Filed under: Profiles
By Nick Berry for The Sydney Morning Herald: T-Berry is sweating above his bright red bow tie as he launches into the story of the Pool Shootin' Monkey.
Using broad gestures, exaggerated facial expressions, high-pitched character voices, beats and rhymes, the Harlem-born 62-year-old spins an obscene yarn of animals arguing, fighting and screwing in a pool hall, his eyes fixed on the crowd,offending some, delighting others.
It's like Brer Rabbit meets Lenny Bruce, drawing on an African-American tradition that goes back through freestyle rap to jazz and all the way back to the plantations and slave ships of his ancestors.
Street performer Leonard ''T-Berry'' White has been doing these routines for decades, mostly in downtown Manhattan, through snow, wind and rain, carrying his collections in a tin Spiderman lunchbox, toting a battered cardboard sign that proclaims him ''The World's Greatest Storyteller''.
''Nobody grows up wanting to be a street performer, wanting to tell stories to strangers for change in their baseball cap,'' he says. ''It's just something that your life takes a turn to.''
His upbringing was ''chaotic''. His mother had psychological problems, his father shell shock from World War II. Young T-Berry was raised partly by his grandmother, partly in shelters and foster homes. He found school tough, as he was partially deaf and has a ''tied-down tongue''.
He spent his youth ''seeking acceptance'', he says. There were ''survival crimes'': ''I was dealing with a system that doesn't give you a lot of options. It was the law of self-preservation.'' It was on the streets and in the pool halls of Harlem that he heard his first stories. ''Most of the stories I heard from hanging out with adults older than me,'' he says.
Read more here.