and careful not to presume, he missed the cue completely, just said he’d like to go to the post office; he had letters to mail. They stayed in touch, though, and a friendship grew and deepened. When they married, Bobby suggested that they say their vows to each other every day, not wait for one of those 20-year renewal ceremonies. For a quarter-century, they have done so. “Even when I was in Taiwan for two weeks and there was a 13-hour time difference,” Sherry adds. “I’d call him at 3 in the morning, and sometimes he’d call me when he was ready to go to bed, so we’d say them twice.”
They laugh a lot together, and their house pops with sound effects. If an old door creaks, they both echo the sound. If a dog barks outside, one of them barks back to start a conversation. Phrases from their stories work their way into the quotidian: “You going to the store?” “Yeah, I’ve got to go fast.” “Boogedy-boogedy-boogedy.”
I ask Sherry how she feels about Bobby doing standup. “Yeah, I’ve never seen that side of him,” she says. “Every once in a while he’ll tell a really silly raw joke, but…he’s just not that person now.” It’s not that he wants to go back to standup, she adds firmly, only that he’d like to be in front of more adult audiences.
Jones hopes he sticks with kids. “We used to get our shoes shined at a place called House of Good Care, on St. Louis Avenue. One day a guy was asking the woman who ran it to help straighten out this kid, and she said, ‘How old is he?’ He said, ‘Fifteen.’ She said, ‘I can’t help him.’ You gotta catch them young, when the inspiration is there—and Bobby Norfolk does that.”
We get hopelessly lost following written directions to St. Francis Borgia in Washington, Missouri, so while my phone loops us back, we talk about Bobby’s future. “Your peeps are all contradicting one another,” I tell him. “Do you want to go back to standup?”
“Yes and no!” he tosses back. “I’m conflicted. When I do programs at high schools and colleges, it basically is standup. One kid at Marquette High said, ‘Why don’t you go on Comedy Central?’ I said, ‘I’ve been there, done that.’ But I started calling myself a standup storyteller. I tried a comedy routine once with Jack Buck’s daughter Beverly Brennan, and it went well, except the sound was horrible—SLU was having a fireworks display, maybe they’d won some championship, and the building was vibrating, and Bev panicked and started yanking plugs and finally we had no sound at all, just explosions. I said, ‘OK, this is a harbinger!’”
He is still shy, deep down, and not sure how to launch another transformation. But beneath his hard-won calm (only later will he admit that he was frazzled about getting lost and scared we wouldn’t get to the school on time) is an intense wanting. Not to do to raw jokes in nightclubs but instead to reach the grownups, satirize this crazy time we’re living through...
We pull up and hurry inside, met at the door by a teacher who’s all excited because she’s heard about Bobby for years. Slinging his backpack onto the stage, he ducks into the restroom to change into a Crayon-bright yellow T-shirt. He’s adjusting his mic when four classes, pre-K through third grade, troop into the gym. Bobby pushes the mic stand closer to them and grins. “My favorite stories in the world are folk tales and fairy tales,” he begins, then sings the Dewey decimal code with them so they’ll remember: “three-ninety-eight-point-two.
“One day I said, ‘Teacher’”—he squeaks his voice high and wiggles his butt—“who’s the author of that story about the rabbit and the turtle?” He plays around with “Aesop” till he’s sure they’ll remember, then says, “Let’s change the story around. Let’s call it ‘One Foot at a Time.’” He makes bunny ears with his fingers, waggles them, and brags that he can run faster than a car. The story unfolds, the kids cracking up at the sound effects and body movements as other animals urge the turtle to race their way, and the turtle retains his dignity, insisting, “I don’t wiggle, and I don’t waggle… I don’t hip, and I don’t hop.” Soon the kids are keeping time with the refrain, “One foot in front of the oth-er,” and by the third repetition they are stomping their feet and bobbing their heads and snapping and clapping.
Bobby never asks for participation. He doesn’t wait for laughs or invite kids to clap along or shift his weight from one foot to the other, hoping someone will have a question. He’s just so warm, funny, and engaging that the response other speakers have to beg for tumbles out.
When the fifth- through eighth-graders come in, he changes the tone, adds some gravity. The first story, he sets in Ghana, after a drought so fierce, cracks have formed in the ground and the sun has baked the crops bone dry and the only things to eat are bugs and worms and tree bark. But when the cauldron talks back to the trickster spider, Bobby yells without warning, startling the kids out of their cynicism. They laugh hard; they have decided to adore him. As he’ll put it later, “This isn’t gonna be boring, and it isn’t gonna be lame.” He does a rap about peer pressure, asks whether any of the kids writes poetry. Then he asks for questions, and a dozen hands shoot up.
“How did you become so good at acting and doing voices?” a girl wants to know, and he tells her his teacher’s secret: “You make the high sounds in the head, the middle sounds in the throat, and the deep sounds in the chest. And for sound effects, it’s lips, teeth, tip of the tongue.” They chant it back: “Lips, teeth, tip of the tongue.”
“You should be on American Idol,” a boy announces.
“What do you like better, performing in front of children or older people?” a girl calls out.
Bobby blinks. Then he laughs. “That’s a very good question. Children—y’all are my tribe.”
I tease him later: “You were busted.”
He grins. But though I’m ready to forgive him if he fibbed for the kids’ sake, it isn’t that simple—he meant his answer.
“It’s the difference,” he says, “between what I would like to do and what I was born to do.”
