No More Learning

Since the aid of a boyfriend is an economic necessity, the little girl
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THE COMPLEXITY OF CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE
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? ? searches diligently for him. In the jump-rope song "Ice Cream Soda," she
jumps to find out his identity:
Ice cream soda.
Delawarie punch.
Tell me the initials
Of your honeybunch.
A, B, C, D. . .
When she misses, she calls out a name that begins with that letter:
Danny, Danny,
Do you love me?
Yes, no, maybe so.
Certainly! 3
In another version of "Ice Cream Soda," the first verse is the same, except
that the name is determined in place of the initial:
Ice cream soda.
Delawarie punch.
Tell me the name
Of your honeybunch.
A, B, C, D. . .
In the second verse, instead of determining whether or not the "honeybunch"
loves the little girl, their marriage is divined:
Danny, Danny,
Will you marry me?
Yes, no maybe so.
Certainly!
It is assumed natural in both versions that the little girl will have a lover.
His existence is not in question, only his initials or his name. Once these have
been established, the question is simply whether or not he loves her, or
whether or not he will marry her. Apparently the man of these jump-rope
songs has an option to love or not to love, to marry or not to marry. For
the little girl, this choice is not available.
When the little girl finds her love, it is likely that she will greet him
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? ? with the kiss that is peppered throughout folklore. This kiss has different
connotations. Sometimes it is a feminine tease; sometimes a precursor to
marriage. "Missed me, missed me! Now you gotta' kiss me! " is called out
to the person who is "it" in a game of tag. The children of the following
taunt find that the kiss holds greater import:
Nancy and Bobby
Sittin' in a tree.
K-i-s-s-i-n-g.
First comes love.
Then comes marriage.
Then comes Nancy with a baby carriage. 14
The little girl's orientation must be directed toward the home, for this
is the center of her activity. Even her address is decided. As my informants
said, "My mother, your mother, lived across the street, 1617 Mable Street. "
This is also rendered, "My mother, your mother, lives across the way, at 514
East Broadway" (Abrahams and Rankin 1980, 154). This leaves no doubt
where the little girl will be found. She is in the home. She will probably be
hanging up the clothes, as in the following counting-out rhyme:
My mother, your mother
Hangin' up the clothes.
My mother punched your mother
Right in the nose.
What color was her blood?
Blue. B-L-U-E spells blue.
And you are not it! 1s
Or maybe she will be drinking coffee or tea, as the little girl is in the fol-
lowing jump-rope rhyme:
I like coffee.
I like tea.
I like Janie
To jump in with me! '6
Part of her work will certainly follow the command:
Wash the dishes.
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? ? Dry the dishes.
Turn the dishes over! 17
When the baby arrives, he must be fed. The method of obtaining food
and preparing it for baby's consumption is a task of divided labor:
Fishy, fishy in the brook.
Daddy catch him on the hook.
Mommy fry him in the pan,
Baby eat him like a man. 1"
Daddy brings the food home, mommy prepares it, and baby eats it. This
chain is continued with baby's eating, for he is urged to "eat him like a man. "
Presumably this means that baby will keep trying to be a man as he eats his
fish, until he grows up and is a food-provider for his wife and baby.
The little girl of folklore emerges as a creature of variation. At times,
she is a good little girl who obeys her parents, uses her good looks to get a
boyfriend, and then makes sure that he ends up as her husband. At other
times, she is manipulative and scheming; sometimes, provocative and rebel-
lious. The image of the ideal in folklore is the little girl who is usually obe-
dient and submissive.
This ideal little girl has the power to influence through repetition and
suggestion. The girls who jump to "I am a Pretty Little Dutch Girl" do not
necessarily identify with her on a conscious level. Yet they do hear the mes-
sage of this jump-rope song encoded at many other levels of their lives. It is
this reenforcement that folklore imparts to already existing values that gives
these symbols their potency.
To stop here in our analysis, however, is to give a distorted picture
of the little girl, her folklore, and her social values. Next to the ideal little
girl stands the real little girl. This real girl of flesh and blood is responsible
for the continuation of the tradition and the re-creation of folklore in per-
formance. She is also a girl who lives in a society where the ideal has been
challenged. And she is aware of this challenge.
In his classic remarks on fieldwork, Bronislaw Malinowski advised
the ethnographer to record both what people say they do and what they do.
The ethnographer will then have "the two extremes within which the nor-
mal moves" (Malinowski 1922, 21). It is likely that what people say will
yield the ideal; and what they actually do will reflect the real. In my work
with children's folklore, the ideal is revealed in the texts and in the formal
interviews. The children tell me how it should be. In their actions-both in
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? ? the performance of the folklore and in their daily lives-they show me how
it really is. It is of crucial importance to elicit the ideal and to observe the
real. Often the tension between the ideal and the real reveals an area of cul-
tural stress, of shifting cultural values.
The real little girls from my folklore study return to me in all their
complexity. There is Sara, aged eight, who ran into my kitchen to perform
with delight and accentuated pelvic thrusts:
La-la-la boom dee a,
They took my pants away.
They left me staying there
Without my underwear. '9
It was also Sara who explained to me that men should open doors for
women, because men are strong and women are weak. Yet Sara was the one
who suggested the formation of the women's lib group. This followed the
creation of mod maidens, a club jointly created by Sara and Hillary that fo-
cused on dressing-up and playing with Barbie dolls.
Jacqueline, aged ten, and Hillary, aged eight, revealed another appar-
ent discrepancy between the ideal and the real. The two explained to me the
division between boys' and girls' games. Boys play tether ball, Greek dodge
ball, dodge ball, kick ball, and baseball. Girls play hopscotch, jump rope,
tree tag, and they play on the rings at school. In narrative folklore, girls and
boys, for the most part, say different rhymes. As they stressed, boys would
never say "I am a Pretty Little Dutch Girl. " There is an overlap occurring
mainly in the nasty jokes. When I was questioning Hillary and Jacqueline
about the games played by the boys and girls, my inquiries brought an in-
credulous response from Jacqueline:
RZ: What about other boys at school? Do they play hopscotch?
Girls: No.
RZ: Do they play jump rope?
Girls: No.
RZ: Do they play on the rings?
Jacqueline: Oh, Rosemary, you must be kidding!
To Jacqueline, this division was so clear that my questions seemed absurd.
It was most interesting in Jacqueline's case that she saw baseball as a boy's
sport because she played it constantly and was in great demand as a team
member. As she explained it, "Girls can play it, but it's a boy's game. "
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? ? In her approach to boys, Jacqueline was a combination of the seduc-
tive and the aggressive. At the age of ten, she had considered herself mar-
ried for over a year to her boyfriend, Brian. Brian's younger brother, Jimmy,
performed the wedding ceremony in which a "diamond" ring from a bubble-
gum machine was given to Jacqueline by her "husband. " This wedding cer-
emony was in keeping with the image of the ideal little girl. Yet Jacqueline's
more aggressive behavior was at the other end of the spectrum. She would
chase and tackle Brian, covering him with kisses as she wrestled him to the
ground. Often this was done with the help of her girlfriends, accompanied
by delighted laughter from the girls and screams of help from Brian.
How does the image of the ideal little girl mesh with this real little
girl, aggressive and demanding in her behavior toward her boyfriend? And
how do we resolve the seeming contradiction between the little girls' classi-
fication of boys' and girls' games and their actual participation in the games?
What do we do about Sara, who expects men to open doors for the weaker
sex but founds women's lib groups? Perhaps rather than expecting a blend-
ing or a merging of the ideal and the real, we should attempt to see the in-
tertwining layers in the children's lives. We need not expect simplicity and
consistency. We will not find it.
CONSERVATISM AND CREATIVITY
Much work in children's folklore has focused on its conservative and tradi-
tional nature, the manner of transmission, from child to child, without the
aid or knowledge of adults. It also has to do with the remarkable continu-
ity and stability of narrative texts.
Children's folklore is part of the insular world of the child. In com-
ments about my research, principals, teachers, and parents would say,
"Children's folklore, interesting. But does it exist? " or "Rope jumping? Do
children still do that? " As Mary and Herbert Knapp said in One Potato, Two
Potato, "Most adults simply assume that today's children don't play tradi-
tional games any more" (Knapp and Knapp 1976, xi). Iona and Peter Opie
remarked on the adult's ignorance of children's folklore: "The schoolchild's
verses are not intended for adult ears. In fact part of their fun is the thought,
usually correct, that adults know nothing about them. Grown-ups have out-
grown the schoolchild's lore" (Opie and Opie 1959, 1). The body of
children's folklore, shared so enthusiastically among children and unknown
to adults, certainly strengthens the bonds between children and sets off a
safe territory, free from adult restraints.
Stone and Church in Childhood and Adolescence discuss the period
of middle childhood, which encompasses years six to ten: "The middle years
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? ? are perhaps the age adults know least about. One reason for this is that dur-
ing the school years children turn their backs on adults and actively shut them
out from much of the world of childhood. Beyond the family-centered
school-based life of earlier years, children join a separate, neighborhood- and
school-based society of their peers, forming groups along lines of age and
sex" (Stone and Church 1957, 202). The desire to protect and sustain the
group fosters the conservatism of children. Innovation in dress, manners, and
speech is suppressed. The urge to be like other children is the motivating
factor in choosing what cereal to eat for breakfast and what clothes to wear
to school. 2?
Alice Bertha Gomme attributed a mystical force to this conservatism
in children's folklore. As she says, "There must be some strong force . . .
potent enough to almost compel their continuance and to prevent their de-
cay" (Gomme 1964 [1898], 2: 514). Lady Alice identified this as "the dra-
matic faculty of mankind. "
In addition to the continuity of form, there is also a conservatism
within the corpus of children's folklore. In the course of my research, I en-
countered only one or two selections of folklore that were not part of my
own repertoire when I was a child growing up in Napa, California, in the
1950s. There was one item that appeared new on the scene and enjoyed wild
popularity for a few months. It was used as an insult or taunt:
God damn you
Mother-fucker
Titty-sucker
Two ball bitch!
When the girls in my study decided that swearing was bad, they changed
this to "Oh, you M-F, T-S, T-B-B! " Gradually, even the abbreviated version
was dropped by the children. At the time, I suggested that a radical new el-
ement in children's folklore might attract excited attention for a time. But
the values and aesthetics of the group would militate against radical change,
splintering off sharp corners to maintain the rounded body of oral tradition
(Zumwalt 1972, 50). John McDowell, in writing of the poetic quality of
riddles, uses the metaphor of the rounded body: "They are like the polished
stones, rounded off through the incessant action of a brook's water, as their
continuous rehearsal on the tongue of the folk endows them with an increas-
ingly graceful and rounded contour. At the same time, this grace of form
ensures their perpetuation, rendering them pleasurable and memorable"
(McDowell 1979, 57). This rounded body of folklore, this enduring form,
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? ? has to do with the content of the folklore. The conservatism of the children,
then, is highlighted in their folklore repertoire.
In accord with the Opies, Sutton-Smith attributes the retention of
children's games to the conservatism of children. As he notes, between the
ages of six and nine, children have "relatively unorganized personalities" and
participate in a "very precarious" group life (Sutton-Smith 1972a, 45). The
games provide the children with a reliable structure, a means of control in
their otherwise powerless state. As Sutton-Smith says, "The children's con-
servatism (their jealous regard for the rules of the game) has its basis in their
need for structure in social relationships. . . " (Sutton-Smith 1972a, 45-46).
Through guarding the games and assuring a tradition of continuity, the chil-
dren exercise control over a portion of their world. One might add that while
they are controlling this portion of their lives through playing a game, the
children are simultaneously being controlled by the game. So they have the
freedom to choose and the constraints of the choice in the same moment.
Their world of play is a microcosm of the adult world.
Along with the duality of freedom and constraint, there is conserva-
tism and innovation. As Sutton-Smith remarks, "In seeking to understand
children at play . . . we must hold in mind the dual fact that children are
innovative as well as conservative. . . " (Sutton-Smith 1972a, 65). Mary and
Herbert Knapp also stress this: "While children are remarkably conserva-
tive in preserving their traditions for generations, they are also very flexible
in adapting their lore to present concerns" (Knapp and Knapp 1976, 14).
This dual orientation was present in William Wells Newell's Games
and Songs of American Children (1963 [1883]). 21 Chapter four of this work
is entitled "The Inventiveness of Children" and Chapter five, "The Conser-
vatism of Children. " Newell refers to "the legacy of other generations and
languages" present in children's folklore. He poses the rhetorical question
"Should we then infer that childhood, devoid of inventive capacity, has no
resource but mechanical repetition? " (Newell 1963, 22). To answer this, he
discusses children's fantasy play: A solitary girl transforms the city park into
a place filled with make-believe companions; two young girls conduct elabo-
rate lessons at their imaginary boarding school. Newell also mentions the
creativity of secret languages. Children's "love of originality finds the tongue
of their elders too commonplace; besides, their fondness for mystery requires
secret ways of communication" (Newell 1963, 24). He gives the reader in-
structions for "Hog Latin," a secret language of New England: "It consists
simply in the addition of the syllable ery, preceded by the sound of hard g,
to every word. Even this is puzzling to older persons, who do not perceive
that 'Wiggery youggery goggery wiggery miggery' means only 'Will you go
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? ? with me'! Children sometimes use this device so perpetually that parents fear
lest they may never recover the command of their native English" (Newell
1963, 24). Forever inventive, when they tire of this secret language, Newell
says, the children simply create a new one. 22
While recognizing the force of innovation, Newell is pulled back to
the lodestone of tradition. In the conclusion to the chapter on "The Inven-
tiveness of Children," he remarks that the majority of children's games have
existed for centuries with "formulas which have been passed from genera-
tion to generation. " "How," Newell asks, "are we to reconcile this fact with
the quick inventiveness we ascribe to children? " (Newell 1963, 27). The in-
ventiveness, Newell tells us, yields localized games-the fantasy play of the
lone child, the "gibberish" of a group of children-which fade when inter-
est lags. Traditional games have passed the test of time-they have survived-
because they have an appeal broader than that of passing innovation: "The
old games, which have prevailed and become familiar by a process of natu-
ral selection, are usually better adapted to children's taste than any new in-
ventions can be; they are recommended by the quaintness of formulas which
come from the remote past, and strike the young imagination as a sort of
sacred law" (Newell 1963, 27). In his notes to the first edition, Newell
singled out the emphasis on tradition in his work: "It is devoted to formu-
las of play which children have preserved from generation to generation,
without intervention, often without the knowledge of older minds" (Newell
1963, i). Newell found "something so agreeable in this inheritance of thought
kept up by childhood itself" (Newell 1963, 12). The imminent disappear-
ance of these rhymes is "a thousand pities" (Newell 1963, 12).
One might caution here against an overly arbitrary division between
inventiveness and conservatism. While Newell posits a division between these
two types of play, children do not-for is it not possible to play a traditional
game with innovation, to chant rhymes centuries old with fantasy of the
moment? Thus even these two forces in children's folklore twine together
in complex interplay. As one individual in her reading of my work has
pointed out, "Innovation has also survived the test of time. " Just as chil-
dren share in traditional games, so they share in fantasy play. In this sense,
innovation has the same depth in children's folklore as tradition. It was
present in the past, it adds intricacies to the traditional games of the mo-
ment, and it will remain a force in the culture of childhood.
Yet still in accord with Newell on this point, might we find "some-
thing so agreeable" in the tradition of children's folklore, and something so
pleasing in the creativity? The challenge is to broaden our grasp, to encom-
pass the complexity of children's folklore-to reach for the text and the con-
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? ? text, the ideal and the real, the tradition and the creativity. Still, in our en-
deavor to encircle all this, we must not expect fully to succeed. There is the
magical in children's folklore that will never be captured. And here we might
learn from the anthropologist who went to Dublin, Ireland, to study a lep-
rechaun. In 1957, as the story goes, a mechanic from the Vauxhall Factory
captured a leprechaun in Phoenix Park. People came from all over to see the
leprechaun, and among these was the anthropologist. For four or five days,
the anthropologist observed the leprechaun. On the fifth day, the leprechaun
took on the appearance of a tiny, shriveled root and died. 23 So with children's
folklore, the voice on the wind, the creativity of the moment, cannot be fully
captured. The fluid world of the child eludes the static state of the printed
word. Their mirthful nature will not be pinned down by our sobriety. That
is fair; it is part of the rules of the game. The children have, after all, warned
us that they do it all "just for the fun of it! "
NOTES TO CHAPTER Two
1. Darwin's twentieth-century descendants in the social sciences are wont to
connect Social Darwinism with others. John Friedl in The Human Portrait says, "Al-
though Darwin did not mean for his theory of evolution to be applied to human so-
cial and cultural change, it was proposed by many social scientists that cultures evolved
in a struggle for survival, just as animals did. This doctrine, inappropriately called 'so-
cial Darwinism,' was ultimately used to justify white supremacist policies of Western
nations . . . " (Friedl 1981, 116). In spite of Friedl's sympathetic interpretation of
Darwin's work, Darwin did not wait for others to create social Darwinism. The seeds
were present in Journal of Researches into the Natural History and Geology of the
Countries Visited During the Voyage of H. M. S. Beagle Round the World (1852). It
blossomed in his masterwork, On the Origin of Species (1859), and took firm root in
Descent of Man (1871). It is well to keep in mind the reality of our historical ante-
cedents in theory. For a discussion of the Forerunners of Darwin: 1745-1859, see
Bentley Glass 1968.
2. The cultural evolutionary orientation was opposed to the theory of
degenerationism. Archbishop Whately, the major advocate of the latter theory, repre-
sented the savage as the end point of the fall from grace. From this perspective, to pro-
pose an evolution from savagery was blasphemy. There could be no development from
the savage state, since that ran counter to the biblical account of creation. The savage
represents not the childhood of the race but the depths of degradation. For a detailed
discussion of the theory of degenerationism, see Margaret Hodgen's Doctrine of Sur-
vivals (1936). For a discussion of evolutionary theory, see Frederick Teggart's Theory
and Processes of History (1977 [1941]), and Kenneth Bock's Acceptance of Histories
(1958). See also Dundes's "Devolutionary Premise in Folklore Theory" (1969a).
3. Karl Pearson (1897) Chances of Death, London: Edward Arnold.
2:53-54.
4. Alice Bertha Gomme's two-volume work, The Traditional Games of En-
gland, Scotland and Ireland, was originally published as part one of George Laurence
Gomme's intended but not completed Dictionary of British Folklore. Volume 1 was
published in 1894; Volume 2, in 1898. The Dover edition is an unabridged republi-
cation of this important work. See Dorothy Howard's introduction to the Dover edi-
tion for remarks on Lady Alice's cultural evolutionary theory.
5. Alice Bertha Gomme's treatment of "Round and Round the Village" is an
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? ? example of her thorough scholarship. First she presents the music, then she provides
nineteen versions with informant and geographic designations. There follows a descrip-
tion of how the game is played with accompanying diagrams. Lady Alice includes di-
rections for each version. She then provides a four-page chart that lists the segments
of the rhyme with coordinates for geographical area and version. This facilitates what
she refers to as the analysis of the game rhymes. And finally she discusses the game in
relation to the custom of perambulation of boundaries, with citations to other perti-
nent sources. This is just one game in her two-volume work, which considers more
than two hundred games.
6. For differing interpretations of Aarne-Thompson Tale Type 328, "Jack and
the Beanstalk," see Humphrey Humphreys's "Jack and the Beanstalk" (1965 [1948],
103-6); William H. Desmonde's "Jack and the Beanstalk" (1965 [1951], 107-9); and
Martha Wolfenstein's "Jack and the Beanstalk: An American Version" (1955, 100-
113). For the solar mythological approach, see the summary of Angelo De Gubernatis's
interpretation in Dorson (1955). All of the foregoing articles are reprinted in Dundes's
Study of Folklore. See also Dundes's "Projection in Folklore: A Plea for Psychoana-
lytic Semiotics" (1976a, 1510-11).
7. For an examination of the origin theory as it relates to narrative, see Brian
Sutton-Smith's "The Origins of Fictions and the Fictions of Origin," American Eth-
nological Society Proceedings, 1984, 117-32. In relationship to cultural evolutionary
theory, it might be that a culture has a simple technology, but that is not the same as
a simple cognitive system. The Australian aborigines-who from the nineteenth cen-
tury to the present have been the choice of the evolutionary anthropologists as the sim-
plest, most primitive culture-do, indeed, have a simple stone-tool technology. But they
have a kinship system so complex that it is a point of dispute still among kinship ex-
perts as to how to describe it. The result of the myriad of ethnographies written dur-
ing the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries has been to present the complexity of
cultures; and this complexity is apparent even though the cultures might be described
in these same ethnographies as simple, savage, or primitive.
8. See Dundes's foreword to the 1978 edition of Children's Humor for an ap-
praisal of Martha Wolfenstein's contributions.
9. In the winter of 1971, I began a collection of jump-rope and hand-clapping
songs that I gathered from children at an elementary school and from children living
in an apartment complex in Santa Cruz, California. One year later, I broadened the
scope of the project to include the children in two other elementary schools. At this
point, I was still limiting my search to jump-rope and hand-clapping songs. Then, as
serendipity would have it, I recorded some "nasty jokes" from my three major infor-
mants. As I listened to the jokes, I heard the same message threading through the jokes
that bound together the jump-rope and hand-clapping songs. From that point on, I
attempted to study the full gamut of children's folklore.
10. Collected from a six-year-old Caucasian girl in Santa Cruz, California,
February 1971. The informant had learned this two years earlier when she attended
school on the Navajo reservation in Window Rock, Arizona. She used it as a jump-
rope song and she said that the girl jumping rope ran out on the last line.
11. Collected from an eight-year-old Caucasian girl in Santa Cruz, California,
in 1971.
12. Collected from a six-year-old Caucasian girl in Santa Cruz, California, in
1971.
13. Collected from an eight-year-old Caucasian girl in Santa Cruz, California,
in 1971.
14. I used this rhyme to taunt my older sisters when I was a child growing up
in Napa, California, in the 1950s. I also heard it chanted endlessly by my informants
in Santa Cruz, California, in 1971-72.
15. Collected from a six- and an eight-year-old Caucasian girl in Santa Cruz,
California, in 1971. The two learned this from an eight-year-old boy.
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