Focusing on conversational stories of personal experience (SPEs), this paper explores the narrative skills of preschool-aged black children in a low-income, urban community. Although linguistic and anthropological work attest to a flourishing tradition of story telling among black adults, little is known about the ways in which children become skilled participants in that tradition. Developmental research has focused on white children and on literary or make-believe stories. The purposes of this study were to document what 4-year-old black children know about the content, structure, and function of SPEs, and to compare stories initiated by children with those initiated by others. A conversational narrative was defined as an episode of talk in which the child produced at least two clauses addressed to an interlocutor and referring to a particular event. Stories were collected from 5 preschool-aged children. Findings indicated: (1) frequent and effective use of SPEs by children for communicating a variety of experiences and sustaining a social relationship; (2) a high degree of mastery of SPEs by 4 years of age, particularly with respect to the use of evaluative devices; and (3) greater elaboration and complexity of narratives initiated by children, compared to stories initiated by others. References number 57. (Author/RH)