(For a complete view of the larger
study, which includes handball, folk basketball, hopscotch, step dancing, and
play fighting, see Beresin 1993.
study, which includes handball, folk basketball, hopscotch, step dancing, and
play fighting, see Beresin 1993.
Childens - Folklore
There is a real sense in which
games are a quite "different" experience from everyday life, being where one
can safely engage in all kinds of actions that would not be allowed elsewhere;
at the same time it is true that the social interaction, the rule systems, and
the players' temperaments are also continuous with everyday life.
Furthermore, while on the one hand we can say with Bateson (1972)
that the play in a game is "the nip that means the bite but not what the bite
means," on the other hand general success and esteem in play count enor-
mously in childhood success. Not to be able to play is to fail childhood. Play
and games are not separate from life but are interwoven within it in mul-
tiple ways, which are now beginning to be approached by workers such as
Beresin, Hughes, and Goodwin. What may be of ironical interest is the pos-
sible coincidence between a typical male researcher's focus upon the actions
in the games that men play (discontinuity) and female researchers' interest
in the etiquette by which the games women play are sustained (continuity).
In female researchers it is as if the game might be an incident in a prolonged
conversation, whereas in the studies of males it is as if a conversation may
be an interruption of an ongoing gaming activity. It has taken the largely
female investigators mentioned here to bring these differences to light
(Mechling 1985).
For general reviews of prior research and thought on games we can
recommend Avedon and Sutton-Smith (1971), Caillois (1961), Goffman
(1961b), Huizinga (1950), Jones and Hawes (1972), and Sutton-Smith
(1972).
GIRLS
Play and games have throughout Western history been largely the preserve
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? ? of men and boys. The variety of games available to boys yesterday and of toys
today far exceeds in complexity and range those available to girls. Some writers
have even suggested that recreation has simply not been central to the life of
women and girls in Western society (Wimbush and Talbot 1988). Others
have argued that the play of women and girls is much less obvious because
it tends to be verbal and private rather than physical and public (Schwartz-
man 1978). This would parallel cross-cultural sex differences in the display
of humor, where men more generally have access to public and women to
private forms of such expression (Apte 1985). The historical sex-role shift
within children's folklore, however, is that although the nineteenth century
might show more folk gaming activity by boys, the contrary would be the
case today. With their greater access to sports organizations, the playground
play of boys has become increasingly homogenized throughout the century
and increasingly under the sway of modern adult interests in coaching and
sports. The relative neglect of girls, particularly girls in lower socioeconomic
orders and minority races, has left them as the legatee of children's folklore.
Thus jump rope, hopscotch, and jacks continue to flourish with girls, while
marbles, momley peg, and prisoner's base are seldom seen in boys' folkplay
any longer. When girls' games are contrasted with those of boys (team sports)
their games appear to be much less complex, less active, less intrusive, more
confined, less competitive (Sutton-Smith 1979b). Some have written that, as
a result, girls may not develop the large group collaborative and competi-
tive skills that are essential to their success in modern organizations (Lever
1976). The papers by Zumwalt and particularly those by Beresin and Hughes
raise questions about that line of interpretation. The complexity of the girls'
game organization is a complexity in the meta levels of the play. Several so-
cial functions are being accomplished at the same time. It is as if the girls
are using the game to reaffirm their small group ties and to maintain their
collaborative networks in the midst of competitive activity. They do play the
game and abide by its rules, and yet they are also "gaming" the game in terms
of their own social rules of nice versus nasty, and further interpenetrating
these rules with the preexisting coalitions to preserve their favorites. There
is a subtlety here that is ignored in most attempts to compare the role of
games in the lives of boys and girls, men and women. Lever's notion (1976)
that girls break up their games in the presence of argumentation, whereas
boys go on arguing with each other until they finally resume the game again
is countered by this evidence of girls' persisting collaboration by Hughes and
collateral evidence from Goodwin and Von Glascoe (1980). Given Gilligan's
(1982) position of women having a "different voice," a concern, as much
with collaboration as competition, there is evidence here of just that con-
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? ? cern in the method of play. Still, we need to have care here. Hughes's girls
were studied in a Quaker school that had its own particular ethos of coop-
eration, exercised, one presumes, more coercively than in most places. It
could be that some of the differences now appearing between the findings
about girls by Hughes and Goodwin and those of Lever might be due to the
location of the study and the relative familiarity of the girls with each other.
Still, the general fear that girls are underprivileged in their school playground
life continues and it is increasingly suggested that this has a lot to do with
the way in which the rough and tumbling boys dominate the playground
space in a physical way, thus disadvantaging the girls (Thorne 1993).
METHODS
Again in the Beresin and the Hughes studies we have quite intensive inves-
tigations of one particular focus. These studies and those of the prior sec-
tion contrast methodologically with the questionnaire and interview tech-
niques carried out with large numbers of students, more typical in earlier
work in children's folklore. Hughes gives some indications of the step-by-
step process by which she proceeded from observations to interviews. In these
kinds of exploratory studies the investigator cannot know beforehand just
what is to be studied, and must remain open to all kinds of possibilities if
the ultimate outcome is to be of any potential worth. Going beyond Hughes's
assertion that the "gaming of the game is as important as the game," Beresin
suggests that in a variety of ways the larger community also affects what
occurs in the game (for example, commercials, school recess rules). Beresin's
use of video and audio recording reveals a host of contingencies beyond the
text that are relevant to the life of the game in an urban elementary-school
playground. In short, Beresin's study demonstrates the intricate ways in
which a game functions in the context of playground space and the players'
age, gender, and ethnic grouping, and how the commercial world and the
school's rules enter from the outside, thus having their own influence on what
goes on. Once again games are not so separate from life as has often been
suggested.
What is remarkable about Fine's overview is first his enunciation of
a series of principles of ethical procedure (informed consent, credit to in-
formants, lack of deception, lack of harm to subjects) and then his pursuit
of examples, many of which some readers will find controversial. With an
admirable openness Fine details his own ad hoc responses on a number of
difficult questions, and we are left with a clear impression that when one is
attempting to gather the often arcane and antithetical lore of children, the
phenomena of racism, obscenity, cruelty, gifts, and gender can arise and leave
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? ? the researchers in a highly ambiguous position between wanting to uphold
public morality and retaining the confidence of their informants. Not every-
one will agree with the "solutions" that Fine adopts here, but we can ap-
plaud his courage in telling us about them, and we can realize that these are
very real problems because children's folklore is often about culturally an-
tithetical matters. Subject matter that might be incidental to orthodox so-
cialization research can be central to children's folklore and cause ethical
problems perhaps beyond neat solution.
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? ?
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? ? 4 DOUBLE DUTCH
AND DOUBLE CAMERAS
STUDYING THE TRANSMISSION OF CULTURE
IN AN URBAN SCHOOL YARD
Ann Richman Beresin
It can be said that within the children's game lies an entire cosmos. For Jean
Piaget, the study of marbles uncovered the wrestlings of the moral judgments
of the child. For Brian Sutton-Smith, the flexibility of children's games re-
vealed play itself as a process of invention and reversal. For John McDowell,
the riddle texts unfolded an array of themes reflecting that of the children's
lives as a whole. (Piaget 1965; Sutton-Smith 1976b; McDowell 1979). This
paper will examine the complex world of double dutch jump rope as prac-
ticed and performed by third- through fifth-grade girls in an urban, public,
working-class, racially integrated elementary school yard in Pennsylvania.
It will be argued here that the study of the game reveals complex, overlap-
ping cultural worlds, and that if we can attune our eyes to the game beyond
the basic game text, that the potential meaning of such study goes beyond
the collection of interesting rhymes.
Unlike the classic studies of jump-rope rhymes which have privileged
the texts of the rhymes over their actions (Abrahams 1969; Butler 1989;
Delamar 1983; Gomme 1894; Newell 1883), in this paper I seek to explore
the interaction around the game in addition to its texts, and to examine its
relationship to the specific context of the urban school yard. I suggest not
only that the school yard shapes the game-and it is indeed inseparable from
it-but that the privileging of game texts by collectors of children's folklore
has been directly related to the available methodologies for folk-game study.
Rhymes and songs were written down by observers of children, and these
rhymes were then compared with older rhymes and rhymes from different
regions in order to examine cultural uniqueness and distribution. It was not
until recently that the invention of the audio tape recorder enabled the stu-
dent of games to capture verbal nuances, cadence, and rhythm, thus allow-
ing for the preservation of detail beyond the mere text.
Although it is hard to imagine folk song collectors today not using a
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? ? tape recorder to capture the details of song, the use of visual media in game
study is virtually untapped. Like dance ethnography, the study of folk games
could greatly benefit from the preservation of actual game performances on
film or videotape, in order to examine the game in its rapid-fire detail, and
then, perhaps most significantly, to replay the game for the participants to
get their expert views.
Prior to the use of audio and video equipment, students of children's
folklore made use of historical documentation and oral history to extract
meaning from rhymes and games. The Opies' extensive use of written docu-
mentation and Sutton-Smith's vast collection of oral history around folk
games have emphasized the shifting temporal context of the games (Opie
and Opie 1959, 1969; Sutton-Smith 1981a). Although collections from
Gomme to the Opies have included musical notation in singing games, the
jump-rope literature has, to this day, typically emphasized the poetic meter,
and done so sparingly, leaving the impression that jumping rope was some-
thing one does perhaps sitting down with one's mouth (Butler 1989). The
first in-depth interactionist study of the game of jump rope is Goodwin's
1985 article "The Serious Side of Jump Rope: Conversation Practices and
Social Organization in the Frame of Play," which, by using audiotaped tran-
scripts of talk around the games, allowed for the capturing of variation in
actual rope games as they were performed in the streets of Philadelphia. Al-
though still emphasizing the verbal interaction around the game and imply-
ing that the game of rhythmic foot work, known as jump rope, was prima-
rily a verbal art, this provided a step into the study of the game as more than
fixed text. Goodwin's study demonstrated that the game was a framework,
as Bateson and also Goffman have suggested, for other kinds of dramas
(Bateson 1972; Goffman 1959, 1974). For more on the significance of the
inclusion of the larger social context and folk interaction, see Bauman 1982;
Briggs 1988; and Kendon 1990.
The majority of the folk-game literature can be said to be either a mi-
cro or a macro survey, leaving us with often uncomparable details, as
Schwartzman has noted, or acontextual lists of separate events, as is popu-
lar in the general books on American children's folklore (Bronner 1988;
Knapp and Knapp 1976; Schwartzman 1978). For years the historical com-
parative methodology when used in combination with fieldwork provided
the only way to merge the two perspectives. But, given our relative access
to the technology of wide-angle and close-up footage, this is no longer the
case. Rivka Eifermann's massive study of Israeli Arab and Jewish children's
games serves as perhaps the closest prevideographic model of combined
micro and macro study; she utilized hundreds of simultaneous observers
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? ? within the same play area. (Eifermann 1971, 1979). In this manner
Eifermann was able to amass a wealth of detail in survey form and to com-
pare children of different social classes, locales, and ethnicities. Although the
published versions of her study do not illuminate the important details of
the folk games within its survey, it stands as a marker in the careful exami-
nation of the meaning of children's games in the larger culture.
THE USE OF FILM AND VIDEO
Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead pioneered the use of film in Learning
to Dance in Bali, as they captured the nonverbal stylistics of a cross-cultural
dance lesson. Reels of unedited film recorded the instruction of cultural
forms. Film documentary, which by definition is an edited process of graphic
storytelling, has its own fascinating history, but what is relevant here is not
the use of film and video as storyteller, but rather as presenter of art forms.
Helen Schwartzman's encyclopedic text Transformations: The Anthro-
pology of Children's Play includes in its final pages a listing of ethnographic
films, ranging from Bateson's own 1954 film of river otters at play to Bess
Lomax Hawes and Robert Eberlein's Pizza Pizza Daddyo in 1969, a film
about a special performance of favorite African American singing games. It
is in these films that the details and nuances of the games emerge, and the
texts can be placed in perspective, as verbal expressions of bodily forms.
What is being proposed in this paper is the use of film or video as
witnessing or documentation, so that when a game is described in transcrip-
tion or in actual videographic presentation we can see the phenonemon
being discussed. Unfortunately, this chapter is itself limited to the paper
medium, but with careful description of a few minutes of actual footage,
it is hoped that the reader will begin to see and hear details of the game.
As microethnographers Adam Kendon and Frederick Erickson advocate,
through the use of such documentation we can begin to be more consistent
about our study of social phenomenon, in this case the cultural transmis-
sion of folkgames, and build upon a collection of real cases involving real
human beings (Kendon 1979; Erickson and Wilson 1982). We have the
possibility of checking them, and rechecking them, long after the fieldwork
is over, in slow motion and in fast forward, with sound on and sound
off, to see things not possible in the quick blur of the moment. And we have
the possibility of the local experts sharing their specific insights on their
own folk process, well after the moment of concentration is past. The very
field of children's folklore expands before us, and it has the potential to
become the study of children's cultures and folklife, in all its richness and
complexity.
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? ? DOUBLE CAMERAS
When this author set out to study the games and rituals of one multiethnic
working-class school yard in 1991, it became clear that one pair of eyes
would not be sufficient to capture the details or the larger boundaries of
school-yard interaction. In the summer months, the principal of the Mill
School was approached for general permission to spend time at the daily fif-
teen-minute recess periods, and eventually to use audio and video record-
ers. Permission was granted, as no individuals were being targeted in the
study, and student anonymity was assured. General information letters were
sent in the fall to one class in each of the third, fourth, and fifth grades on
which the fieldwork was based. In mid-fall, a stationary videocamera was
placed in a second-floor window facing the school yard, and set on a wide
angle. This was done to capture the basic traffic zones and play spaces, and
as an aid in the locating of field observations within the larger picture. The
principal was supportive and accepted such a plan, as the individual faces
were obscured, and he, too, was curious to learn what kinds of interaction
were occurring. Recess had been canceled by his predecessor out of fear of
school-yard violence, and the status of recess time was uncertain. Such docu-
mentation, to be shared with him and his staff at the end of the year in re-
port form, was of interest and had policy implications.
On the first day of school, daily nonparticipant observation fieldnotes
were written, and it was not until rapport was firmly established with the chil-
dren and staff that audiotaping commenced. From January to May, daily
audiotapes were made, overtly, with many texts collected, rules explained,
interactions noted, and nonverbal information described. It was not until May
that the researcher felt ready to ask the children if a mobile video camera could
be set up on the school yard to record their games directly. A deep rapport had
developed by that time, and their response was universally positive. They were
quite excited, as it had been our agreement that they could see themselves on
video later in the month. At that time, they were to tell me what they thought
about the games they played. Small group interviews with the three classes
under study had been conducted since the beginning of the year, so this would
be another round of interviewing, also considered a pleasant task.
In sum, the methodology included ongoing small group interviews,
daily fieldwork, gradual inclusion of audio recording, seasonal wide-angled
videotaping from the second-floor window, eventual close-up or micro-video
footage, and then the presentation of samples of the footage to the partici-
pants. A total of thirty-three videotapes were recorded, covering twenty-seven
days of recess. Nineteen tapes of wide-angled footage were made, and four-
teen tapes of close-up micro footage were made. Fifty-one days of live au-
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? ? diotape were also recorded.
One hundred and four third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade boys and girls
were observed, audiotaped, and videotaped during recess. Forty-seven chil-
dren served as native experts and provided their own commentary as they
watched themselves at play on videotape. Occasionally younger and older
children were included in the taping process, if they were part of a game being
studied and played by the core participants.
Although not the first study to utilize videotaped games of children
in this manner, this study is among few to share the footage with its partici-
pants in this age group (see also Sutton-Smith and Magee's "Reversible Child-
hood" [1989a], on the use of reflexive video ethnography with young chil-
dren). Although this is not the first study to examine school-yard games and
the transmission of culture in one place (See Parrott 1972; Sluckin 1981; Hart
1993), it is unique in its deliberate emphasis on a public, multiethnic school.
Studies of urban play, such as Dargan's and Zeitlin's extensive photo essay
City Play (1990), capture bits of the cultural crossover visible in urban street
games, but in the following transcriptions we can see it emerge in the school-
yard games themselves. Such cultural crossover is significant in the light of
the emphasis on school desegregation so important to the American public-
school system, and in the light of the potential elimination of recess as school
policy (Sutton-Smith 1990b).
Several games were studied in this larger exploration of the folklore
of the 1991-92 Mill School yard, including the games of the third- through
fifth-grade boys. This paper, however, will serve as a window to the specific
game worlds of the double dutch players.
(For a complete view of the larger
study, which includes handball, folk basketball, hopscotch, step dancing, and
play fighting, see Beresin 1993. ) Double dutch was perhaps the chief peer-led
activity for African American girls at the Mill School, and provided a perfor-
mance focus for a mobile audience of both girls and boys in the school yard.
DOUBLE DUTCH
A fast-paced, polyrhythmic jump-rope style, double dutch utilizes two ropes,
typically turned inwards, egg beater fashion, by two girls who have "the
ends," while a single jumper executes specific steps to a specific song or
chant. It is almost exclusively an African American girls' tradition in urban
Pennsylvania, and has been virtually ignored in the jump-rope literature.
There has been so little written on double dutch in the folklore literature,
and in the collections of African American folklore, that it could even have
been said to be skipped over.
Singing game and street game collections like those of the Opies have
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? ? described larger game traditions but excluded rope singing. American
children's folklore, as in the works of Bronner and Knapp and Knapp, have
homogenized the ethnicity of their young experts and have given us only
single rope traditions; the African American collections of general folklore
have rarely even mentioned the lore of young girls (Kochman 1972; Jack-
son 1967; Whitten and Szwed 1982). With the exception of Jones's and
Hawes's Step It Down (1972) and Black Girls at Play (1975) by Bauman,
Eckhardt, and Brady, the games of African American girls have been ren-
dered practically invisible, and these collections have examined only the step-
ping and clapping forms. Abrahams's Jump-Rope Rhymes: A Dictionary
(1969), a text called "the most thorough recent compilation of these (jump
rope) rhymes for English-speaking children" (Schwartzman 1978, 36), lists
a handful of articles relevant to double dutch, but, with the exception of his
own useful 1963 article, all deal with it only in passing.
Even when only a single rope was available-it was typically one
brought by a child from home-it was utilized in the style and steps of double
dutch. Two girls hold the ends and turn for the girl who is jumping, and
often it is expected that one must turn for someone before getting the chance
to jump. Occasionally the "double Irish" or "double orange" style of rope
turning was observed; that is the term for the turning of the ropes outward,
egg beater style. This method was considered more difficult and sometimes
occurred by accident when the turners changed direction. More typically,
there would be two turners rapidly turning the rope inward, left, right, left,
right, swaying rhythmically to the slapping beat as the rope brushed the
ground. The jumper would dance the steps associated with the song or
rhyme, and a group of singers, ranging from the turners to nonparticipants
to would-be participants, would dance a minimal version of the game in
place. This was considered both a fun thing to do while you await your turn,
as well as a chance to practice the sequence.
The game was competitive, with jumpers vying to be the one who
could not only stay in the ropes the longest but could progress the furthest
in the particular rhyme. Someone would shout "She got foot" or "She got
turn. " And one would often hear the cry of "Saved! " or "Saved by one! "
meaning that the person shouting had progressed farther than the jumper
who had just tripped on the turning rope. Steps were parodied, styles imi-
tated, and occasionally corrected in order to ensure that the jumper did the
job right. Turners could be accused of turning too rapidly, or of intention-
ally "flicking" the rope to make it more difficult, and high-status
jumpers,usually the more skilled fifth and sixth graders, claimed first jumps,
while the younger, less experienced players would be the turners. The chance
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? ? to jump first, and if one was skilled, stay in the spotlight, was often called
long before the game started, in the hallway, in the classroom, or at the end
of one round for the round the next recess.
Double Dutch Style
Count 2 turns
left hand
clockwise
Count 1 turn
right hand
clockwise
ouble Dutch Style Count 2 turns
right hand
clockwise
Count 1 turn
left hand
clockwise
Immigrant Chinese and Haitian girls, representing a small minority
of this officially racially desegregated school, also occasionally did individual,
single jump rope. Two Chinese girls sometimes jumped in two parallel ropes
and, in their own ropes, looped circles around each other, sort of a couple
dance while jumping. The Haitian girls sometimes jumped with a second girl
in the same small rope, either face to face or back to front. Regardless of
form or ethnicity, jump rope was almost always competitive, either by en-
durance, elaborateness of steps, or frequency of turns.
The European American girls would often be observers of the double
dutch games, and on only rare occasions do individual ropes themselves.
When they did so they would compete to see which of them could jump the
most times. They would not sing or chant, just count the number of con-
tinuous jumping steps. One girl was up to 230 and still jumping. Unlike the
African American girls, who stayed in one place or rotated their positions
slightly to be out of the bright sun, or the immigrant girls, who stayed in
one place with their individual ropes, the European American girls did a
running jump rope step and would, one at a time, run around the entire yard
counting. Like their hand-clap games, which were also done to numbers or
counting, the European American girls had clearly distilled their games and
no longer had an active jump-rope singing tradition at this school. The sing-
ing jump rope game, and for that matter the singing hand-clapping game,
had become predominantly an African American tradition.
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? ? Many double dutch songs included the same sequence of steps or
commands: foot, bounce, hop, turn, criss (crossing), clap, with "foot" or
"footin" being the basic right, left, right, left running step over the quickly
turning ropes. "Bounce" involved a lighter touch of the foot while doing the
running step; "hop" a one-footed airborne step. "Turning" and "crissing"
involved the most skill and only the most advanced jumpers were able to
do those steps. Taisha, a particularly graceful fifth grader, was known to add
turns to all of her steps, in every sequence, just for the challenge of it.
THEMES OF THE JUMP-ROPE TEXTS
Much like the world of themes found in the children's riddling studied by
John McDowell (1979), the recorded texts of the rope games were spheres
of the African American girls' culture. There were "1,2,3 Halleluya" and
"Hey, D. J. , let's sing that song," and "Boom Boom Tangle"-a rhyme about
rap artists. Plus there were "All in Together," "Hey Consolation, Where Have
You Been," "Girlscout, Girlscout, Do Your Duty," "Juice Juice, Let's Knock
Some Boots," "D-I-S-H Choice, Do Your Footsies," "Challenge, Challenge
1,2,3," and "Kitty Cat Come, Gonna Be on Time, Cause the School Bell
Rings at A Quarter to Nine. " But these themes, the ones of religion, region,
pop music, of group entry and exit, schooling, and even of plain step dis-
play in menu form, were out-shouted by "Big Mac," a commercial for the
McDonald's Corporation.
As Cheyna, a fourth-grade African American girl had said, "Want to
hear my favorite? " (Snap fingers on down beat. Accented syllables are capi-
talized)
Big MAC, Fillet FISH, Quarter POUNDer, French FRIES, Ice COKE,
Milk SHAKE, Foot
Fillet FISH, Quarter POUNDer, French FRIES, Ice COKE, Milk
SHAKE,
BOUNCE
Fillet FISH, Quarter POUNDer, French FRIES, Ice COKE, Milk
Shake,
HOP
Fillet FISH, Quarter POUNDer, French FRIES, Ice COKE, Milk
Shake,
TURN
Fillet FISH, Quarter POUNDer, French FRIES, Ice COKE, Milk
Shake,
CRISS
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? ? Big Mac appeared in twenty-three out of fifty-six live unrequested
recordings of double dutch chants, closely followed by a follow-the-leader
game, "Challenge Challenge, One, Two, Three. " This contrasted with the
rest of the active repetoire, of which two or three versions were recorded of
each. First observed in mid-October, "Big Mac," and its occasional partner
"Challenge Challenge," were the only chants jumped at recess until Febru-
ary. Most of the other rhymes did not appear at all until April. "Big Mac"
represented forty percent of all the songs sung for double dutch, with "Chal-
lenge Challenge" representing thirty percent. The remainder totaled three to
six percent, tallying another thirty percent. "Big Mac" was therefore not only
the first jump-rope rhyme to appear in the school yard and not only the most
frequently jumped, but, as we will see, also the one used for learning how
to play the game of double dutch itself.
Collectors of jump-rope games have typically emphasized the antiq-
uity of the games and rhymes, in part because of the archive methodology
available, as discussed, and in part because of the inherent romance in find-
ing things old. Paradoxically, the most significant rhyme for the players of
this game was the newest one, invented by the McDonald's Corporation as
a menu chant. Again and again the local jump-rope experts-the third-,
fourth-, and fifth-grade girls-claimed that the "Big Mac" rhyme was com-
mercial and approximately ten years old, but that the game was learned from
their mothers and sisters. The dating of this particular chant was confirmed
by the national public-relations office of the McDonald's Corporation, which
indicated that the menu chants are periodically placed in local papers as part
of a contest. It is significant that McDonald's has been a national sponsor
of double dutch competitions since the late 1970s and that the only other
long commercial text that emerged was in an interview setting: This was
"R-E-E-B-O-K do your footsies the Reebok way. " Reebok is also a national
sponsor of double dutch competitions.
All of the new attempts at double dutch recorded in the school yard
were done to the "Big Mac" rhyme. When Isha, a fifth-grade expert jumper,
was asked what was the easiest rhyme, she answered, "Challenge Challenge,"
because "you just had to imitate what was done before you. " When asked
why the younger girls and the ones new to double dutch started with "Big
Mac," she answered, "Because they don't have nothing else. " Commercial
culture is, for the kids of the school yard, the most basic of common culture.
The commercial is easily learned: It's short, it's quick, and it's "fun
in the mouth. " Children who are bused in from all sections of the city know
it, and children from all economic levels have access to it. It may have been
introduced by the corporate-sponsored leagues and ad campaigns and may
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? ? be a future classic example of the "invention of tradition" (Hobsbawm and
Ranger 1983), but it would not have continued if it did not serve some func-
tion. Adam Kendon, in his book Conducting Interaction (1990), talks about
"movement coordination in social interaction" and the use of ritual to fa-
cilitate synchrony. The sound bytes of "Big Mac" may well serve to speed
up the ritualization of entry into the game in a recess period that allows only
fifteen minutes for play in this city.
In an environment where raw materials are inaccessible and consis-
tently removed from the play time, it appears that the African American
children from poorer neighborhoods, rich with an oral tradition, are teach-
ing non-African Americans what can be done, as Isha says, "when you don't
have nothing else. " This is especially true of the play of girls, which is par-
ticularly repressed in the school yard by the institution of school itself. Here
it is commercial culture that is the common denominator, both within an
ethnic tradition and across ethnic traditions.
One of the most relevant texts on this topic is Newell's 1883 book
Games and Songs of American Children. His essays "The Inventiveness of
Children" and "The Conservatism of Children" address the dynamics in-
herent in play study, the idea of play as being both traditional and transi-
tional, and the idea that children reconstruct and reinvent performances rel-
evant to their complex lives. The key word is relevant. Valuable things are
reused and recycled and retold. And as we will see, the repetition of the com-
mercial rhyme may be fixed, but the variation and creativity in the game can
be found in the foot work. In a sense, the folklorist begins with the text, but
cannot stop there.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPTIONS OF DOUBLE DUTCH
The following are transcriptions of actual footage of the "Big Mac" game,
filmed on two days in the spring of 1992. The clips are unique in that they
capture two incidences of non-African American girls participating in the
African American tradition of rope jumping. The first example is the first
time R. , a European American third grader, actually got a chance to jump,
although she had been a turner of single rope African American games pre-
viously. The second example is an overt lesson in the art of double dutch
itself, as given by African American girls to an immigrant girl from Hong
Kong, and also to a Polish American girl.
The transcriptions show a basic diagram of the rope, and list a run-
ning time imprinted on the videotape in hours, minutes, and seconds. In this
manner the transcript reflects specific frames of videotape and can be cross-
referenced by time. The cross referencing of tapes by time turned out to be
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? ? rather significant and is a topic to which the concluding pages will be devoted.
The action is described in the middle column, and the audible con-
versation and game text is listed in the right-hand column. Following the
principle, but not the style, of Ray Birdwhistell's kinesics, and Adam
Kendon's studies of nonverbal communication, it was considered important
to at least describe the basic body motion as a line of communication sepa-
rate from the speech (Birdwhistell 1970; Kendon 1981). Actual kinesic tran-
scriptions, from Birdwhistell to Laban, have proved too complex for most
readers and, in a sense, give us more detail than is necessary for this level of
analysis. (For an example of Laban's system of movement notation, see
Hutchinson 1977). The advantage of video ethnography is that the footage
is there to be reanalyzed over time, as more and more detailed levels of analy-
sis become of interest. (For more on the recent attention given to the body
in folklore studies, see Young 1993. )
Example A: The Single Rope Version of "Big Mac"
In the following transcription there is a demonstration of non-double dutch
and double double dutch styles utilizing a single rope. Third- and second-
grade girls Q. , V. , and S. , all African American, and European American girl,
R. , took turns jumping. One to two singers sang as they jumped without
doing any particular steps. A more experienced jumper joined in and the two
jumped at once, facing each other, laughing. The last jumper performed the
"Big Mac" steps and sang all the way from foot to criss, with a stop in the
middle. She was angry when another girl tried to do joint jumping with her.
They jumped past the honking bell, and this episode ended angrily when she
was interrupted by another attempt at joint jumping.
Diagram Time (Action) Voices
10:40:15 (Q. jumps single rope, (no singing)
both feet, not double
dutch style)
10:40:27 (R. gets a turn, jumps,
same way)
10:40:29 (A second African
American girl, V. , jumps
in; they stop)
10:40:30 (R. again jumps)
10:40:36 (Joint jumping of
R. and V. ) and V.
"No, no,no"
Laughter of R.
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? ? 10:40:38
10:40:43
10:40:51
(R. tries again)
(S. begins turn)
(S. sings to herself)
(jumps non-d-d style)
10:41:02 [school bell rings]
10:41:04 (V. jumps in to joint
jump)
(A. , a turner, yells)
(S. gets angry,
starts again. )
(S. does required
motions)
"Hey come on! "
"Quarter pound-
er, french fries,
ice coke, milk
shake, foot"
(Sound of bell,
screams)
"No, don't
jump in. "
"Quarter pound-
er, french fries
ice coke, milk
shake, turn
quarter
pounder,
french fries
ice coke, milk
shake, criss"
10:41:17 (V. jumps in;
they miss.
S. gets angry.
R. tries to
collect the rope)
There were several variations from the typical game here, reminding
us that no game really is typical. The text itself was varied and began with
"Quarter pounder, french fries," creating an even syncopation of the usual
rhyme, making it slightly easier for this younger player. The format itself was
different as a single rope, not a double rope, was being used. The style was
different, as both before and after the double dutch style was being jumped
a second player attempted to do joint jumping. And the intensity of the game
itself was shaped by the honking of the bell.
games are a quite "different" experience from everyday life, being where one
can safely engage in all kinds of actions that would not be allowed elsewhere;
at the same time it is true that the social interaction, the rule systems, and
the players' temperaments are also continuous with everyday life.
Furthermore, while on the one hand we can say with Bateson (1972)
that the play in a game is "the nip that means the bite but not what the bite
means," on the other hand general success and esteem in play count enor-
mously in childhood success. Not to be able to play is to fail childhood. Play
and games are not separate from life but are interwoven within it in mul-
tiple ways, which are now beginning to be approached by workers such as
Beresin, Hughes, and Goodwin. What may be of ironical interest is the pos-
sible coincidence between a typical male researcher's focus upon the actions
in the games that men play (discontinuity) and female researchers' interest
in the etiquette by which the games women play are sustained (continuity).
In female researchers it is as if the game might be an incident in a prolonged
conversation, whereas in the studies of males it is as if a conversation may
be an interruption of an ongoing gaming activity. It has taken the largely
female investigators mentioned here to bring these differences to light
(Mechling 1985).
For general reviews of prior research and thought on games we can
recommend Avedon and Sutton-Smith (1971), Caillois (1961), Goffman
(1961b), Huizinga (1950), Jones and Hawes (1972), and Sutton-Smith
(1972).
GIRLS
Play and games have throughout Western history been largely the preserve
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? ? of men and boys. The variety of games available to boys yesterday and of toys
today far exceeds in complexity and range those available to girls. Some writers
have even suggested that recreation has simply not been central to the life of
women and girls in Western society (Wimbush and Talbot 1988). Others
have argued that the play of women and girls is much less obvious because
it tends to be verbal and private rather than physical and public (Schwartz-
man 1978). This would parallel cross-cultural sex differences in the display
of humor, where men more generally have access to public and women to
private forms of such expression (Apte 1985). The historical sex-role shift
within children's folklore, however, is that although the nineteenth century
might show more folk gaming activity by boys, the contrary would be the
case today. With their greater access to sports organizations, the playground
play of boys has become increasingly homogenized throughout the century
and increasingly under the sway of modern adult interests in coaching and
sports. The relative neglect of girls, particularly girls in lower socioeconomic
orders and minority races, has left them as the legatee of children's folklore.
Thus jump rope, hopscotch, and jacks continue to flourish with girls, while
marbles, momley peg, and prisoner's base are seldom seen in boys' folkplay
any longer. When girls' games are contrasted with those of boys (team sports)
their games appear to be much less complex, less active, less intrusive, more
confined, less competitive (Sutton-Smith 1979b). Some have written that, as
a result, girls may not develop the large group collaborative and competi-
tive skills that are essential to their success in modern organizations (Lever
1976). The papers by Zumwalt and particularly those by Beresin and Hughes
raise questions about that line of interpretation. The complexity of the girls'
game organization is a complexity in the meta levels of the play. Several so-
cial functions are being accomplished at the same time. It is as if the girls
are using the game to reaffirm their small group ties and to maintain their
collaborative networks in the midst of competitive activity. They do play the
game and abide by its rules, and yet they are also "gaming" the game in terms
of their own social rules of nice versus nasty, and further interpenetrating
these rules with the preexisting coalitions to preserve their favorites. There
is a subtlety here that is ignored in most attempts to compare the role of
games in the lives of boys and girls, men and women. Lever's notion (1976)
that girls break up their games in the presence of argumentation, whereas
boys go on arguing with each other until they finally resume the game again
is countered by this evidence of girls' persisting collaboration by Hughes and
collateral evidence from Goodwin and Von Glascoe (1980). Given Gilligan's
(1982) position of women having a "different voice," a concern, as much
with collaboration as competition, there is evidence here of just that con-
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? ? cern in the method of play. Still, we need to have care here. Hughes's girls
were studied in a Quaker school that had its own particular ethos of coop-
eration, exercised, one presumes, more coercively than in most places. It
could be that some of the differences now appearing between the findings
about girls by Hughes and Goodwin and those of Lever might be due to the
location of the study and the relative familiarity of the girls with each other.
Still, the general fear that girls are underprivileged in their school playground
life continues and it is increasingly suggested that this has a lot to do with
the way in which the rough and tumbling boys dominate the playground
space in a physical way, thus disadvantaging the girls (Thorne 1993).
METHODS
Again in the Beresin and the Hughes studies we have quite intensive inves-
tigations of one particular focus. These studies and those of the prior sec-
tion contrast methodologically with the questionnaire and interview tech-
niques carried out with large numbers of students, more typical in earlier
work in children's folklore. Hughes gives some indications of the step-by-
step process by which she proceeded from observations to interviews. In these
kinds of exploratory studies the investigator cannot know beforehand just
what is to be studied, and must remain open to all kinds of possibilities if
the ultimate outcome is to be of any potential worth. Going beyond Hughes's
assertion that the "gaming of the game is as important as the game," Beresin
suggests that in a variety of ways the larger community also affects what
occurs in the game (for example, commercials, school recess rules). Beresin's
use of video and audio recording reveals a host of contingencies beyond the
text that are relevant to the life of the game in an urban elementary-school
playground. In short, Beresin's study demonstrates the intricate ways in
which a game functions in the context of playground space and the players'
age, gender, and ethnic grouping, and how the commercial world and the
school's rules enter from the outside, thus having their own influence on what
goes on. Once again games are not so separate from life as has often been
suggested.
What is remarkable about Fine's overview is first his enunciation of
a series of principles of ethical procedure (informed consent, credit to in-
formants, lack of deception, lack of harm to subjects) and then his pursuit
of examples, many of which some readers will find controversial. With an
admirable openness Fine details his own ad hoc responses on a number of
difficult questions, and we are left with a clear impression that when one is
attempting to gather the often arcane and antithetical lore of children, the
phenomena of racism, obscenity, cruelty, gifts, and gender can arise and leave
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? ? the researchers in a highly ambiguous position between wanting to uphold
public morality and retaining the confidence of their informants. Not every-
one will agree with the "solutions" that Fine adopts here, but we can ap-
plaud his courage in telling us about them, and we can realize that these are
very real problems because children's folklore is often about culturally an-
tithetical matters. Subject matter that might be incidental to orthodox so-
cialization research can be central to children's folklore and cause ethical
problems perhaps beyond neat solution.
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? ?
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? ? 4 DOUBLE DUTCH
AND DOUBLE CAMERAS
STUDYING THE TRANSMISSION OF CULTURE
IN AN URBAN SCHOOL YARD
Ann Richman Beresin
It can be said that within the children's game lies an entire cosmos. For Jean
Piaget, the study of marbles uncovered the wrestlings of the moral judgments
of the child. For Brian Sutton-Smith, the flexibility of children's games re-
vealed play itself as a process of invention and reversal. For John McDowell,
the riddle texts unfolded an array of themes reflecting that of the children's
lives as a whole. (Piaget 1965; Sutton-Smith 1976b; McDowell 1979). This
paper will examine the complex world of double dutch jump rope as prac-
ticed and performed by third- through fifth-grade girls in an urban, public,
working-class, racially integrated elementary school yard in Pennsylvania.
It will be argued here that the study of the game reveals complex, overlap-
ping cultural worlds, and that if we can attune our eyes to the game beyond
the basic game text, that the potential meaning of such study goes beyond
the collection of interesting rhymes.
Unlike the classic studies of jump-rope rhymes which have privileged
the texts of the rhymes over their actions (Abrahams 1969; Butler 1989;
Delamar 1983; Gomme 1894; Newell 1883), in this paper I seek to explore
the interaction around the game in addition to its texts, and to examine its
relationship to the specific context of the urban school yard. I suggest not
only that the school yard shapes the game-and it is indeed inseparable from
it-but that the privileging of game texts by collectors of children's folklore
has been directly related to the available methodologies for folk-game study.
Rhymes and songs were written down by observers of children, and these
rhymes were then compared with older rhymes and rhymes from different
regions in order to examine cultural uniqueness and distribution. It was not
until recently that the invention of the audio tape recorder enabled the stu-
dent of games to capture verbal nuances, cadence, and rhythm, thus allow-
ing for the preservation of detail beyond the mere text.
Although it is hard to imagine folk song collectors today not using a
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? ? tape recorder to capture the details of song, the use of visual media in game
study is virtually untapped. Like dance ethnography, the study of folk games
could greatly benefit from the preservation of actual game performances on
film or videotape, in order to examine the game in its rapid-fire detail, and
then, perhaps most significantly, to replay the game for the participants to
get their expert views.
Prior to the use of audio and video equipment, students of children's
folklore made use of historical documentation and oral history to extract
meaning from rhymes and games. The Opies' extensive use of written docu-
mentation and Sutton-Smith's vast collection of oral history around folk
games have emphasized the shifting temporal context of the games (Opie
and Opie 1959, 1969; Sutton-Smith 1981a). Although collections from
Gomme to the Opies have included musical notation in singing games, the
jump-rope literature has, to this day, typically emphasized the poetic meter,
and done so sparingly, leaving the impression that jumping rope was some-
thing one does perhaps sitting down with one's mouth (Butler 1989). The
first in-depth interactionist study of the game of jump rope is Goodwin's
1985 article "The Serious Side of Jump Rope: Conversation Practices and
Social Organization in the Frame of Play," which, by using audiotaped tran-
scripts of talk around the games, allowed for the capturing of variation in
actual rope games as they were performed in the streets of Philadelphia. Al-
though still emphasizing the verbal interaction around the game and imply-
ing that the game of rhythmic foot work, known as jump rope, was prima-
rily a verbal art, this provided a step into the study of the game as more than
fixed text. Goodwin's study demonstrated that the game was a framework,
as Bateson and also Goffman have suggested, for other kinds of dramas
(Bateson 1972; Goffman 1959, 1974). For more on the significance of the
inclusion of the larger social context and folk interaction, see Bauman 1982;
Briggs 1988; and Kendon 1990.
The majority of the folk-game literature can be said to be either a mi-
cro or a macro survey, leaving us with often uncomparable details, as
Schwartzman has noted, or acontextual lists of separate events, as is popu-
lar in the general books on American children's folklore (Bronner 1988;
Knapp and Knapp 1976; Schwartzman 1978). For years the historical com-
parative methodology when used in combination with fieldwork provided
the only way to merge the two perspectives. But, given our relative access
to the technology of wide-angle and close-up footage, this is no longer the
case. Rivka Eifermann's massive study of Israeli Arab and Jewish children's
games serves as perhaps the closest prevideographic model of combined
micro and macro study; she utilized hundreds of simultaneous observers
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? ? within the same play area. (Eifermann 1971, 1979). In this manner
Eifermann was able to amass a wealth of detail in survey form and to com-
pare children of different social classes, locales, and ethnicities. Although the
published versions of her study do not illuminate the important details of
the folk games within its survey, it stands as a marker in the careful exami-
nation of the meaning of children's games in the larger culture.
THE USE OF FILM AND VIDEO
Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead pioneered the use of film in Learning
to Dance in Bali, as they captured the nonverbal stylistics of a cross-cultural
dance lesson. Reels of unedited film recorded the instruction of cultural
forms. Film documentary, which by definition is an edited process of graphic
storytelling, has its own fascinating history, but what is relevant here is not
the use of film and video as storyteller, but rather as presenter of art forms.
Helen Schwartzman's encyclopedic text Transformations: The Anthro-
pology of Children's Play includes in its final pages a listing of ethnographic
films, ranging from Bateson's own 1954 film of river otters at play to Bess
Lomax Hawes and Robert Eberlein's Pizza Pizza Daddyo in 1969, a film
about a special performance of favorite African American singing games. It
is in these films that the details and nuances of the games emerge, and the
texts can be placed in perspective, as verbal expressions of bodily forms.
What is being proposed in this paper is the use of film or video as
witnessing or documentation, so that when a game is described in transcrip-
tion or in actual videographic presentation we can see the phenonemon
being discussed. Unfortunately, this chapter is itself limited to the paper
medium, but with careful description of a few minutes of actual footage,
it is hoped that the reader will begin to see and hear details of the game.
As microethnographers Adam Kendon and Frederick Erickson advocate,
through the use of such documentation we can begin to be more consistent
about our study of social phenomenon, in this case the cultural transmis-
sion of folkgames, and build upon a collection of real cases involving real
human beings (Kendon 1979; Erickson and Wilson 1982). We have the
possibility of checking them, and rechecking them, long after the fieldwork
is over, in slow motion and in fast forward, with sound on and sound
off, to see things not possible in the quick blur of the moment. And we have
the possibility of the local experts sharing their specific insights on their
own folk process, well after the moment of concentration is past. The very
field of children's folklore expands before us, and it has the potential to
become the study of children's cultures and folklife, in all its richness and
complexity.
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? ? DOUBLE CAMERAS
When this author set out to study the games and rituals of one multiethnic
working-class school yard in 1991, it became clear that one pair of eyes
would not be sufficient to capture the details or the larger boundaries of
school-yard interaction. In the summer months, the principal of the Mill
School was approached for general permission to spend time at the daily fif-
teen-minute recess periods, and eventually to use audio and video record-
ers. Permission was granted, as no individuals were being targeted in the
study, and student anonymity was assured. General information letters were
sent in the fall to one class in each of the third, fourth, and fifth grades on
which the fieldwork was based. In mid-fall, a stationary videocamera was
placed in a second-floor window facing the school yard, and set on a wide
angle. This was done to capture the basic traffic zones and play spaces, and
as an aid in the locating of field observations within the larger picture. The
principal was supportive and accepted such a plan, as the individual faces
were obscured, and he, too, was curious to learn what kinds of interaction
were occurring. Recess had been canceled by his predecessor out of fear of
school-yard violence, and the status of recess time was uncertain. Such docu-
mentation, to be shared with him and his staff at the end of the year in re-
port form, was of interest and had policy implications.
On the first day of school, daily nonparticipant observation fieldnotes
were written, and it was not until rapport was firmly established with the chil-
dren and staff that audiotaping commenced. From January to May, daily
audiotapes were made, overtly, with many texts collected, rules explained,
interactions noted, and nonverbal information described. It was not until May
that the researcher felt ready to ask the children if a mobile video camera could
be set up on the school yard to record their games directly. A deep rapport had
developed by that time, and their response was universally positive. They were
quite excited, as it had been our agreement that they could see themselves on
video later in the month. At that time, they were to tell me what they thought
about the games they played. Small group interviews with the three classes
under study had been conducted since the beginning of the year, so this would
be another round of interviewing, also considered a pleasant task.
In sum, the methodology included ongoing small group interviews,
daily fieldwork, gradual inclusion of audio recording, seasonal wide-angled
videotaping from the second-floor window, eventual close-up or micro-video
footage, and then the presentation of samples of the footage to the partici-
pants. A total of thirty-three videotapes were recorded, covering twenty-seven
days of recess. Nineteen tapes of wide-angled footage were made, and four-
teen tapes of close-up micro footage were made. Fifty-one days of live au-
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? ? diotape were also recorded.
One hundred and four third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade boys and girls
were observed, audiotaped, and videotaped during recess. Forty-seven chil-
dren served as native experts and provided their own commentary as they
watched themselves at play on videotape. Occasionally younger and older
children were included in the taping process, if they were part of a game being
studied and played by the core participants.
Although not the first study to utilize videotaped games of children
in this manner, this study is among few to share the footage with its partici-
pants in this age group (see also Sutton-Smith and Magee's "Reversible Child-
hood" [1989a], on the use of reflexive video ethnography with young chil-
dren). Although this is not the first study to examine school-yard games and
the transmission of culture in one place (See Parrott 1972; Sluckin 1981; Hart
1993), it is unique in its deliberate emphasis on a public, multiethnic school.
Studies of urban play, such as Dargan's and Zeitlin's extensive photo essay
City Play (1990), capture bits of the cultural crossover visible in urban street
games, but in the following transcriptions we can see it emerge in the school-
yard games themselves. Such cultural crossover is significant in the light of
the emphasis on school desegregation so important to the American public-
school system, and in the light of the potential elimination of recess as school
policy (Sutton-Smith 1990b).
Several games were studied in this larger exploration of the folklore
of the 1991-92 Mill School yard, including the games of the third- through
fifth-grade boys. This paper, however, will serve as a window to the specific
game worlds of the double dutch players.
(For a complete view of the larger
study, which includes handball, folk basketball, hopscotch, step dancing, and
play fighting, see Beresin 1993. ) Double dutch was perhaps the chief peer-led
activity for African American girls at the Mill School, and provided a perfor-
mance focus for a mobile audience of both girls and boys in the school yard.
DOUBLE DUTCH
A fast-paced, polyrhythmic jump-rope style, double dutch utilizes two ropes,
typically turned inwards, egg beater fashion, by two girls who have "the
ends," while a single jumper executes specific steps to a specific song or
chant. It is almost exclusively an African American girls' tradition in urban
Pennsylvania, and has been virtually ignored in the jump-rope literature.
There has been so little written on double dutch in the folklore literature,
and in the collections of African American folklore, that it could even have
been said to be skipped over.
Singing game and street game collections like those of the Opies have
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? ? described larger game traditions but excluded rope singing. American
children's folklore, as in the works of Bronner and Knapp and Knapp, have
homogenized the ethnicity of their young experts and have given us only
single rope traditions; the African American collections of general folklore
have rarely even mentioned the lore of young girls (Kochman 1972; Jack-
son 1967; Whitten and Szwed 1982). With the exception of Jones's and
Hawes's Step It Down (1972) and Black Girls at Play (1975) by Bauman,
Eckhardt, and Brady, the games of African American girls have been ren-
dered practically invisible, and these collections have examined only the step-
ping and clapping forms. Abrahams's Jump-Rope Rhymes: A Dictionary
(1969), a text called "the most thorough recent compilation of these (jump
rope) rhymes for English-speaking children" (Schwartzman 1978, 36), lists
a handful of articles relevant to double dutch, but, with the exception of his
own useful 1963 article, all deal with it only in passing.
Even when only a single rope was available-it was typically one
brought by a child from home-it was utilized in the style and steps of double
dutch. Two girls hold the ends and turn for the girl who is jumping, and
often it is expected that one must turn for someone before getting the chance
to jump. Occasionally the "double Irish" or "double orange" style of rope
turning was observed; that is the term for the turning of the ropes outward,
egg beater style. This method was considered more difficult and sometimes
occurred by accident when the turners changed direction. More typically,
there would be two turners rapidly turning the rope inward, left, right, left,
right, swaying rhythmically to the slapping beat as the rope brushed the
ground. The jumper would dance the steps associated with the song or
rhyme, and a group of singers, ranging from the turners to nonparticipants
to would-be participants, would dance a minimal version of the game in
place. This was considered both a fun thing to do while you await your turn,
as well as a chance to practice the sequence.
The game was competitive, with jumpers vying to be the one who
could not only stay in the ropes the longest but could progress the furthest
in the particular rhyme. Someone would shout "She got foot" or "She got
turn. " And one would often hear the cry of "Saved! " or "Saved by one! "
meaning that the person shouting had progressed farther than the jumper
who had just tripped on the turning rope. Steps were parodied, styles imi-
tated, and occasionally corrected in order to ensure that the jumper did the
job right. Turners could be accused of turning too rapidly, or of intention-
ally "flicking" the rope to make it more difficult, and high-status
jumpers,usually the more skilled fifth and sixth graders, claimed first jumps,
while the younger, less experienced players would be the turners. The chance
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? ? to jump first, and if one was skilled, stay in the spotlight, was often called
long before the game started, in the hallway, in the classroom, or at the end
of one round for the round the next recess.
Double Dutch Style
Count 2 turns
left hand
clockwise
Count 1 turn
right hand
clockwise
ouble Dutch Style Count 2 turns
right hand
clockwise
Count 1 turn
left hand
clockwise
Immigrant Chinese and Haitian girls, representing a small minority
of this officially racially desegregated school, also occasionally did individual,
single jump rope. Two Chinese girls sometimes jumped in two parallel ropes
and, in their own ropes, looped circles around each other, sort of a couple
dance while jumping. The Haitian girls sometimes jumped with a second girl
in the same small rope, either face to face or back to front. Regardless of
form or ethnicity, jump rope was almost always competitive, either by en-
durance, elaborateness of steps, or frequency of turns.
The European American girls would often be observers of the double
dutch games, and on only rare occasions do individual ropes themselves.
When they did so they would compete to see which of them could jump the
most times. They would not sing or chant, just count the number of con-
tinuous jumping steps. One girl was up to 230 and still jumping. Unlike the
African American girls, who stayed in one place or rotated their positions
slightly to be out of the bright sun, or the immigrant girls, who stayed in
one place with their individual ropes, the European American girls did a
running jump rope step and would, one at a time, run around the entire yard
counting. Like their hand-clap games, which were also done to numbers or
counting, the European American girls had clearly distilled their games and
no longer had an active jump-rope singing tradition at this school. The sing-
ing jump rope game, and for that matter the singing hand-clapping game,
had become predominantly an African American tradition.
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? ? Many double dutch songs included the same sequence of steps or
commands: foot, bounce, hop, turn, criss (crossing), clap, with "foot" or
"footin" being the basic right, left, right, left running step over the quickly
turning ropes. "Bounce" involved a lighter touch of the foot while doing the
running step; "hop" a one-footed airborne step. "Turning" and "crissing"
involved the most skill and only the most advanced jumpers were able to
do those steps. Taisha, a particularly graceful fifth grader, was known to add
turns to all of her steps, in every sequence, just for the challenge of it.
THEMES OF THE JUMP-ROPE TEXTS
Much like the world of themes found in the children's riddling studied by
John McDowell (1979), the recorded texts of the rope games were spheres
of the African American girls' culture. There were "1,2,3 Halleluya" and
"Hey, D. J. , let's sing that song," and "Boom Boom Tangle"-a rhyme about
rap artists. Plus there were "All in Together," "Hey Consolation, Where Have
You Been," "Girlscout, Girlscout, Do Your Duty," "Juice Juice, Let's Knock
Some Boots," "D-I-S-H Choice, Do Your Footsies," "Challenge, Challenge
1,2,3," and "Kitty Cat Come, Gonna Be on Time, Cause the School Bell
Rings at A Quarter to Nine. " But these themes, the ones of religion, region,
pop music, of group entry and exit, schooling, and even of plain step dis-
play in menu form, were out-shouted by "Big Mac," a commercial for the
McDonald's Corporation.
As Cheyna, a fourth-grade African American girl had said, "Want to
hear my favorite? " (Snap fingers on down beat. Accented syllables are capi-
talized)
Big MAC, Fillet FISH, Quarter POUNDer, French FRIES, Ice COKE,
Milk SHAKE, Foot
Fillet FISH, Quarter POUNDer, French FRIES, Ice COKE, Milk
SHAKE,
BOUNCE
Fillet FISH, Quarter POUNDer, French FRIES, Ice COKE, Milk
Shake,
HOP
Fillet FISH, Quarter POUNDer, French FRIES, Ice COKE, Milk
Shake,
TURN
Fillet FISH, Quarter POUNDer, French FRIES, Ice COKE, Milk
Shake,
CRISS
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? ? Big Mac appeared in twenty-three out of fifty-six live unrequested
recordings of double dutch chants, closely followed by a follow-the-leader
game, "Challenge Challenge, One, Two, Three. " This contrasted with the
rest of the active repetoire, of which two or three versions were recorded of
each. First observed in mid-October, "Big Mac," and its occasional partner
"Challenge Challenge," were the only chants jumped at recess until Febru-
ary. Most of the other rhymes did not appear at all until April. "Big Mac"
represented forty percent of all the songs sung for double dutch, with "Chal-
lenge Challenge" representing thirty percent. The remainder totaled three to
six percent, tallying another thirty percent. "Big Mac" was therefore not only
the first jump-rope rhyme to appear in the school yard and not only the most
frequently jumped, but, as we will see, also the one used for learning how
to play the game of double dutch itself.
Collectors of jump-rope games have typically emphasized the antiq-
uity of the games and rhymes, in part because of the archive methodology
available, as discussed, and in part because of the inherent romance in find-
ing things old. Paradoxically, the most significant rhyme for the players of
this game was the newest one, invented by the McDonald's Corporation as
a menu chant. Again and again the local jump-rope experts-the third-,
fourth-, and fifth-grade girls-claimed that the "Big Mac" rhyme was com-
mercial and approximately ten years old, but that the game was learned from
their mothers and sisters. The dating of this particular chant was confirmed
by the national public-relations office of the McDonald's Corporation, which
indicated that the menu chants are periodically placed in local papers as part
of a contest. It is significant that McDonald's has been a national sponsor
of double dutch competitions since the late 1970s and that the only other
long commercial text that emerged was in an interview setting: This was
"R-E-E-B-O-K do your footsies the Reebok way. " Reebok is also a national
sponsor of double dutch competitions.
All of the new attempts at double dutch recorded in the school yard
were done to the "Big Mac" rhyme. When Isha, a fifth-grade expert jumper,
was asked what was the easiest rhyme, she answered, "Challenge Challenge,"
because "you just had to imitate what was done before you. " When asked
why the younger girls and the ones new to double dutch started with "Big
Mac," she answered, "Because they don't have nothing else. " Commercial
culture is, for the kids of the school yard, the most basic of common culture.
The commercial is easily learned: It's short, it's quick, and it's "fun
in the mouth. " Children who are bused in from all sections of the city know
it, and children from all economic levels have access to it. It may have been
introduced by the corporate-sponsored leagues and ad campaigns and may
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? ? be a future classic example of the "invention of tradition" (Hobsbawm and
Ranger 1983), but it would not have continued if it did not serve some func-
tion. Adam Kendon, in his book Conducting Interaction (1990), talks about
"movement coordination in social interaction" and the use of ritual to fa-
cilitate synchrony. The sound bytes of "Big Mac" may well serve to speed
up the ritualization of entry into the game in a recess period that allows only
fifteen minutes for play in this city.
In an environment where raw materials are inaccessible and consis-
tently removed from the play time, it appears that the African American
children from poorer neighborhoods, rich with an oral tradition, are teach-
ing non-African Americans what can be done, as Isha says, "when you don't
have nothing else. " This is especially true of the play of girls, which is par-
ticularly repressed in the school yard by the institution of school itself. Here
it is commercial culture that is the common denominator, both within an
ethnic tradition and across ethnic traditions.
One of the most relevant texts on this topic is Newell's 1883 book
Games and Songs of American Children. His essays "The Inventiveness of
Children" and "The Conservatism of Children" address the dynamics in-
herent in play study, the idea of play as being both traditional and transi-
tional, and the idea that children reconstruct and reinvent performances rel-
evant to their complex lives. The key word is relevant. Valuable things are
reused and recycled and retold. And as we will see, the repetition of the com-
mercial rhyme may be fixed, but the variation and creativity in the game can
be found in the foot work. In a sense, the folklorist begins with the text, but
cannot stop there.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPTIONS OF DOUBLE DUTCH
The following are transcriptions of actual footage of the "Big Mac" game,
filmed on two days in the spring of 1992. The clips are unique in that they
capture two incidences of non-African American girls participating in the
African American tradition of rope jumping. The first example is the first
time R. , a European American third grader, actually got a chance to jump,
although she had been a turner of single rope African American games pre-
viously. The second example is an overt lesson in the art of double dutch
itself, as given by African American girls to an immigrant girl from Hong
Kong, and also to a Polish American girl.
The transcriptions show a basic diagram of the rope, and list a run-
ning time imprinted on the videotape in hours, minutes, and seconds. In this
manner the transcript reflects specific frames of videotape and can be cross-
referenced by time. The cross referencing of tapes by time turned out to be
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? ? rather significant and is a topic to which the concluding pages will be devoted.
The action is described in the middle column, and the audible con-
versation and game text is listed in the right-hand column. Following the
principle, but not the style, of Ray Birdwhistell's kinesics, and Adam
Kendon's studies of nonverbal communication, it was considered important
to at least describe the basic body motion as a line of communication sepa-
rate from the speech (Birdwhistell 1970; Kendon 1981). Actual kinesic tran-
scriptions, from Birdwhistell to Laban, have proved too complex for most
readers and, in a sense, give us more detail than is necessary for this level of
analysis. (For an example of Laban's system of movement notation, see
Hutchinson 1977). The advantage of video ethnography is that the footage
is there to be reanalyzed over time, as more and more detailed levels of analy-
sis become of interest. (For more on the recent attention given to the body
in folklore studies, see Young 1993. )
Example A: The Single Rope Version of "Big Mac"
In the following transcription there is a demonstration of non-double dutch
and double double dutch styles utilizing a single rope. Third- and second-
grade girls Q. , V. , and S. , all African American, and European American girl,
R. , took turns jumping. One to two singers sang as they jumped without
doing any particular steps. A more experienced jumper joined in and the two
jumped at once, facing each other, laughing. The last jumper performed the
"Big Mac" steps and sang all the way from foot to criss, with a stop in the
middle. She was angry when another girl tried to do joint jumping with her.
They jumped past the honking bell, and this episode ended angrily when she
was interrupted by another attempt at joint jumping.
Diagram Time (Action) Voices
10:40:15 (Q. jumps single rope, (no singing)
both feet, not double
dutch style)
10:40:27 (R. gets a turn, jumps,
same way)
10:40:29 (A second African
American girl, V. , jumps
in; they stop)
10:40:30 (R. again jumps)
10:40:36 (Joint jumping of
R. and V. ) and V.
"No, no,no"
Laughter of R.
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? ? 10:40:38
10:40:43
10:40:51
(R. tries again)
(S. begins turn)
(S. sings to herself)
(jumps non-d-d style)
10:41:02 [school bell rings]
10:41:04 (V. jumps in to joint
jump)
(A. , a turner, yells)
(S. gets angry,
starts again. )
(S. does required
motions)
"Hey come on! "
"Quarter pound-
er, french fries,
ice coke, milk
shake, foot"
(Sound of bell,
screams)
"No, don't
jump in. "
"Quarter pound-
er, french fries
ice coke, milk
shake, turn
quarter
pounder,
french fries
ice coke, milk
shake, criss"
10:41:17 (V. jumps in;
they miss.
S. gets angry.
R. tries to
collect the rope)
There were several variations from the typical game here, reminding
us that no game really is typical. The text itself was varied and began with
"Quarter pounder, french fries," creating an even syncopation of the usual
rhyme, making it slightly easier for this younger player. The format itself was
different as a single rope, not a double rope, was being used. The style was
different, as both before and after the double dutch style was being jumped
a second player attempted to do joint jumping. And the intensity of the game
itself was shaped by the honking of the bell.
