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volume 33 
2011

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CFR_11covers.indd   1 10/31/11   8:50:24 AM



Children’s Folklore review

EDitor: ElizabEth tuckEr 
book rEviEw EDitor: li cornfElD

 EDitorial boarD: Jay mEchling, priscilla orD, anD

 simon J. bronnEr

thE chilDrEn’s folklorE rEviEw (ISSN: 0739:5558) is published once a year by the 
Children’s Folklore Section of the American Folklore Society, with support from 
the Dean’s Office of Harpur College at Binghamton University.

Subscription orders should be addressed to Priscilla Ord, 414 High Earl’s Road, 
Westminster, MD 21158. Checks should be made payable to “American Folklore 
Society/CFS.” Current subscription rates are $10.00 for USA addresses and $15.00 
for non-USA addresses. Back issues are available.

chilDrEn’s folklorE rEviEw regularly publishes articles on all aspects on children’s 
traditions: oral, customary, and material culture. In addition CFR will consider 
articles dealing with the use of folklore in children’s literature, children’s folklore 
and education, children’s folklore and popular culture, and similar topics. Articles 
are referreed and are indexed by the MLA and other major bibliographers. CFR 
retains copyright for all articles but gives permission for reprinting with no charge.

Manuscripts submitted for consideration should conform to the author-date 
format of the Chicago Manual of Style (2003). Manuscripts should be submitted as 
Word documents; illustrations should be submitted in “jpeg” or “tif” form with a 
resolution of 300 dpi or higher.

Send manuscripts to Elizabeth Tucker, ltucker@binghamton.edu (Department of 
English, Binghamton University, Binghamton, NY 13902-6000). Books for review 
should go to book review editor Li Cornfeld, licornfeld@gmail.com.

chilDrEn’s folklorE sEction officErs 2010-2011
prEsiDEnt: spEncEr grEEn

past prEsiDEnt: ElizabEth tuckEr

sEcrEtary-trEasurEr: priscilla orD

aEsop committEE chair: kathErinE schramm

opiE committEE chair: rosEmary vohs

Cover photo: Like father, like daughter: hair’s family tapestry. Neal A. Lester with 
daughter Jasmine Z. Lester.

CFR_11covers.indd   2 10/31/11   8:50:25 AM



Children’s Folklo re review

volume 33 
2011

Published by the 

Children’s Folklore seCtion oF the AmeriCAn Folklore soCiety  

with suPPort From the deAn’s oFFiCe oF hArPur College At  

binghAmton university

CFR_2011_R.indb   1 10/31/11   8:57:34 AM



                                        ConTenTs

From the editor                                                       5

nAsCent Folklore: CommuniCAtion And AesthetiCs in inFAnCy

 Katharine r. M. SchraMM  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . 7

FAthers And their AFriCAn AmeriCAn dAughters:  
hAir PieCes CreAting ties thAt bind

 neal a. leSter.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . 27

sidewAlk songs, JumP-roPe rhymes, And ClAP-hAnd gAmes  
oF AFriCAn AmeriCAn Children

 Mona Saloy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35

genetiC bubble wrAP

 Karin PhilliPS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45

FAiling to Fly, but Free FAlling: JumPing As A Form oF Childhood releAse

 PaMela Weintraub . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47

the APProPriAtion oF A CommerCiAl trAdemArk:  
the golliwog As A CulturAl mArker

 robert Macgregor   .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . 51

Co-winner oF The 2011 william wells newell Prize

disAstrous AlternAtives: boy sCout disAster stories And legends  
And imAgining the nAturAl world

 SPencer lincoln green . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67

Children’s Folklore seCtion: 2010 AnnuAl meeting                        77

notes And AnnounCements                                              79

Contributors                                                          81

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From The ediTor

elizAbeth tuCker

As this thirty-third volume of Children’s Folklore Review goes to press, I feel 
excited about the high level of achievement that has resulted in its contents. This 
year we have two winners of the William Wells Newell Prize: Spencer Green, 
author of “Disastrous Alternatives: Boy Scout Disaster Stories and Legends and 
Imagining the Natural World,” and Steve Stanzak, author of “Manipulating Play 
Frames: The Yo Momma Joke Cycle on YouTube.” Both of these outstanding 
essays would have delighted William Wells Newell, who held children’s creativity 
and tradition conservation in such high esteem. Because of space limitations, this 
issue just contains Green’s essay; Stanzak’s will appear in volume 34.

Besides one of the two Newell Prize-winning essays, this volume of Children’s 
Folklore Review contains other extremely interesting essays. Katharine R. M. 
Schramm’s “Nascent Folklore” explores the emerging interdisciplinary field of 
communication and aesthetics in infant behavior; Neal Lester’s “Fathers and Their 
African American Daughters: Hair Pieces Creating Ties That Bind” explicates the 
significance of African American girls’ hair; Mona Lisa Saloy’s “Sidewalk Songs, 
Jump-Rope Rhymes, and Clap-Hand Games of African American Children” 
examines the wealth of children’s folklore among children in New Orleans before 
Hurricane Katrina; and Robert MacGregor’s “The Appropriation of a Commercial 
Trademark: the Golliwog as a Cultural Marker” traces contested representation of 
a cultural symbol in the United Kingdom. I am proud to add that the two short 
essays on dangerous games, Karin Phillips’s “Genetic Bubble Wrap” and Pamela 
Weintraub’s “Failing to Fly but Free Falling: Jumping as a Form of Childhood 
Release,” were written by two outstanding undergraduate students in my 
Children’s Folklore class at Binghamton University last spring.

This fall we can celebrate the acceptance of all back issues of Children’s 
Folklore Review by Indiana University’s Scholar Works Web site. I want to thank 
Jennifer Laherty at Scholar Works for all of her help in making this possible. Now 
scholars of children’s folklore have access to all of our published material.

I want to thank the Dean’s Office at Harpur College of Binghamton University, 
which generously supports Children’s Folklore Review. I am also very grateful 
to Kathy Buchta for her fine work on layout/design and to Sheridan Press for its 
excellent work. 

Li Cornfeld, our new book review editor, is starting to work on reviews for our 
next issue. If you would like to review a book on children’s folklore or a related 
subject, please contact her: licornfeld@gmail.com.

Submissions and comments are always most welcome. Please feel free to 
contact me any time: ltucker@binghamton.edu. Thanks very much for your 
support of our journal.

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7

nasCenT Folklore: CommuniCaTion and aesTheTiCs in inFanCy

kAthArine r  m  sChrAmm 

Whereas just as cultural relativity implies that each human group 
fashions its own forms of human adaptation and expression and 
that each has its wonder and beauty (as well as disasters), so with 
childhood there is an aesthetic for each age, which may be celebrated 
(or cursed) by adults, rather than simply glossed as an inevitably 
inferior step on the way to the ‘wonders’ of adults’ civilization, reason, 
and morality (Sutton-Smith and McMahon 1999, 299),

Newborn infants, though weak and inexperienced, are sentient and 
intending agents (Trevarthen, et al. 1999, 143).

The question of when folklore begins is one which is simultaneously 
philosophical, biological, and psychological. It hinges by implication on what, 
indeed, constitutes folklore. If we assume that folklore is artistic, communicative, 
culturally grounded, and socially actuated, something must come before the more 
recognizable forms of tradition, performance, and identity — a nascent folklore. 
Not only is there interesting material in the prelinguistic, pre-genre, pre-self arena 
of infant behavior that recommends itself to our attention as folklorists of children, 
but we as folklorists can recognize it and comment upon it, using the tools at our 
disposal. We can engage with proto-cultural agents through an interdisciplinary 
approach that does not relinquish our qualitative methods for quantitative ones.

In what follows, I will discuss the subfield of children’s folklore as a gateway 
into discussing the broad issues inherent to folkloristics. Once having established a 
few basic criteria and their quantitative-field counterparts, I will press forward into 
an interdisciplinary exploration that takes on infant interaction in an ethnographic 
context, merging the developmental and folk psychological approaches.

In approaching the concept of nascent folklore, it may be useful to consider it 
as a subset of children’s folklore. Children’s folklore is our window through which 
we study expressive forms shared by children, among children, a protean world 
which often functions counter-intuitively to adult sensibilities (Sutton-Smith 1999, 
6). Its study has come a long way from the thorough collection of text and variant 
and a preoccupation with “survivals” to incorporate theory that takes into account 
what William Wells Newell noted well over a century ago — that children’s 
folklore is both innovative and dynamic, as well as traditional and conservative. 
Children’s folkloristics is concerned not only with the contexts where childlore 
occurs, but also the negotiation of social roles and activity surrounding expressive 
forms (Goodwin 1985), and how children learn, adapt, and create within child-
constructed frameworks of performative competence (Brady 1980, 163). Scholars 
are also cognizant of the fact that lore is not transmitted so much as it is activated, 
opening up the possibility of alteration and permutation (McDowell 1999, 61). 
Unlike folklorists who work with adults, folklorists of children are much more 

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nAsCent Folklore sChrAmm

8

likely to be aware of developmental considerations influencing what they observe, 
as those often are telling characteristics in setting childlore apart in both form and 
function (Fine 1980, 172). 

An example of these developmental considerations is McGonnagill’s 1993 study 
of preschoolers at play. The children she observed did not have a high degree 
of communicative or social sophistication, but she found that the game-playing 
behavior she observed still functioned as a way for them to process and cope with 
their social environment, despite relying entirely upon a fluid approach to their 
play, up to and including the actual goal of the game. McGonnagill called this 
behavior “protolore,” because there were substantial differences when compared 
with approaches to folklore that stressed lore performed within the more clearly 
defined boundaries of aesthetic communication marked by particular conventions 
and style. She compared folklore and protolore to riddles and preriddles, enacted 
by young children whose grasp of the genre was not quite sophisticated or 
solidified enough to be considered mastered (McGonnagill 1993, 41). 

However, children’s folklore or protolore has rarely gone into areas that pre-
linguistic children occupy, namely toddlers before 18 months of age. Talkers are 
more interesting: their experimentation with developing language skills gives 
researchers a ready verbal transcript, and the ease with which cognition and 
cultural competence can be evaluated via the increasing complexity and situational 
use of linguistic forms is undeniable. Infant behavior, on the other hand, has been 
dubiously regarded, save the responses and actions directed from adult caregivers 
to infants.1 What occurs in infancy is complex and lays the groundwork for later 
development. I would not expect folklorists anywhere to deny this, just as they 
would not deny that childlore in its various age-appropriate incarnations contains 
its own complexity and significance whose mastery dovetails into the adult-
recognized world of expressive competence. Yet the study of children’s folklore 
ought not be concerned primarily with where child culture is going, through the 
ramifications of performative competence in the child contributing to adult social 
competencies, but with that which is in the moment, and how it has its own value 
which is insubordinate to adult norms. It short, it recognizes the inherent value 
and function of child expressive forms at each age.

Folklorists tend to gravitate to the expert performers, willing performers who 
have mastered their craft, and who are recognized by their community. These 
may include the most authoritative jump-rope ringleader on the playground, the 
snarkiest teenage dirty-joke teller, or the gaggle of kids who are unafraid to harass a 
fieldworker while the tape is running (Goodwin 1985, Bartlett 1971, and McDowell 
1979, respectively). However, infants do not regularly exist in a community of 
peers, because they are incapable of being left to their own devices for long. The 
context one might imagine as hosting an “infant peer community” might be a day-
care setting, or some arranged opportunity when infants are given the opportunity 
to interact with one another. Yet even here, our adult or even older-child 
conceptions of “peer group” seem inadequate. At times, infants do not even seem 
to be responding directly to one another when they’re observed. Or are they?

Without our easily usable default (admittedly problematized) terms like 
culture, group, and language, infant behavior seems to be a very amorphous 

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sChrAmm  nAsCent Folklore

9

phase. In part, this impression is correct because the forms we enjoy studying 
do not yet exist — what is performative competence for something that is not 
yet performance? However, from another perspective, there is a basic insecurity 
in the way that we approach our informants — namely, that lacking the ability 
to refer to language use as a means to validate our conclusions, we doubt our 
assessments as too adult-centric, or as wishfully inserting the reading of intention 
instead of confirming it. These are perfectly agreeable and acceptable cautions, 
and well worth acknowledging: a teleological angle makes for circular arguments, 
and “just so” stories instead of theory. Another part of this insecurity comes from 
our hesitance to acknowledge infants as actors in their own right, as agents, even 
if they seem to possess an alien form of individuality against our developed sense 
of self. Yet we are creatures that can and do live as a part of a physical world 
wherein body language is read alongside or without spoken language (Cicourel 
1973, 40-41).2 Ascribing intentionality and agency to non-speaking individuals is 
part of all human interpretive communication, yet recognizing infant activity itself 
as part of the range of interpretable human experience clearly requires some sort 
of approach. 

However, what do terms like competence, group, artistic, or communication 
mean in the context of infant interaction? To get at the undergirding elements 
of folklore requires some conception of what folklore itself is. As Oring notes, a 
definition of folklore per se is problematic, as it may be “partial, idiosyncratic, or 
inconsistent” (Oring 1986, 17). However, examining how various scholars have 
approached the problematic definition of folklore yields certain basic commonalities. 

The first is that folklore occurs between and among people. It is discursive, 
interactive, and is a form of communication. This group may be large or small, 
down to a basic binary pair (Dundes 1965). The concept of “group” is fraught 
with ambiguity, and exists on multiple levels and imaginaries. However, it can 
be conceptualized due to shared experience and “bodily patterning” — existing 
in a physical, felt sense of community (Noyes 2003). This sense of community 
(alternatively, communitas as articulated by Victor Turner) hinges on the ability 
to empathize with fellow community members (Kapchan 2003). Empathy 
works to direct communication between members of the group, aiding mutual 
comprehension and sense of identity (Noyes 2003). In seeking out the nascent 
forms of these requirements for folkloric interaction, we will be identifying 
where and if the infant shares the ability to sense others’ motives, if the infant 
can recognize other humans through shared experience, and if the infant can 
communicate interactively with other humans. 

Another basic aspect of folklore lies in its attention to the creative and the 
artistic. Folklore is at some level expressive, and aesthetic expression in turn draws 
in the notion of the repeated, re-creation, tradition, and again, the community 
(Ben-Amos 1971, Glassie 2003, Oring 1986). Creative, artistic, expressive — all of 
these terms are immensely problematic, and must be judged in terms of the culture 
from which they originate. Yet as Pocius points out, regardless of what art might 
be, its expressive potential hinges on the emotional and affective. “Art” comes 
to be considered as a kind of skillful behavior, accomplished between people 
to varying levels of emotionally-affective efficacy (Pocius 2003, 51). In short, the 

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nAsCent Folklore sChrAmm

10

connection between human communication, human skill, and human emotional 
response is inseparable: we will be looking for where infants show the capacity to 
respond and express with emotionally responsive and affective behavior. 

The final basic block in artistic communicative actions is that its performance 
is intentional. The “interpretive frame” within which communication is produced 
and read must be at its heart a reading and evaluation of intention to make sense 
of others’ actions (Hufford 2003). The will to create makes the creation possible 
(Glassie 2003). To see if this aspect of folklore is present in a nascent form, 
we will be looking to see whether infants are capable of reading intention and 
demonstrating intentional behavior. 

However, to seek out what makes the communal, the aesthetic, and the 
intentional feasible during this stage of human development benefits from an 
interdisciplinary stance, through developmental psychology, language socialization, 
and evolutionary biology. Developmental psychology takes as a starting point the 
idea of normative stages through which all humans pass on their way to adulthood. 
It is concerned not only with the development of infant cognition, but also what 
may be considered healthy development in terms of interaction and socialization 
through measurable tests of competence (Sameroff and Cavanaugh 1979, 386).3 

Mediating between developmental psychology and more qualitative research 
is the study of language socialization, which asserts that all human behavior is 
learned interactionally, and that by gradual mastery of interactive forms, children 
become increasingly competent members of their social and cultural contexts 
(Ochs 1986, 2). Children socialize adults, just as adults socialize children, and once 
children are capable enough to work tacitly (if not reflexively) with interactional 
routines, they also socialize one another (Corsaro 1992).4 

However, if infants are born with these socializing abilities, it may also imply a 
biological, evolutionary imperative inherent in infant interaction with adults. The 
evolutionary approach has become very trendy within the past decade. In its most 
fascinating moments, it makes a case for artistic activity as not merely part of what 
“matters” for our mental wellbeing, but that at a basic level it is a trait selected for 
over millennia for human survival (Dissanayake 2000, 2001).5 

The three fields work well in tandem for the same reasons that ethnographers 
learn about a culture in order to interpret it. Developmental psychology points out 
what we can reasonably expect from our infant interlocutors, as well as gives us signs 
to look for during our ethnographic exploration. Language socialization provides 
us with a successful model to follow in terms of merging lab analysis with cultural 
manifestation. The evolutionary approach allows us the possibility that specific 
observations at the nascent level may indeed be generalizable across cultures. 

Why “Nascent Folklore”?

If developmental psychologists, language sociologists, and evolutionary biologists 
are doing so much good work on infant behavior already, why should folklorists 
take it as their interest? As cited in the introductory quote to this article, Felicia 
McMahon and Brian Sutton-Smith make clear that for folklorists of children, 
each age has potential. I read this as a challenge — shortly after the child exits 

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sChrAmm  nAsCent Folklore

11

the womb, she is literally severed from the mother to become her own separate 
physical entity that must rely on communication to survive in a cultural context 
that will shape her and be shaped by her. I noted above that infant behavior 
does not always conform to our assumptions about how interaction is supposed 
to work. For cultural relativism to function for infant behavior, we have to 
simultaneously acknowledge infants as cultural agents, and as agents that may 
not yet have internalized cultural practice. This idea is particularly problematic 
when we consider the most loaded assumption of agency — that the agent be 
intentionally setting out to act upon her environment. 

This is the heart of nascent folklore — the abilities, skills, and biologically 
adaptive mental machinery that infants possess as the smallest, most proto-
cultural, and most underrepresented of human agents. The mastery of foundational 
communicative abilities is imperative for the development of later expressive 
forms, yet as an early form of communicative action embedded in shared human 
experience, these abilities can be shown to be themselves a form of folklore. 

To explore what these foundational abilities mean in the context of 
ethnographic infant observation, I was fortunate to enjoy the cooperation of 
mothers and staff in visually recording infant interaction at several parent-baby 
playtimes during the spring of 2007. The playtime took place in a comfortable, 
living-room-like environment in the building of the hosting organization, which 
provides valuable natural-birth and breastfeeding resources, as well as pre- and 
post-natal counseling and other health-related activities particularly geared towards 
new and expecting mothers. During the same time period, I also took video 
footage of my then-baby daughter in our home. In the first situation, infants were 
able to interact with one another as well as with their mothers, though I stayed 
off to the side. While the mothers occasionally conversed with me, I spent no 
time deliberately interacting with the infants. In the second, staying out of direct 
interaction with my daughter was impossible, even with her father trying to 
engage her, due to her curiosity with the video camera.

In what follows, I will engage with the three major, interwoven areas common 
to approaches to folklore — the communal, the aesthetic, and the intentional — 
and argue that the infant abilities of interactive imitation, innovation, and intention 
are where these later orientations find their first expression.

Interactive Imitation 

The first area of nascent folklore is that of interactive imitation. Imitation in infancy 
takes place within an explicitly social framework in which develop forms of social 
cognition, group identity, and aesthetic capacity. 

For present purposes, imitation is, most simply, the reproduction (or attempted 
reproduction) of some act. At its most easily detectable, imitation can resemble 
identical stimulus and response, but its complexity can encompass simultaneous 
movement, affect, sound, timing, and even intention (Trevarthen et al. 1999, 
140-142) Neonate imitation between adult and infant has received substantial 
experimental attention. Minutes after birth, a newborn can imitate simple 
movement, such as tongue protrusion, and by six weeks of age, infants can 

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nAsCent Folklore sChrAmm

12

repeat imitated actions over a day’s delay, indicating some memory of the action 
(Meltzoff and Moore 2001, 176). Furthermore, they can actively influence the flow, 
type, and manner of communication with caregivers by their own positive and 
negative reactions (Dissanayake 2001, 85-86). By eight weeks of age, infants’ sense 
of timing is good enough to know whether or not a play partner is responding 
contingently (Dissanayake 2001, 86). By three months of age, an infant can repeat 
behavior in order to elicit more of the same behavior from her partner, and by 
seven months, the infant repeats behavior to bring about a desirable result from an 
adult (Bretherton, et al. 1981, 334–5). 

The ability to imitate and the awareness of being imitated give infants an 
identity by analogy which serves as a psychological basis for social cognition, not 
its eventual outcome: 

Because human acts are seen in others and performed by the self, the 
infant can represent the other as ‘like me’: I can act like the other and 
reciprocally the other acts like me. Persons are special entities, the 
only entities in the world with whom I can share behavioral states. 
The cross-modal knowledge of what it feels like to perform observed acts 
provides a privileged access to people not afforded by things. This sets 
the child down the pathway of ascribing psychological properties to 
people. (Meltzoff and Brooks 2001, 174, emphasis in original)

In other words, imitation may not only be the sincerest form of flattery, but the 
most direct avenue into forming conceptual as well as lived community. Imitation 
goes hand in hand with what appears to be innate human empathy (Field 2007, 
94; Eisenberg 1992, 8-10). Imitation provides a process by which motives are 
interactively engaged, being simultaneously read and responded to, and innate 
abilities develop into intentional ones (Trevarthen et al 1999,142). Beyond the 
establishing of community and social cognition, infants’ intersubjective reading of 
motivation and early development of the intricacies of timing and signal may be 
responsible for the development of pretense, as they discover that the framework 
can be manipulated between the contingent response and the non-contingent 
response. With the skill in intersubjective comparison and contrast grows an 
increasing awareness of and competence in directing the metacommunicative 
signaling of play.6 

Where to Find Interactive Imitation

To draw out the shared, the aesthetic, and the communicative as one might hope 
to find in a folkloristic analysis, I am looking for consistencies, repetition and 
attempted repetition, what is collectively done, and how knowledge (if any) is 
transmitted, as well as looking out for metacommunicative markers of both play 
and social engagement (Meckley 1994, 5). This includes but is not limited to 
established signs of social interest from developmental literature, such as sustained 
gaze, smiling, outcry, eye contact, directed movement, as well as lack of interest 
denoted by averted gaze. 

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sChrAmm  nAsCent Folklore

13

The description that follows is excerpted from my video footage of the local 
parent-baby playtime described above, and lasts approximately fifty seconds. The 
excerpt features two infants of eight months and four months placed face-down, 
roughly two feet apart and facing one another on separate blankets. Both were at 
varying levels apparent strength and balance in maintaining a position in which 
they could push up with their arms on the floor to look around. Their mothers sat 
to their infants’ sides within arm’s reach, frequently speaking on the infants’ behalf, 
interrupting their own casual conversation. 

However, in looking solely at the movements of the infants and their non-
verbal interaction, the two baby girls showed immediate interest in one another 
through sustained gaze and eye contact, breaking it only from time to time to look 
at a toy or a caregiver. These breaks in attention given to other things such as 
toys, blankets, or mothers lasted from one to three seconds. However, their shared 
attentive gazes lasted between fifteen and twenty-seven seconds, making the 
asides comparatively miniscule. Neither infant could creep or crawl effectively yet, 
so they stayed where they had been placed. 

In the first ten seconds of the clip, the younger infant, who demonstrated 
generally a much less physically stable ability to push up and balance herself, 
arched her back and kicked her legs in the air. The older infant watching her 
immediately arched her own back and vigorously wiggled her arms and legs in 
the air. After the older infant repeated this movement several times, the younger 
observer noticed and followed suit. The timing of the wiggling was entirely 
dependent on whether or not they were visually engaged with their partner. 
When the older infant, more capable of turning her head and pushing herself 
up, looked away, she missed her play partner’s break into wiggling, and did not 
wiggle in response until she turned and actually saw what the younger was doing. 
Of particular note was that the infants did not wiggle simultaneously while they 
were closely watching one another, only in alternation. When the younger infant 
averted her gaze, she stopped participating in the activity. It was only a matter of 
seconds after the clip ended before she began to cry and her mother removed her 
from the situation. 

The interactive cues that marked the two infants’ social interest in one another 
included sustained and averted gaze, outcry, isolated arm and leg movement, and 
the fully-engaged body wiggle. The communal co-wiggling activity was, like the 
preschool protolore observed by McGonnagill, spontaneous and structured in part 
by the context in which the mothers had placed the babies, but was not directed 
by the adults. Despite their occasional interference (such as stroking their infants’ 
heads, smiling encouragingly, speaking to the infants or the other mother as if to 
explain their baby’s action), the mothers were never as interesting to the infants as 
the infants were to one another. However, unlike protolore, the imitative wiggling 
cannot be read as including some intent, not even a flexible one. It exists on a 
genre-less level of action and reaction.

The mutually enjoyable patterning of wiggle play between the infants proved 
possible because of the highly developed sense of timing and signal that the 
infants already possessed. With extended observation, tracking cultural cues 
for timing could be achieved for even this young age. It is possible to suggest 

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that instead of disjointed flailing of arms and legs, the younger infant began to 
move in ways that lifted all four limbs up off the ground in closer imitative form 
to the other infant, closely attending to how it was done and then repeating 
the action. Beyond the idea of skill acquisition, the exploration of “turn-taking 
procedures” may be, as Shieffelin and Ochs suggest, a way into understanding 
larger communal social relationships (1986, 171). If we take nascent folklore in 
tandem with language socialization, we can argue that infants at this age not only 
communicate in terms of social cohesion and interaction, but that they actively 
teach one another by imitative skill acquisition within a peer group.

Innovation

Innovation is the second major area of nascent folklore. It is closely linked with 
imitation, but beyond the establishment of community and social cognition, the 
intersubjective reading of motivation and infants’ early awareness of the intricacies 
of timing and signal rapidly transform into experimentation. From the early ability 
to compare and contrast grows an increasing awareness of the metacommunicative 
signaling of play. These markers can be found in “exaggeration and stereotypy, 
(e.g., prolongation, patterning, and repetition),” and the dynamic variation of 
their use serves to establish that intentions can vary dramatically from expectation 
and not be taken seriously, which is the point at which pretense can function 
(Dissanayake 2001, 94-95). 

By nine months of age, an infant’s sense of timing is not only good enough 
to imitate when she wishes, but also to try different tactics in imitative interaction 
to see if the imitator is watching or not, which often becomes a game to see if 
the other is following (Meltzoff and Brooks 2001, 179). The infant also begins to 
attempt different means of accomplishing the same goal (Meltzoff and Brooks 
2001, 182).

However, deciding when and where infant inventiveness occurs may hinge 
on uncovering the point at which habitual action and delayed imitation can be 
distinguished from “innovation,” as well as coming to terms with what innovation 
may mean for infancy. The field observation in the previous section dealt with 
infant interaction in a face-to-face context, but it must also be noted that much 
of infant and toddler play is done in apparent solitude, with little or no direct 
interaction at all. However, this co-presence still functions as a basis for imitation 
and learning. Tullia Musatti explains that among infants and toddlers, it has 
been experimentally verified that even during apparently non-related play, 
children’s activities are related consistently to what other children have done 
previously during the same time, with varying degrees of relationship between 
them. In studies where the range of age went from twelve to eighteen months 
and eight to twenty-seven months, imitation occurred that did not necessitate 
direct communication; infants and toddlers aligned themselves to what occurred 
around them. “Having a child’s own activity and that of the partner simultaneously 
displayed makes it easier for the child to assess the activities’ similarities and 
differences” (Musatti 1993, 245). In other words, they are able to distinguish 

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between their own activities and those of others, and to incorporate and imitate 
that which is new.

The question then is whether any innovation is truly new, or if infants simply 
learn by watching others and trying out new activities the first time for themselves. 
While I do not want to dismiss the infant at solo play, the autotelic, self-sustaining 
enjoyment of his experimentation feeds upon itself. Much like studying dialogue 
with oneself, solo play bears the hallmarks of communicative activity while not 
explicitly being so. Innovation rises out of interaction with others, even when it is 
in parallel and indirect. 

In summary, dynamic variation existing between the infant and the other, 
whether another infant or an adult, gives rise to the co-interpretative, intersubjective 
existence of imaginative play, all by the age of nine months. The ability to engage 
and recognize engagement by the other is fundamental to recognize what is play 
and what is not, in order to establish the subtle framing of experience and 
interaction.

Where to Find Innovation

For the purposes of identifying nascent folklore, we turn our focus to what is 
communicatively effected during the flow of an interactive scene, setting aside for 
the time being the more difficult-to-identify innovation at work within individual 
experimentation.

Signs to look for in identifying innovation are similar to imitation. Sustained 
gaze can denote interest, and shared actions and patterns mark the interactive 
element. However, to discover innovation, we seek those actions which break 
the pattern, and in a play context, are used for the purpose of contributing to 
a sustained and mutual enjoyment of an activity. To know whether an action 
is truly innovative, a fresh invention of game play that the child has never 
witnessed before, is simply not in the scope of these field observations. However, 
introduction of a fresh movement, a different cry, or a different use of a toy that 
is done for the purpose of prolonging the enjoyment of play demonstrates the 
innovative ability of the infant to string together prior witnessed behaviors into a 
fluid whole, not unlike verbal formulas and innovative variations within a riddle 
sequence that require skill, intelligence, and creativity to fashion together.7 

By way of illustration, let me sketch a play scene based on my own observation 
of infants at play. Two infants are playing with toys which rattle. One lifts his toy 
into the air and shakes it vigorously, eliciting the sound. The enjoyment of doing 
the action appears to be reason enough to continue shaking the rattle periodically. 
Meanwhile, the second infant begins to pay attention and lifts her rattling toy, 
imitating her play partner’s movement. Now there are two infants rattling toys in 
similar ways. At this point, the second infant, whose toy is not of the rattle-specific 
variety, but has a number of other bells and whistles attached, begins to bang it on 
the carpet, and it makes a most pleasing cacophony of noise. Infant one continues 
shaking his rattle midair for a moment more, then begins enthusiastically pounding 
it on the floor, smiling, eyes wide. 

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We do not know whether the second infant had experienced floor-pounding 
with the toy prior to this situation. However, the break in the rattle pattern 
was directed by the infants’ choices, and, most importantly, contributed to the 
continuation of the play activity. Perhaps after a time, rattling midair would have 
ceased to be enjoyable. Perhaps changing the activity to pounding allowed the 
infants’ enjoyment of the activity to endure ten or even twenty seconds longer 
than the rattle game might have lasted on its own––a significant space of time 
for their attention spans. The possibility for this early creative process hinged 
on the intersubjective space between the two infants where variation could be 
incorporated and improved upon. 

This example suggests an approach much like trial and error in the ways 
that human beings mutually construct culture. Behavior is imitated, and when 
improvements are attempted, the response of the community (or party) for whom 
the communicative behavior is initiated determines whether those changes in turn 
are repeated. This early pattern in infant rattle play becomes writ large, with all 
of the same messy and subjective misfires of communication building upon and 
responding to one another, smoothing into established patterns over time.

The attempting of new or previously demonstrated behavior for one’s own 
ends (often in the same process of trial and error) is also foundational in regard 
to creativity. Creativity and innovation as terminology possess culturally-laden 
value; and the idea of innovation as “newness” and therefore “good” certainly 
creates problems. However, if we recognize the interactive quality of innovation 
— namely, that it is dependent upon others to validate it, repeat it, or encourage 
further repetition — we can see that together, imitation and innovation in 
interactive symbiosis provide rudimentary guidelines for judging activities that 
evoke pleasure, such as play (Miller 1973, 91). In other words, they form the 
foundational properties of aesthetics. 

As noted earlier, distinguishing the difference between previously imitated 
behavior, a failed imitation, and a completely original innovation is beyond 
the scope of my observation. However, I would question to what extent such 
distinction truly matters. The communicative function of the innovation is 
located in the context where it occurs, and its effect is of greater interest than its 
originality. However, as noted above, imitated behavior and innovative behavior 
do differ somewhat in the matter of intention, for it is in the exploration of 
intention that we can create a picture of the infant as agent.

Intention

The final area in which to see the nascent stage of folklore is intention. Imitation 
and innovation in the context of interaction are intimately tied to the simultaneous 
and mutual reading of intention and motivation by infants. Intention, motivation, 
belief, and desire are all terms considered to fall into the realm of “folk 
psychology,” namely, the interpretive system(s) that humans utilize to make sense 
of others’ actions through the attribution of mental states (Malle and Knobe 2001, 
45-46).8 Despite its relative lack of empirical provability, intention has been the 
focus of much attention in recent years, and considerable effort has been made to 

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analyze the various aspects of intention as well as to do empirical study of how 
the concept is put to use (see Malle and Knobe 2001, Ames et al. 2001). What is 
particularly relevant for this analysis is that intention and the reading thereof is a 
social, survival-oriented trait, culturally nuanced and intimately connected with 
communication. 

Infants appear to learn intentionality within the same interactive and imitative 
framework that Dissanayake credits with laying the foundation for later aesthetic 
imagination. Meltzoff notes that infants are taught the idea of actions being linked 
with intention by virtue of their own experience in trying to fulfill their own goals 
and watching others do the same:

Infants have goals and act intentionally. They have experienced 
their own failed plans and unfulfilled intentions … When an infant 
sees another act in this same way, the infant’s self-experience could 
suggest that there is a goal, plan, or intention beyond the surface 
behavior. Thus infants would come to read the adult’s failed attempts 
[at doing a task], and the behavioral envelope in which they occur, as 
a pattern of ‘strivings’ rather than ends in themselves. (Meltzoff 2007, 
131)

However, this broad analysis gives us little assurance. By three months of age, 
it has been shown, infants repeat behavior in order to bring about a repeated 
response in a caregiver, and infants from seven months repeat behavior in order to 
make an adult laugh (Bretherton et al. 1985, 334-5). Elsewhere, it has been argued 
that infants begin to infer absent goals from between nine to thirteen months of 
age (Meltzoff and Brooks 2001, 181). 

However, to what extent can such activities be considered intentional? Knowing 
that infants are intentional agents and recognizing infant intention may be separate 
matters. Ascribing intentionality may itself be a component in whether an action 
achieves its goal, since reading a situation as goal-oriented implies the existence 
of intention. Relevant as well is the idea of self, and to what extent the infant 
agent conceives of the self, as we approach intention’s sister concept, agency. The 
awareness of how one acts upon the world, in tandem with how much one may 
exert one’s own action upon it, vary substantially within the first year of life.

In order to interpret underlying intentions, there must be a shared “framework 
of meaning,” as well as some medium through which communication can be 
achieved (Bretherton et al. 1981, 340). As discussed in the previous sections, this 
framework of meaning is constructed through the minutiae of action and reaction, 
imitation and innovation, and infants can direct and influence its flow. I read 
this as arguing that infants do not need to possess a “theory of mind,” that is, the 
ability to recognize intentionality in others, in order to express desire in a goal-
directed way. 

Desire is another folk psychological concept. As Malle and Knobe point out 
among adults discerning between desire and intention, desire is often defined 
as an internal state, while intention is the action that springs from desire. In 
determining intention, social perceivers suppose strength of a person’s desire to 

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do something. If that desire is acted upon, then it is read as intention, but only if 
there is an equally perceived presence of commitment (Malle and Knobe 2001, 60). 

This raises a teleological spectre. Do varying assumptions of present desire and 
committed action risk adults reading too much intention into infant behavior than 
actually is present? I think that we as ethnographers must be willing to spend the 
time necessary to interpret infant behavior in long-term ethnographic context, to 
recognize individuated cries and gestures, as well as culturally-relevant recognizing 
of infant intention — what is recognized will be responded to. 

 In studies of vocal imitative behavior between infants and parents, 
developmental psychologists Kokkinaki and Kugiumutzakis found that with infants 
between two and six months of age, imitation with parents gave rise to “two 
specific kinds of emotion: interest and pleasure.” They go on to write that, “Given 
that emotions are regarded as motives in human intentional communication, this 
later finding provides evidence that infants and parents also share the ability to 
read each others’ motives and intentions” (Kokkinaki and Kugiumutzakis 2000, 
185). 

While this developmental work does not prove anything about perfect strangers 
being able to read the intentions of infants whom they do not know, it does 
suggest that drawing in expert observers, namely parents, could provide an angle 
for making more accurate conclusions about infants’ intentions during a given 
interaction. Like any human interaction, reading motivation is an interpretive 
process. 

When looking to establish and interpret infant intention, many of the same 
criteria that are useful in recognizing imitation and innovation also apply. 
However, this time the approach must also incorporate more obvious emotional 
signs of response — pleasure, excitement, and interest — that work to direct 
action. 

Beyond merely signaling and recognizing intent with sustained gaze, or 
looking for consistencies and repetitions and breaks in that repetition for new 
permutations on an old theme, the indication that the collective play activity has a 
clearly defined emotional component is key in attributing intention, as well as are 
metacommunicative markers of play, such as exaggeration and stereotypy.

Where to Find Intention

I hope to illustrate this concept of intention by comparing the following two 
scenes, where I have entered as an “expert observer” of my own child. Both 
scenes demonstrate attempts at a game variant of peek-a-boo played with my 
daughter of thirteen months at our home. The first scene is directed by me, 
stationed to one side of a video recorder. The second is the same game played 
with her father while I filled the role of observer and camera person. Both video 
clips do not last more than thirty seconds each in recorded form. 

In the first recording, our daughter turns from standing at a door and walks 
roughly fifteen feet away from the camera, through a living area scattered with 
toys, and down a hallway. I ask her where she is going (in high-pitched play 
tones) even as she disappears out of sight around a doorway. Then come the 

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cue words of our game, which we have played numerous times before: “Where’s 
[Name]?” The sing-song chant is repeated at a higher pitch. As the repetition of 
the cue comes to a close, the child runs out from the doorway with a huge smile 
on her face, looking for my face. I exclaim with exaggerated excitement, round 
eyes, and large smile, “Ohh, there she is!” My daughter responds by squealing in 
delight and prancing on her tiptoes. She drops eye contact with me, and continues 
to create the squealing noise for her own apparent pleasure. She averts her gaze 
to inspect the basket momentarily before she looks up and turns back for the 
doorway. 

In the second clip, the toddler is standing behind her father, seated in the 
middle of the living room floor. He begins the game cue. “Where’s [name]? Where 
did [name] go?” He turns around quickly with a wide, open-mouthed smile and 
exaggeratedly wide eyes. “There she is!” 

However, our daughter has instead turned to a nearby toy behind her father, 
and does not respond to his cue. As her father turns to make eye contact with her, 
she looks up from the toy, and then to where I am seated with the video camera 
(about ten feet away) and then back to her father (about a foot away), before she 
returns her gaze to the camera, with a slight smile. The father tries again, turning 
away from her and repeating the game cue again. However, the direction of my 
daughter’s gaze does not stay more than a moment on her father, and with an 
increasingly large smile, the indirect steps that had taken her to the toy become 
more direct, and she makes an unsteady beeline in the direction of the camera. 
As she passes her father by, he laughs, “Ohh, [Name]’s not paying any attention to 
Daddy; [Name] wants the video camera!” The clip ends as the child, grinning into 
the lens, gets her wish, grabbing for the camera and wrenching it to one side. 

The desire of our daughter to play the game with us was just as important as 
our willingness to play it with her. Through metacommunicative exaggeration, we 
parents in both clips demonstrated our intent to play, and our daughter picked 
up on it. In variation one, she used the doorframe to hide behind. In the second 
variation, her father expected her to hide behind his back and appear to one side 
(based on their previous game play). However, whether due to the distraction 
of the camera, or the lack of ability to see his face as he signaled the game to 
her through exaggerated expression and repeated, patterned behavior, her direct 
engagement with him and with the game were fleeting, despite his numerous 
attempts at re-establishing the flow of interaction between them. 

In the first clip, pleasure could be interpreted and shared by both participants, 
and recognized in the form of squealing, exaggerated expressions, and body 
language, such as excitable prancing. The appearance of the toddler was marked 
by the child’s pleasure. Perhaps this came from filling the hanging, uncertain 
expectation of the situation and gratifying it, but it engendered a return of clear, 
affective signals that reinforced and heightened the her own emotional response. 
Pleasure was also demonstrated for pleasure’s sake, such as the continued 
squealing that was disengaged from seeking a response. When we re-engaged 
through eye contact, she immediately turned back and walked directly for the 
doorway, a clear gestural sign that she wanted to repeat the action and have the 
game continue. 

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In the second clip, the child’s own gauging of the likelihood of chasing the 
camera seemed to grow steadily, first in the uncertainty of her glances between 
camera, father, and toy, and then in the widening smile she manifested in 
advancing in the direction she wished to go. It might also be noted, however, that 
she was never dissuaded from heading toward the video camera. Both parents 
reinforced their own amusement to the child through smiles and laughter as the 
incongruencies between the situation they were trying to effect and the child’s 
actions became more and more pronounced, first through her utterly ignoring her 
father in favor of the nearby toy, and then as she toddled purposefully for the 
camera.

Both of these clips make apparent the ability of the parents and the toddler 
to establish a pattern and a play frame for the game. The parents achieved 
this through a repeated call with a specific vocal tone and exaggerated facial 
expressions. The child accomplished this through the repetition of actions that 
will trigger the calling cue, and enabled her to share in the expression of delight 
and surprise. The delight and surprise that generated the fun of the game hinged 
on the toddler’s ability to distinguish between that which was expected, and that 
which was not expected. By failing to appear immediately in the first game, the 
toddler experimented with the concept of expectation, of the absent being present, 
and her own control in eliciting a reaction. She was in control of the flow of the 
response (though if she had disappeared into the bathroom for too long, I would 
have assumed that she was no longer participating, and would have broken the 
play frame to deny her agency in exploring that particular location). In the second 
situation, parental attempts at creating a recognizable play frame can be seen to 
exist somewhat shakily, and then fall apart. In the uncertain glances between 
father and mother and camera, it was apparent that not only did the parents 
recognize what their daughter wanted, but that the toddler was not entirely at 
ease with pursuing her goal until the signals were clear — the parents had been 
attempting to make eye contact and repeat a cue call, but once their laughter and 
smiling at her replaced their (feeble) attempts to maintain the play situation, her 
steps became faster and more direct, and her smile widened and grew to a cry of 
pleasure upon reaching her destination.

The Promise of Nascent Folklore 

The areas of interactive imitation, innovation, and intention have much to offer 
folklorists who wish to understand this stage of human aesthetic potential. 

The seeds of identity and community sprout in shared communicative and 
intentional behavior, the mutual recognition and empathy inherent in imitation, and 
the developing theory of mind that comes out of the developing child recognizing 
others as “like me,” perhaps the most early experience of Turnerian communitas. 
The most basic experience of imitation and innovation is relived in tradition, 
paralleling the conception of folklore’s ability to be both conservative and dynamic 
(Toelken 1979, 39-40). This “communal creation and recreation” (Ben-Amos 1971, 
7) is negotiated through a social community and its inherent system of response 
and evaluation, and the building fluency of triggering response in others and in 

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turn reading their intention provides for the existence of framing and the reading 
of contextual clues (Hufford 1995, 532). The ability to read the differences in 
performance and intention can be argued as the foundation of genre. 

There are some unsettling implications that we can draw out of the areas of 
infant ability that I have discussed above. One harks back to outdated assumptions 
about “primitive” man and cultural group-think. Another could be perceived as a 
flattening of cultural variation and change under biological reductionism. However, 
despite the implied conclusion that all infants everywhere share these foundational 
abilities as part of their biologically evolved equipment for survival, there is no 
cause to diminish the role of human agency. 

By recognizing foundational abilities which incorporate the desires and the 
intentions of the individual actor, there exists room for the growth of the master 
performer as well as creative expression. Between cultural and social frameworks, 
I would expect to find imitation, innovation, and intention appearing in varying 
forms, with peer and adult responses to proxemics, timing, and variations of 
intentional action being read and responded to very differently. The forms that 
these infant desires and intentions grow into will be diverse — what creativity 
looks like, and indeed what constitutes mastery or performance, will vary by 
culture and folk group. 

The folklorists of infancy are few and far between, which suggests challenges 
in negotiating developmental literature, dealing with the lack of a clearly 
defined group identity, and transcribing multimodal, nonverbal communication. 
However, perhaps we set aside ethnographic methodology and interdisciplinary 
experimentation too soon. As adult humans we possess years of practice past that 
early developmental milestone of nine months to begin grasping that others have 
goals and that other humans are “like me,” while simultaneously acknowledging 
that expectations can and do differ from what actually occurs. Already highly 
experienced readers of intention and action, as ethnographers we hone this skill 
to make our interpretations as accurate and culturally sensitive as possible; as 
folklorists, we engage the expressive, emotionally moving, communicative aspects 
of human behavior — regardless of the phase of human development at which it 
occurs. 

Infants experience emotionally meaningful shared communication––between 
one another and others. They possess their own means for evaluating contingency 
and demonstrating their engagement and preference; they interact creatively and 
imitatively. With expressive communication which is wordless yet vocal, active and 
intentional, infants can be recognized as significant bearers of protoculture — their 
own nascent folklore.

NOTES

Many thanks go to John McDowell for his continual support and encouragement, 
and infinitely helpful commentary during the revisionary process, as well as to 
the dependable friends/sharp-eyed editors of thesis group. Thanks also to Harper, 
without whom it never would have occurred to me to consider people her age 
inspirational. 

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NOTES

1. A notable anthropological exception to this that I have found is Alma 
Gottlieb’s “Do Infants Have Religion?: The Spiritual Lives of Beng Babies,” in 
American Anthropologist 100 (1998: 122-135). She spent over 700 hours with 
infants in order to counterbalance a potentially “adulto-centric” perspective. 

2. See Noyes’ discussion of physical experience (and academic discomfort in 
addressing it) Fire in the Plaça: Catalan Festival Politics after Franco (Philadelphia: 
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). See also Sklar 1994.

3. It would be incorrect to assert that all developmental psychology is clinically 
“cold” or unconcerned with cultural nuance, though critically speaking, quite a 
lot of literature suggests Western-centric universals in forming normative bases 
for comparison with other cultures that has in turn been picked up by the social 
sciences (see Burman 2008, Hirschfield 2002 for extended discussions).

4. While this assertion would not be hotly disputed in many psychological circles, 
these two fields of developmental psychology and language socialization differ 
in many ways. Language socialization is positioned between the quantitative lab 
analysis common to most psychological studies and qualitative ethnographic research, 
incorporating both statistical and interpretive elements, with an end focus on what 
can be learned about cultural values encoded in the medium of language forms and 
how they are taught and internalized by children (Shieffelin and Ochs 1986, 168). 

5. In its most extreme forms, the evolutionary approach risks falling into 
biological reductionism, taking for granted that there are a set of universals that 
exist a priori to culture manifesting in its various forms. However, for early infant 
behavior, where cultural forms are in fact in a nascent and largely unformed state, 
biology may offer insights — especially when we take as a possibility that certain 
human behaviors may be evolved just as physical characteristics are, rejecting the 
idea that evolution is the equivalent of biological determinism (see Bandura 2001 
for an extended discussion). 

For an excellent critique of this evolutionary position, which in many studies 
contains at its core the reverse-engineering of culture, see Robert C. Richardson’s 
Evolutionary Psychology as Maladapted Psychology (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007).

6. By exploring this area, I do not mean to conflate protolore and nascent 
folklore with play, despite some of their obvious similarities. For example, 
Piagetian sensorimotor-period “practice play,” is certainly marked by an intrinsic 
enjoyment of the act of doing itself, its agents not yet having reached the 
developmental capacity for symbols or rule-based games, yet it is often done 
in solitude (Miller 1973, 90). While I do not believe that the ability to derive 
pleasure from solitary play is unimportant or unrelated to an intersubjective social 
framework, it does not receive focus here. 

7. See McDowell 1979 for an extended discussion of the creativity and variation 
within riddling sessions.

8. A term generally considered pejorative by the psychological literature, I 
wonder if we cannot bring some respectability to the idea of “folk psychology” 
by recognizing it as the way in which humans perceive others, a cultural system 
which is taught and believed. 

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Practices and Social Organization in the Frame of Play. Journal of American 
Folklore 98: 315-330.

Harding, Carol Gibb, and Roberta Michnick Golinkoff. 1979. The Origins of 
Intentional Vocalizations in Prelinguistic Infants. Child Development 50(1). 
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Hirschfield, Lawrence A. 2002. Why Don’t Anthropologists Like Children? 
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Hufford, Mary. 2003. In Eight Words for the Study of Expressive Culture, ed. Burt 
Feintuch, 146-175. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Kapchan, Deborah A. 2003. In Eight Words for the Study of Expressive Culture, ed. 
Burt Feintuch, 121-145. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Kokkinaki, T. and Kugiumutzakis, G. 2000. Basic Aspects of Vocal Imitation in 
Infant-Parent Interaction during the First Six Months. Journal of Reproductive 
and Infant Psychology 18: 173-187. 

Lancey, David F. 2007. Accounting for Variability in Mother-Child Play. American 
Anthropologist 109(2): 273-284.

Malle, Bertram, and Joshua Knobe. 2001. The Distinction between Desire and 
Intention: A Folk-Conceptual Analysis. In Intentions and Intentionality, eds. 
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MA: MIT Press.

McDowell, John H. 1979. Children’s Riddling. Bloomington: Indiana University 
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McGonnagill, Laurie. 1993. Preschool Protolore. Children’s Folklore Review 16: 41-
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Moses, Louis J. 2001. “Some Thoughts on Ascribing Complex Intentional Concepts 
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Noyes, Dorothy. 2003. Group. In Eight Words for the Study of Expressive Culture, 
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______1999. Introduction: What is Children’s Folklore? Children’s Folklore: A 
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In Imitation in Infancy, eds. Jacqueline Nadel and George Butterworth. 
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

 

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27

FaThers and Their aFriCan ameriCan daughTers:  
hair PieCes CreaTing Ties ThaT Bind

neAl lester 

Barbie never told Black girls they are beautiful. 
Essex Hemphill, “Soft Targets (For Black Girls)” (2006) 

Writing about the “mother-daughter dance over hair” in her article “For Black 
Girls, Hair and Self-Esteem Are Interwoven,” Karen M. Thomas (2006) asserts that 
hair is both “a mother’s way to pass judgment and a daughter’s way to rebel.” 
Thomas sees hair as “a sign of independence and self-identity [that] announces 
to the world who we are,” but for little African American girls, the hair “dance” is 
more complicated, often signaling “a daughter’s entry point into racial differences 
and America’s standard of beauty” (E3). Culturally and racially-specific hair stories 
represent nuanced intersections between adults’ choices about girls’ hair and 
young black girls’ ability to make their own informed hair and identity-forming 
choices in an adult world. Kim Green’s reflection in “The Pain of Living the Lye” 
underscores the effect of “good hair” on an African American child’s psyche: 
“I grew up mad at my hair because it wasn’t like the swinging manes of white 
children who surrounded me” (1993, 38). To achieve the “good hair” ideal, heated 
iron combs or lye-based chemicals become the tools of destruction and temporary 
construction. African American women routinely talk and testify about a loss of 
innocence by pinpointing the moment their hair journeys toward selfhood began, 
testimonials revealing an evolution from hair-straightening to eventual acceptance 
of self and hair. The beginnings of these self-defining moments in young black 
girlhood are clear and long-lasting, and ultimately shape the public and private 
images of black womanhood. 

Indeed, the rhetorical ploys that associate straight and relaxed hair care with 
“good” mothering tugs at the emotional and spiritual bond between African 
American mothers and their young daughters, evident in this advertisement for a 
popular children’s relaxer: “Mommy gives us PCJ Pretty-N-Silky because she loves 
us!” (Luster Products, 1996, 123 emphasis added). Another such advertisement by 
Luster Products (1991) offers a similar appeal: “For your daughters, playing ‘dress-
up’ can be wonderful make-believe fun and games. But as their mother, you know 
that looking out for them also has a serious side. And that includes caring for their 
hair. That’s why you use PCJ Relaxer” (65). Decidedly mixed signals equate mother-
daughter love and nurturing with hair relaxing and blur lines between the assumed 
carefree make-believe of childhood innocence and play with pleas to mothers that 
they are doing what is best for their daughters. The final tag of the ad is profoundly 
ironic, a claim that the product is “an original just like your daughters.”

If we take our cues solely from Disney and its most recently released 3-D 
animated flick Tangled — yet another spin on the Rapunzel narrative featuring 
its celebrated long, straight, silky haired blonde damsel — we sense that some 
things about beauty aesthetics seem never to change. Even the social and political 

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implications of straight hair for Disney’s first African American princess Tiana, from 
The Princess and the Frog,1 reveals minimal efforts to challenge prevailing ideals 
about “good” and “bad” hair. On the other hand, perhaps CHANGE really is in the 
air, and in this case, it’s all about little African American girls and their hair. This 
CHANGE may or may not have anything directly to do with the running platform 
of then-Senator Barack Obama and his subsequent election as the first African 
American US president. Or, perhaps the reality of the first African American First 
Family with its three generations of Obama females inhabiting the White House 
residence at the same time creates a new level of social, cultural, and political 
awareness about difference, especially racial and ethnic difference. Indeed, 
while public scrutiny of hair has followed past First Family females — Jacquelyn 
Kennedy, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton, for instance — this current media attention 
to race and gender as related to hair seems another first.2

A decidedly new attitude about the race and gender politics of little African 
American girls and hair is being attributed to the early October 2010 Sesame 
Street segment that has gone viral on YouTube, in which the spunky brown girl 
puppet sings with gusto and full commitment the catchy, upbeat tune “I Love 
My Hair!” This little brown female puppet’s bold embrace of her nappy hair is 
precisely the companion to neo-Soul singer India.Arie’s self-affirming “I Am Not 
My Hair” (2006): “I am not my hair/ I am not this skin/ I am not your expectations, 
no, no/ I am not my hair/ I am not this skin/ I am a soul that lives within.” This 
same message about loving one’s hair as an African American girl interfaces with 
messages of self-acceptance and African American cultural affirmation projected 
in a bevy of children’s picture books about African American girls and their 
hair — Carolivia Herron’s Nappy Hair (1997), Natasha Tarpley’s I Love My Hair 
(1998), bell hooks’s Happy to be Nappy (1999), Joyce Carol Thomas’s Crowning 
Glory (2002), and Dinah Johnson’s Hair Dance (2007), to name a few. Together 
and individually, these children’s books challenge prevailing assumptions about 
a single beautiful hair ideal: long, flowing, silky, bouncy, capable of being wind-
tossed, manageable, and blond. Indeed, “good hair,” according to these alternative 
children’s book narratives, is hair that we are born with and hair that makes 
us happy with who we are. Reiterates poet/ playwright Ntozake Shange (1972) 
addressing black adults about the hair ideal for African Americans: “the roots of 
your hair/ what turns back when we sweat, run,/ make love, dance, get afraid, 
get/ happy: the tell-tale sign of living/” (n.p.). 

In addition to planting and nurturing this positive message to African American 
girls that chemically untouched hair is desirable, acceptable, healthy, manageable, 
versatile, and a source of pride, socially and politically conscious fathers are 
stepping in to assist socially and politically conscious mothers already challenging 
the many forces that negatively impact our brown daughters’ sense of their most 
positive selves. Through this lens of hair, fathers address the sins of glamorizing 
the straight and silky hair ideal. Chris Rock identifies the impetus for his comedic 
documentary Good Hair (2009) as his five-year-old daughter who, after playing 
with Barbie dolls, presented him with this disturbingly loaded question: “Daddy, 
why don’t I have good hair?” With this question so steeped in cultural folklore and 
written so indelibly upon the fabric of America’s distinct history of black and white 

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race relations, Rock set out to explore why this prevailing notion of “good hair” as 
straight hair, presumably like white people’s hair — even though all whites don’t 
necessarily have straight hair — still exists and has reached his and surely other 
young African American daughters. When asked how Rock talks to his little girls 

about their hair, he responds both 
seriously and humorously: “Like any 
dad, I just tell my daughters they’re 
beautiful as much as possible. And 
I keep chemicals out of their hair 
until they’re old enough to make 
that decision. Because if you put 
chemicals in a kid’s hair, she’s 
addicted. It’s like making the kid a 
vampire” (Fireman, 2009, p. 122). 
Another African American parent 
acknowledges the profound pain at 
witnessing his/ her child’s feelings 
of inadequacy that can only be 
countered through creative re-
messaging: “I think that at some 
point, if you have a little girl, we all 

deal with the day your child comes home from school and says, ‘I don’t want my 
hair to look like this; I want it to look like Annie’s.’ And Annie’s hair is blond and 
long and not what she has” (Sims 2010).

Paternal nurturing and social and political responsibility are at the heart of 
Sesame Street writer Joey Mazzarino’s response to his adopted Ethiopian daughter 
when “he noticed as she played with her dolls that she wanted long, straight 
blond hair” (Gray 2010). His politically-charged creative response was the two-
minute, upbeat video meant to remind his daughter that her hair was “nice just as 
it is” (Gray 2010). That the Italian American father’s song for his brown daughter 
addresses years of ambivalent emotions from many African American adult women 
about their subscribing to a straight hair ideal has been unexpected for Mazzarino, 
as summarized by an NPR staff writer (2010) in “‘I Love My Hair’: A Father’s 
Tribute to His Daughter”: 

In writing the song, [Mazzarino] wanted to say in song what she 
says to his daughter: “Your hair is great. You can put it in ponytails. 
You can put it in cornrows. I wish I had hair like you.” That simple 
message has caused an outpouring of responses from women. 
Mazzarino got a call from an African woman who told him the song 
brought her to tears. “I was amazed, ‘cause I sort of wrote this little 
thing for my daughter, and here this adult woman, it touched her.” 

This message has resonated loudly and clearly with African American women and 
girls as they navigate the politics of personal decisions; says one African American 
woman:

Figure 1. Like father, like daughter: 
hair’s family tapestry. Neal A. Lester with 
daughter Jasmine Z. Lester.

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I embarked on a hair journey to revive my curls after getting bored 
with the polished, broadcaster’s look. Tired of wearing my strands 
bone-straight and looking like “everyone else,” I stopped using the 
flat iron for six months, wore my hair in protective hairstyles like 
braids and twists, and then had a big chop three months ago to 
remove the straggling straight ends so that my curls could grow back 
healthy and strong. And while it took over a decade to embrace my 
natural hair, when I watch this two-minute Sesame Street video, I 
can’t help but fight back the tears as it sends a much-needed message 
to young black girls at a pivotal point in their development that will 
reaffirm why they should love what they’ve got on top. Who knows 
if I would’ve yielded to the hot comb or “kiddie” relaxer had I been 
exposed to such a positive image of black hair at an early age. I can 
only hope that little girls who’ve watched this [video] know that, as 
the Muppet sings, “there’s nothing else that can compare to their hair” 
(Oliver 2010).

As an African American scholar who is also a parent, I began researching, 
teaching, and lecturing on the race and gender politics of head hair when our 
daughter was born twenty-one years ago. This work started not because our 
biracial daughter had ever asked questions about her hair, but rather because 
others were so consistently preoccupied with labeling our first-born’s hair as 
“good hair” or “nice hair.”3 During our daughter’s childhood years, I was her 
primary hair groomer because my more flexible job schedule as a university 
professor allowed that morning ritual. Plus, my Italian-Argentine spouse hadn’t 
a clue what to do with our daughter’s hair. As our daughter has moved into the 
young adult world, I have missed those days of bonding through detangler and 
hair-grooming sessions that united us on what I hope was some spiritual level. 
That she consciously alternates between flat-ironed straight and curly hair means 
that some spoken or unspoken lesson about her hair’s healthiness and about self-
acceptance must have been absorbed. Joey Mazzarino shares details of a similar 
bonding-through-hair grooming-ritual with his young daughter: “My wife is an 
actress and if she was away I would be in charge of my daughter’s hair. I made 
sure it looked good … I’m still not great at braids, but I try. I do standard braids. 
I don’t know what I’m doing. It was hard to get used to but I love doing it with 
my daughter…. [The song I created] really comes from a place of love for my 
daughter” (Darden, 2010). Basking in the glory and creative possibilities of braids, 
afro puffs, afros, dreadlocks, and plaits, and then with various fun and funny 
hair adornments, this little unnamed brown girl puppet’s proclamation and dance 
performance underscore Joyce Carol Thomas’s (2002) message of self-affirmation: 
“‘What is good hair?’/ I ask my daddy/ And Mama answers, ‘Why it’s understood,/ 
Sister, if it’s on your head it’s good!’” (n.p.) Even Willow Smith, the tween 
child star of actor parents Will and Jada Pinkett Smith, sends a message of self-
affirmation in her chart-topping single, “Whip My Hair” (2010), wherein she uses 
her proportionally too-long braid extensions as a metaphor of resistance to those 
who demand conformity to another’s unreasonable and arbitrary expectations: 

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“Don’t let haters keep me off my grind/ Keep my head up I know I’ll be fine … 
I whip my hair back and forth/ I whip my hair back and forth (just whip it)/ I 
whip my hair back and forth.”4 Since we fathers and mothers are also trying to 
help our African-American daughters find their voices of self-acceptance, it seems 
appropriate to leave this final word on the race and gender politics of hair to our 
newest young cultural warrior as she prances confidently across the Sesame Street 
stage and onto our computer screens belting out this challenge and declaration 
of “I Love My Hair!” to every brown woman and girl — and by extension every 
brown man and boy — caught in this maze of American beauty aesthetics:

Don’t need a trip to the beauty shop, 
’cause I love what I got on top. 
It’s curly and it’s brown and it’s right up there! 
You know what I love? That’s right, my hair! 
I really love my hair. 
I love my hair. I love my hair. 
There’s nothing else that can compare with my hair. 
I love my hair, so I must declare: 
I really, really, really love my hair. 
Wear a clippy or in a bow 
Or let it sit in an afro 
My hair looks good in a cornrow 
It does so many things you know, that’s why I let it grow 
I love my hair, I love my hair 
I love it and I have to share 
I love my hair, I love my hair! 
I want to make the world aware I love my hair. 
I wear it up. I wear it down. I wear it twisted all around. 
I wear braids and pigtails too. 
I love all the things my hair can do. 
In barrettes or flying free, ever perfect tresses you’ll see 
My hair is part of me, an awesome part of me 
I really love my hair! 

African American women and girls still journey toward a day when their sense 
of themselves and their assessments of other African American women and girls 
are not based on futile efforts to achieve a hair ideal rooted in someone else’s 
limited and limiting constructions and images of beauty. This hugely important and 
popular vocal and visual cyber performance of “I Love My Hair!” in a little brown 
female puppet’s own exuberant voice extends this father’s message of positivity 
to his daughter far and wide in ways that books alone simply cannot and will not. 
African American parents can only hope that the combination of this father’s effort 
and other parents’ will be the CHANGE that nurtures, celebrates, and sustains their 
African American daughters as who will become African American women and 
mothers.

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NOTES

1. See Lester 2010.
2. See Eleveld 2008, Desmond-Harris 2009, and Jones 2008.
3. See “Nappy Edges and Goldy Locks: African American Daughters and the 

Politics of Hair” and “Roots that Go Beyond Big Hair and a Bad Hair Day: Nappy 
Hair Pieces,” in Lester 2007, 79-111.

4. The popularity of “I Love My Hair!” has led to a mash up with the Sesame 
Street video and Willow Smith’s hit “Whip My Hair”: http://hiphop.popcrunch.
com/willow-smith-whip-my-hair-sesame-street-i-love-my-hair-mashup/.

WORKS CITED

Arie, India. 2006. I Am Not My Hair. Testimony 1, Life and Relationship [CD]. New 
York: Motown Records. B0006141-02. 

Darden, Jenee. 2010. Sesame Street Writer Pens ‘I Love My Hair’ Song to Empower 
Daughter. 19 October. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jenee-darden/
sesame-street-writer-pens_b_767353.html.

Desmond-Harris, Jenee. 2009. Why Michelle Obama’s Hair Matters. TIME Magazine 
US. 7 September. www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1919147,00.
html.

Eleveld, Kerry. 2008. It’s Not Just about the Hair. The Advocate (23 September): 
30-34.

Fireman, D. 2009. Chris Rock Made a Film about What? GQ 79 (10): 122. 
Gray, Madison. 2010. Sesame Street: Love your hair, kids! TIME NewsFeed. 20 

October. http://newsfeed.time.com/2010/10/20/sesame-streets-i-love-my-
hair-video-goes-viral/.

Green, Kim. 1993. The Pain of Living the Lye. Essence 24(2): 38.
Hemphill, Essex. 2006. Soft Targets (for Black Girls). The Oxford Anthology of 

African American Poetry, ed. Arnold Rampersad and Hilary Herbold. New 
York: Oxford University Press.

Herron, Carolivia. 1997. Nappy Hair. New York: Dragonfly Books.
hooks, bell. 1999. Happy to Be Nappy. New York: Jump At The Sun.
Hunter, Jenny and O’Donnell, Kevin, prods., and Stilson, Jeff, dir. 2009. Good Hair. 

United States: Chris Rock Productions and HBO Films.
Jackson, Ronald and Smith, Willow. 2010. Whip My Hair. Whip My Hair (Single) 

[CD]. New York: Roc Nation.  
Johnson, Dinah. 2007. Hair Dance! New York: Henry Holt and Co.
Jones, Linda. 2008. Michelle Obama and the Politics of Hair. NaturallyCurly.com. 

26 August www.naturallycurly.com/...hair.../michelle-obama-and-the-politics-
of-hair.

Lester, Neal A. 2007. Once upon a Time in a Different World: Issues and Ideas in 
African American Children’s Literature. New York: Routledge.

______. 2010. Disney’s The Princess and the Frog: The Pride, the Pressure, and the 
Politics of Being a First. The Journal of American Culture 33(4): 294-308.

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Luster Products. 1991. PCJ Relaxer Advertisement. Ebony 46(6): 65.
Luster Products. 1996. PCJ Pretty-N-Silky Advertisement. Essence 27(8): 123.
NPR Staff. 2010. ‘I Love my Hair’: A Father’s Tribute to his Daughter. NPR. 18 

October. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130653300.
Oliver, Dana. 2010. Sesame Street ‘I Love My Hair’ Video: A Priceless Message for 

Black Girls. Stylelist. 15 October. http://stylelist.com/2010/10/15/sesame-
street-i-love-my-hair-song/3.

Sesame Street: Song: I Love My Hair. 2010. YouTube. 12 October. http://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=enpFde5rmw.

Shange, Ntozake. 1972. Nappy Edges. Epigram to Nappy Edges. New York: 
Methuen.

Simpson, India Arie, Shannon Sanders, and Drew Ramsey. 2006. I Am Not My Hair. 
Testimony 1, Life and Relationship [CD]. Detroit: Motown.

Sims, Melanie. 2010. Curly Haired Muppet is Role Model for Little Girls. ABC News. 
20 October. http://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory?id=11928292.

Tarpley, Natasha Anastasia, and Lewis, E.B. (illustrator). 1998. I Love My Hair! 
Boston: Little, Brown. 

Thomas, Joyce Carol. 2002. Crowning Glory. New York: Joanna Cotler Books.
Thomas, Karen M. 2006. For Black Girls, Hair and Self-Esteem are Interwoven. 

Arkansas Democrat Gazette (March 15): E3.

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35

sidewalk songs, JumP-roPe rhymes, and ClaP-hand games 
oF aFriCan ameriCan Children

monA lisA sAloy

Back during elementary days when everyone walked to school, the neighbors 
checked kids’ bad behavior, then reported it to your parents, where you’d really 
get it again for doing what you had no business doing in the first place. In those 
days, not everyone owned a television set. Those who did had to patiently wait 
for TV time after the news and those God-awful “variety” shows for grown ups. By 
then, it was bedtime. Left to our own playful imaginations, we creatively filled time 
with various sidewalk songs, jump-rope rhymes, and clap-hand games. There were 
no headphones, no Sega games, no video arcades, no boom boxes, no CD or 
MP3 players, no palm pilots, no cell phones. This was before the “Mall,” and most 
shopping was done downtown at back counters during Jim Crow. In many ways, 
it was a simpler time when many parents walked their kids to and from the bus 
stop or school in the neighborhood because few folks on the block owned cars. 
We lived in Black neighborhoods, shopped at neighborhood groceries, and sat in 
Colored-only balconies at the Saturday matinee. It was just us kids. We had each 
other; we had time. We were creative; and mostly, we just had good fun together. 

While still in graduate school at Louisiana State University (LSU) at the end of 
the 80s, I wondered which of those kids’ games and rhymes continued in Black 
communities some twenty years post-Civil Rights and integration.1 Were these 
rhymes unique? What were kids doing at the end of the twentieth century? These 
questions led me to collect kids’ lore in New Orleans, from the mid-80s through 
1999. While I lost everything (a life-long collection of books, unpublished research 
and creative works) in Katrina flood waters, thanks to archives such as the New 
Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation2 and the Louisiana State Division of Folklife, 
the raw data is recreated here. In the longer study, a complete listing of all games, 
rhymes, and songs is further classified.

My initial purpose in collecting kids’ lore in New Orleans was to unearth 
connections from kids’ play to the blossoming adult. Were there similarities in the 
function of kids’ lore in New Orleans to other places to the scholarship in general? 
Did this generation of boys join the girls, how, when, why? For New Orleans pre-
Katrina, in what environment did these activities occur? For that decade or more of 
collecting, here is a sample of the kids’ culture existing prior to the devastation of 
hurricane Katrina. This data set is in sharp contrast to games and rhymes of their 
parents’ generation (boomers) and even greater gender distance from the current 
generation post Katrina. The purpose here is to provide part of the overall study to 
portray the kids’ culture as evidenced prior to 2005.

In New Orleans at the end of the previous century and up to 2005, Black 
children performed the songs and rhymes in a family and extended-family 
environment. The youth were sometimes left attended by elder brothers and 
sisters, cousins, or neighbors, who might get them started and urge them to 
continue, especially in New Orleans — a city of families where it is common for 

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36

several generations to live in the same neighborhood where they were born,3 on 
the same street, or within blocks of one another. The result has been a sustained 
culture evolving over centuries. According to the Louisiana Endowment for the 
Humanities, prior to Katrina, nearly 70% of Louisiana residents never left the state. 
This does not mean all is love and kindness. Many families retain that geographical 
closeness and do not speak because of old grudges. For the sake of the children, a 
nurturing and extensive children’s society continues.

This city of families, though many are at or below poverty level, remained 
in the same neighborhoods for half of the last century on the average, prior to 
Katrina. The result was a breeding ground for a culture of children, who were 
supervised by the loving eyes of family, extended family, and neighbors. That 
culture of kids produced sidewalk songs, jump-rope rhymes, and clap-hand 
games, which reflected not just rhythm and rhyme, but a developing sense of 
cultural identity, gender, social mores, and in more recent years, comments on 
society incorporating popular culture.

At that time, the existence of children’s sidewalk culture depended on 
adults who believe that children should socialize separately. Even though they 
considered their children to be blessings from God, in New Orleans pre-Katrina, 
many believed that children should not be a part of adult talk and that children 
should play with children. Neighbors also functioned as extended family, so an 
element of safety existed because of not-too-distant watchful eyes, especially for 
younger kids. The result is that many hot Louisiana evenings are still spent in this 
way. This allows Black children to talk about “grown things” with their friends and 
siblings in a way they can get away with, in a song.

Doing just cursory research, it was clear to me that this kind of urban fun, 
that is playing sidewalk games, is not exclusive to African American Children. 
For example, such rhymes as “Teddy Bear” can be found in some form around 
the world and can be traced to early explorers who brought it with them most 
likely from England; generally, many scholars suggest that “Teddy Bear” has been 
around for some 300 years. “Teddy Bear” is used as a rhyme, with jumping single-
rope games, and also in clap-hand games. This one was collected in Detroit in 
1989 or 1990.4

Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, turn around  
Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, touch the ground 
Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, tie your shoes 
Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, watch the news 
Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, climb the stairs 
Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, go to bed 

Though a tried-and-true centuries-old model of kids’ lore, here in Detroit at the 
end of the last decade, it is updated with the phrase “watch the news.” In African 
American urban areas, these sidewalk songs, jump-rope rhymes, and clap-hand 
Games serve different functions, foster quite original traditions, and continue 
strongly; but the way this process developed is unique; how these games evolve 
gave rise to generations of gifted young folks, and these activities provide a 

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nurturing environment in a protected neighborhood setting.
This research into the songs, games, and rhymes of African American children 

suggests strongly that it is no accident African Americans have contributed to 
world music, to an original American literary landscape. It is no accident that 
“rapping” is now a commercial commodity, and the lyrics of rhythm and blues 
music is legendary. The roots of Black music and literature are inseparably linked 
to urban and rural kids’ games, songs, and play. Much in the way that the early 
blues, work songs, and sorrow songs gave rise to gospel music, jazz, and rhythm 
and blues, these sidewalk songs, jump-rope rhymes, and clap-hand games replace 
nursery rhymes very early and become the African American child’s strong 
connection to the word in performance. As a result, this lore is the core of an oral 
literature, the beginnings of literacy, and a training ground for verbal repartee and 
verbal dueling necessary for survival in urban communities. The verbal prowess 
of African American children played on sidewalks in urban spaces is a direct link 
to the popular culture, music and story-telling nature of what become commercial 
raps. This folklore of Black children builds confidence and prepares these children 
to meet and assess the world in which they find themselves.

Africans brought to American against their wills took with them a great sense 
of rhythm and song. Hand-clap games such as those involving elaborate clapping 
under raised legs, slapping thighs and chests rhythmically while reciting the 
rhyme can be traced to working in fields during Reconstruction, the rhythms and 
recitations resembling work songs. Note this common example of Handbone. It is 
performed in a call-and-response fashion.

Leader: Handbone, Handbone, where you been?  
Respondent: Round that corner drinking gin. 
Leader: Handbone, Handbone, what you know? 
Respondent: I’ll pick this corn and drink some more.5

Rhymes with claps such as this one were surely pass-the-time entertainment, like 
Little Sally Walker, which can be traced to the days of slavery. African American 
children today should know that their games, rhymes, and songs are from a long-
standing tradition of verbal strength maintained throughout the difficult times 
when education was prohibited for Black people. Another question arose: are 
contemporary games, rhymes, and songs, still functioning, and how?

My fear was that with so many contemporary distractions and trends, the 
advent of hundreds of cable TV stations, video games, headphones, and 
integration, these traditions are sometimes wearing thin. It was to document these 
traditions that I began this work. What I found is that these sidewalk songs, jump-
rope rhymes, and clap-hand games, these traditions of oral lore among African 
American children, continued to function as teaching tools as much a play.

African American folklife determines whether we grow up learning from our 
moms how to quilt or how to sing gospel. Folklore is the sum of African American 
jokes, stories, rhymes, and songs. Folklife combines the ways of African Americans 
and influences how Blacks pass on what we make and do for generations. 
Folklore is what all people learn outside of school, outside of church, the 

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traditions we pass on face-to-face, by word-of-mouth, generation-to-generation. 
Sidewalk songs, jump-rope rhymes, and clap-hand games are significant examples 
of the folklore of African American children: what we do among ourselves for 
ourselves, but what is passed on to us, mixed with what each age adds to it.

Verbal artistry among African American children is expressive and creative, 
although the forms are different. Children’s lore in New Orleans’ Black 
neighborhoods bears a necessary developmental function. Sidewalk songs pass on 
attitudes and knowledge of self, imitations of adult life and values, with distinct 
criticisms of adult life and society norms. This is demonstrated in such circle games 
as “When I was a baby.” There is nothing in the boomer repertoire like this one. 

In this circle game, an imitation game, “When I was a baby,” which looks 
so simple and fun on the surface, there is some resemblance to the antiphonal 
pattern, since one girl jumps into the center of the circle and begins the song, 
which is then repeated by the girls surrounding the caller. All in the circle sing the 
response together, adding physical representations of the actions of the particular 
subject. Literally, they recall how a woman develops and lives her life, how she 
experiences disappointment, and how she handles conflict. 

When I was a baby, baby, baby 
When I was a baby, baby, baby 
I went a wan a wan a wan wan wan (imitating baby sounds)

All night long. All night long. (This girl re-joins the circle, and another 
girl steps into the center of the circle reciting that next part. This 
swapping of the central leader continues with different girls leading 
until the game is completed. Depending on how many are involved, 
everyone will get a chance at the circle center; or in the case of just a 
few girls, the each new stage of a girl’s/woman’s life is lead).

When I was a girl, girl, girl 
When I was a girl, girl, girl 
I went a umph a umph, umph ump humph (imitating smiley faces 
while pretending to jump rope; but they actually swing an invisible 
jump rope)

All night long. All night long. 

When I was a teenager, teenager, teenager 
When I was a teenager, teenager, teenager 
I went a hum a hum hum hum hum (imitating a teen on the phone; 
the girls hold up one hand thumb up and forefinger out to resemble 
the headset of a phone.)

All night long. All night long. 

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When I got married, married, married 
When I got married, married, married, 
I went a kiss, a kiss, kiss, kiss, kiss (imitating a full-blown embrace, 
sticking out their lips pursed as in kissing; all movements animated 
and exaggerated throughout).

All night long. All night long. 

When I had a baby, baby, baby 
When I had a baby, baby, baby 
I went a rock, a rock, rock, rock, rock (imitating a woman rocking 
their baby to sleep or comforting the child held tightly in their arms).

All night long. All night long. 

When my husband beat me, beat me, beat me 
When my husband beat me, beat me, beat me 
I went a unh, a unh, unh, unh, unh (imitates the anguish of being 
severely beaten to the ground, afraid, hurt, crying out in pain).

All night long. All night long. 

When I beat my husband, husband, husband 
When I beat my husband, husband, husband 
I went a bam, a bam, bam, bam, bam (imitates vigorously fighting 
back in retaliation with no fear and profound vindication and power; 
they enact the beating of the husband to the ground, laughing all the 
way).

All night long. All night long. 

When I lost my baby, baby, baby 
When I lost my baby, baby, baby 
I went a sigh, a sigh, cry, cry, cry (imitates great grief, making crying 
faces all the while, sometimes laughing but fiercely pretending to cry).

All night long. All night long. 

When I died, died, died 
When I died, died, died 
I went a humph, a humph, humph, humph, humph (imitates what it is 
like to be dead, arms folded akimbo, faces stern).

All night long. All night long. (This ends the game).

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At the time, the core group of girls were aged six through ten. They lived within 
walking distance and most worshiped together, while a few attended St. Raymond 
Catholic School, just a few blocks east. They were not shy about reenacting their 
play and enjoyed having an adult audience. It was shocking to hear such young 
girls at play reflecting on the dominant gender themes of the day as well as the 
taboo topic of marital sex, resulting in birth, domestic violence, and the woman’s 
power not just to fight back but to successfully retaliate and live out her life.

Circle games allow everyone to play; no one is left out. Sometimes, they 
are elimination games; in this one case, it is not. “When I was a baby” is an 
imitation game, something like more common Simon Says, but it is much more 
contemporary and light years away from the child-like concerns of my youth. 
Here, the gender roles are clearly defined, yet the “little” girls are not fazed by the 
content; this is typical of what they witness on TV, in movies, in neighborhoods. 

At its core, children’s folklore in African American urban areas is not just play 
but a comment on the world. Some rhymes are downright vulgar, with profane 
shouts and responses, and others are more respectful, editing offensive words 
cleverly during the game with the kids not skipping a beat. Some attitudes are 
imposed by race, sex, family, and individual ethnic and economic situations. New 
Orleans, with its Black majority, imposes a dominant and varied and varied set of 
adult examples, values, barriers, and opportunities. How did these come to be?

As with all folklore, transmission is key. With the oral songs and rhymes of 
these sidewalk games, Black youth learn typically from other children. They learn 
these songs and rhymes from their parents, often before they can talk. In many 
ways, this is the earliest literacy of African American kids. Once in the children’s 
repertoire, sidewalk songs take the place of nursery rhymes and reflect pre-adult 
concerns. Children then learn them and pass them on to each other in the street, 
on the front porch, on the sidewalk, or in the public parks.

How do these elements function? Children’s folklore, in general, fulfils certain 
functions: it reflects and criticizes society and transmits values. For most kids, their 
lore entertains them, teaches them how to manipulate words, helps to develop 
their group identity, and creates a bond. Especially for Black kids, these rhymes 
and songs provide opportunities to practice “handling” authority and inform them 
of their sexual roles.

The sidewalk songs of children’s folklore perform a particularly important 
role in African American culture. When Black youth perform these rhymes and 
songs, they practice and learn to contribute to their rich African American verbal 
culture, a continuing historical legacy. By puberty, if not earlier, Black children 
must learn to “hold their own” for protection from the verbal abuse of their peers, 
sometimes avoiding or allaying physical abuse. It is a common Black custom to be 
able to “rap” oneself out of a street fight or “jive” your parents out of a deserved 
whipping. Therefore, this early verbal play becomes a vital link to what will later 
become “jiving,” “sounding,” “woofing,” or “selling wolf tickets,” especially “the 
dozens,” and eventually “rapping,” all of which are common African American 
verbal-dueling traditions. The dueling, dozens and rapping have been incorrectly 
attributed only to Black male culture. Girls may be the instigators of this tradition, 
and they participate in these early raps frequently with boys. From the start, boys 

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participate and play with girls to varying degrees depending on their exposure to 
sisters, girl cousins, and neighbors. Therefore, a Queen Latifa is no accident, and 
she is not just imitating a male rapping tradition. This is demonstrated in the group 
of youth that I researched, dubbed The Perlita Street Kids by their parents for the 
name of the street on which they lived and played at the time.

Any rules? Each youth is expected to contribute. If one doesn’t know a rhyme, 
he or she is expected to make one up or learn one from someone else. No one 
wants to be known as not able to “talk stuff.” These unspoken rules have existed 
for generations. In some cases, the environment creates a healthy competitive 
spirit, the kind that will produce a “jam” session as in Jazz where no one wins 
but everyone contributes creatively–which is the essence of “jamming” word play, 
and games creatively, communally. In other cases, kids can be cruel and pressure 
or taunt the person into producing, or the person will not be in the game, what 
is called “OUT” a fate considered worse than death. Nevertheless, the resulting 
product is children’s lore, African American style.

Topics range from familiar rhymes and songs to adult-style “bragging” 
strategies. These songs are much more relevant to their day–such as the one 
expressing their knowledge of the existence of crack cocaine. This example 
is sung to a sidewalk dance or stomp (a group line dance popular in Black 
communities long before country music line dances). It is a simple rhyme but 
shows a prophetic awareness of trouble:

Yo momma, yo daddy, they betta leave that pipe alone 
yo sista, yo brotha, they betta leave that crack alone 
yo auntee yo uncle, they betta leave that pipe alone 
Yo family you friends, they betta leave that crack alone

 (they do an elaborate turn)

Do wha’cha wanna, Do wha’cha wanna 
Do wha’cha wanna, Do wha’cha wanna

 (they do an elaborate turn)

Yo momma, yo daddy, they betta leave that pipe alone 
yo sista, yo brotha, they betta leave that crack alone

 — John, Sunni, Treshon, Natasha, Corey, Jason, 2 June 1990 

In this sidewalk song, the children are aware of the impending fate of “crack” 
cocaine addicts. Crack cocaine is an enemy of the people they love, and it 
becomes something to avoid firmly. Here, they perform a prophetic service to 
each other, reminding themselves of the boundaries they must face to achieve a 
long and healthy life.

From these brief examples, it is demonstrated that at an early age in New 
Orleans, African American children actively participate in their verbal development 

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trough the years prior to Katrina devastation. The rhymes were not collected in the 
schoolyard. Like my childhood decades prior, these kids lived in neighborhoods 
within a mile of each other and walked to each other’s homes to play after school. 
They brag, they duel, they dance, they sing of the world as they understand it. 
These rhymes, games, and raps serve to define group identity, address adult 
concerns, and help children learn verbal prowess and entertain one another. These 
sidewalk songs, jump-rope rhymes, and clap-hand games of African American 
children were still strong on the streets of New Orleans throughout the 1990s and 
early 21st century in the historic 7th Ward neighborhoods, as evidenced in the lore 
of the Perlita Street kids.6 

NOTES

1. Many thanks to folklorists Dr. Rosan Jordan and Dr. Frank de Caro, who 
guided and encouraged my early training in folklore; and additional special thanks 
to Dr. Joyce Marie Jackson, also folklorist at LSU, who pushed me to collect, and 
continued to provide opportunities for me to present this work at the African 
Heritage Stage of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival for a series of years.

2. Special thanks to Archivist Rachel Lyons and the New Orleans Jazz and 
Heritage Foundation Archives for saving my work; I am deeply indebted to you 
for all you do.

3. Many of our names can be dated some 300 years and accessible in the older 
resting places, St. Louis cemeteries No. 1, No. 2, and No. 3.

4. This collecting, for two summers at the end of the 1989 and 1980, was 
made possible by generous support from the Michigan State Museum Festival of 
Michigan Folklife, while I was there to present Detroit kids demonstrating Double 
Dutch.

5. I heard numerous variations of this hand-clap rhyme throughout my life in 
Louisiana, and also in Black communities where ever I lived in the Bay Area of 
California and in Detroit and even in Washington D.C. when I visited for research.

6. Once invited, I presented these kids performing their games and rhymes 
at the Louisiana State Folklife Festival twice in the 90s, and numerous times at 
the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival also in the 90s. Presenting our living 
traditions helps folklorists document contemporary culture. Festivals help everyone 
understand each other better and so promote respect as well as employment in 
the field for budding and experienced scholars. Certainly, it taught the children 
of Perlita Street a greater appreciation for their culture, exposed them to other 
cultures in an educational environment, and perhaps helped them develop a 
continued interest in folklore and folklife. Because the children did “perform” their 
traditions, the Jazz Festival paid each child $20.00 for the performance. No child 
participated without parental permission.

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WORKS CITED

Abrahams, Roger D. 1964. Deep Down in the Jungle, Negro Narrative Folklore from 
the Streets of Philadelphia. Hatboro, Pennsylvania: Folklore Associates.

______. 1969. Jump-Rope Rhymes, A Dictionary. Austin: University of Texas Press.
______. 1970. Positively Black. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc.
______. 1976.Talking Black. Rowley, Massachusetts: Newbury House Publishers.
Buckley, Bruce. 1966. Jump-Rope Rhymes: Suggestions for Classification and 

Study. Keystone Folklore Quarterly 2: 99-111.
De Caro, Frank. 1985. A History of Folklife Research in Louisiana. In Louisiana 

Folklife, A Guide to the State, ed. Nicholas R. Spitzer. Baton Rouge: Louisiana 
Folklife Program, Office of Cultural Development, Department of Culture, 
Recreation and Tourism, 125-29.

Dorson, Richard M. 1982. The State of Folkloristics from an American Perspective. 
Journal of the Folklore Institute 19 (2/3, May): 71-105.

Fielding, Alice. 1975. The Folklore of Children from Ages 9-11. Louisiana Folklore 
Miscellany 3 (5): 33-51.

Gaster, Sanford. 1995. Places of Childhood, 1915-30. The Oral History Review 22 
(2, Winter): 1-31. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the 
Oral History Association. http://www.jstory.org/stable/3675422 (accessed 25, 
March 2010).

Grider, Sylvia Ann. 1980. A Select Bibliography of Childlore. Western Folklore 39 
(3, July): 248-65.

______. 1980. The Study of Children’s Folklore. Western Folklore 39 (3, July): 159-
69.

Hampton, Joan Thompson. 1976-80. Children’s Jump-Rope Rhymes. Louisiana 
Folklore Miscellany 4: 73-81.

Hirschfeld, Lawrence A. 2002. Why Don’t Anthropologists Like Children? American 
Anthropologist, New Series 104 (2, June): 611-27.

Notes. 1971. Louisiana Folklore Miscellany 3 (2): 48-49.
Soileau, Jeanne. 1976-80. Jumping Rope in East Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana. 

Louisiana Folklore Miscellany 4: 146-154.
______. 1985. Louisiana Children’s Folklore. Louisiana Folklife, A Guide to State. 

Nicholas R. Spitzer, ed. Baton Rouge: Louisiana Folklife Program, Office of 
Cultural Development, Department of Culture, Recreation & Tourism, 12-34.

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45

geneTiC BuBBle wraP

kArin PhilliPs

When considering my own childhood, it becomes apparent that I simply was  
not a risk taker. In fact, the most dangerous game I ever participated in was 
sled riding in my neighborhood. The hill was steep and there was a building 
to be avoided at the bottom but there isn’t any way I can squeeze it under the 
heading of dangerous games. Luckily, I married an adrenaline-driven daredevil. 
His childhood stories quite literally make my jaw drop and his antics over the last 
couple of summers of high school unmistakably flash “DANGEROUS GAME” in 
brilliant neon.

The summer following tenth grade, my husband Scott and some of his friends 
from school would ride their bikes near where they lived. “It started in Chenango 
Bridge,” he explained. The boys would take turns jumping into the Chenango 
River from a rope swing hanging from a tree limb on shore. “It was exciting,” he 
said. “We didn’t even think about getting hurt. It was just fun and a good way to 
cool off.” This relatively mild level of risk-taking carried them through that summer 
and into the next. 

Toward the middle of the summer following eleventh grade, the same boys 
heard about a rope swing into “Boland’s Pond” from some older kids. This 
location was a little further down the river. Boland’s was a topsoil company and 
the land around their business was a stone quarry. They would excavate the soil, 
essentially creating gravel pits. One of the largest pits was filled with water that 
seeped from the river. At the edge of this pit was a tall tree, conveniently outfitted 
with a rope swing. The boys would take a running start and jump into the 
standing water from the bank. “It was about a ten to twelve foot drop before you 
hit the water,” according to Scott. The boys were undaunted. “This was even more 
exciting. The jump was better with more distance from the bank. It was great!” 
he enthused. It’s significant to note that these summer rituals were deeply rooted 
in the childhood underground, as none of the boys’ parents had any awareness 
of this activity. It’s also interesting that part of the appeal of these activities was 
defying the murky legends of injury or even death surrounding them. “You’d hear 
that so and so had broken his leg or even his neck,” Scott said. 

As the boys got older, the level of danger in this particular game was amplified. 
By the end of the summer before their senior year, Scott and his friends moved 
their sport to the bridge between Boland’s Pond and Chenango Valley High 
School. They would climb out on the steel beams under the bridge and drop 
approximately 25 feet into the river below. They would “preventatively” scan the 
river for potential dangers like logs or other debris. They made sure the surface 
looked clear, ignoring the potential threats below. This overconfidence and 
oblivion regarding real hazards is addressed in Children’s Folklore: A Handbook, 
“Dangerous games let children prove their courage and skill. Insulated by the 
assurance of youth, players may not hesitate to jump into a game that looks risky” 
(Tucker 2008, 36). Scott and his friends quite literally jumped into their dangerous 

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genetiC bubble wrAP PhilliPs

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game without a lot of consideration for the possible consequences. “I felt a little 
risk, sure, but what I really felt was freedom. I didn’t feel scared,” Scott shared.

The pinnacle of the boys’ jumping adventures and, ironically, the coup de 
grâce took place the summer after their graduation from high school. At this 
point the boys were no longer confined to the area reachable by bikes. They had 
motorcycles and cars to facilitate broadening the range of their fun. They spent the 
summer exploring various gorges in Ithaca, New York. One favored location had 
a rope swing that hung from a tree on a large cliff. “I felt a little trepidation,” Scott 
said. “I never went first. I had to swim downstream and climb all the way back up. 
It took quite a bit of time.” 

One hot day that summer a lot of kids were gathered at this location. “It was 
a party spot,” Scott explained. They heard some kids talking about the “devil’s 
punchbowl.” They followed some people there. “We followed these railroad 
tracks, walking along the top of a ravine. As we got closer I could hear a lot of 
activity. There were about twenty people in a little gathering spot. Beyond that 
spot was a narrow path to the edge of a sheer cliff. It looked like a punchbowl,” 
Scott remembered.

Scott also remembered the awe he felt at the height of the overhang some of 
the kids were jumping off of. “It was at least two telephone poles high,” he said. 
He and his friends received instructions from the “veteran” jumpers. Scott watched 
two of his friends jump ahead of him. “I was very reluctant,” he admitted. “Still, 
all eyes were on me and I felt that peer pressure. It was intense. I followed the 
directions I was given, pointed my toes, crossed my arms and jumped. The water 
was unbelievably cold. The impact jammed my knees up and almost into my face. 
My tailbone hurt so bad that I had trouble moving my legs to swim back. I swam 
with my arms.” 

The myriad ways in which this story could have ended tragically didn’t 
hit my husband until he was safely out of the water and experiencing a 
painful motorcycle ride home. “We really pushed it to the limit that day,” he 
acknowledged. “I knew how stupid it was. When it sunk in, I felt duped by my 
friends. I felt like I had cheated death. I learned to trust myself more.” 

When I hear the details of this dangerous game I wince. As the mother of three 
boys possessing their father’s thrill-seeking DNA, I shudder at the thought of the 
games they have yet to invent or participate in. I can only hope that my prudent 
DNA will temper their play, at least a little.

WORK CITED

Tucker, Elizabeth. 2008. Children’s Folklore: A Handbook. Westport: Greenwood 
Press.

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47

Failing To Fly, BuT Free Falling:  
JumPing as a Form oF Childhood release

PAmelA weintrAub

Throughout my childhood, I was usually the responsible one. Indeed, I was THAT 
kid — the child who thought about what would happen if we got caught playing 
Ding Dong Ditch, pointed out how terrible it would be if we got lost in the local 
nature preserve after night had fallen, explained why we should not go to that keg 
party at the beach, and so on. Part of this was a serious fear of getting in trouble, 
but another aspect was the fact that I was never allowed to go anywhere or do 
anything by my extremely overprotective mother, so if I managed to discourage 
my peers from going to places I wasn’t permitted (out in the neighborhood alone, 
the preserve, the beach, the mall, what have you), I would be preventing my own 
inevitable exclusion from such fun. However, despite my mother’s best attempts to 
keep me safe from the world (I could write an entire paper on that alone), I still 
found ways to push the boundaries of dangerous play — my jumping games.

Although prevented from engaging in certain activities at home, while on 
the schoolyard I was able to experiment with the laws of physics on a regular 
basis. While it was most definitely not intended, the way in which my elementary 
school’s playground was built easily facilitated a number of delightfully risky 
activities. Perhaps suffering from what Peter and Iona Opie termed “misplaced 
audacity,” where children take risks with common objects such as “knives, 
swings, and roller-towels” (Tucker 2008, 36), my friends and I utilized a number 
of playground structures in our pursuit of thrills. The first of these was a metal, 
dome-shaped, web-like construction named “the spider hut.” When we were little, 
our favorite thing to do was climb to the top of the “hut” (which was rather large, 
in retrospect), and drop our bodies through one of the spaces between the bars, 
dangling by our hands for as long as we could, and then letting go, falling six 
or seven feet to the ground below. This was a calmer form of jumping, because 
really, it was more of a carefully orchestrated drop and carried less risk than the 
variations we later engaged in. However, it was still quite high up and our parents 
would have had heart attacks if they had known about it.

When we grew older and moved to the “upper grades” section of the 
playground (since there were designated spaces for k-3 and 4-5), we upped the 
danger factor significantly. One favorite activity was to climb the acrobatic bars 
(which were two vertical metal bars with a single horizontal one held between 
them, and there were several of these structures at varying heights) and to jump, 
feet first, to the ground. These jumps ranged from three to probably ten or 
twelve feet in height, and there was concrete below (not a smart move on the 
school’s part). The higher you were willing to jump from, the braver you were 
considered to be. That said, it was perfectly acceptable if a person was only 
willing to jump from so high. However, if people climbed to a higher point, made 
a big deal about it, and then seemed like they were going to “chicken out” they 
often found themselves pushed. It was far worse to be pushed because not only 

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was it embarrassing (since one lost quite a bit of credibility afterwards), but it 
was also significantly more dangerous, since there was less time to prepare the 
jump properly. With respect to my experience, heights didn’t faze me, and the 
greater challenge was being able to climb the higher structures since I was so 
short. However, my taller friends were quite helpful in getting me up there, and 
when it came to jumping off, I was fearless. Occasionally I would get a scrape 
or bruise, and there were one or two of my classmates who got more seriously 
hurt (more than one sprained or broke a wrist), but that never really deterred us, 
since accidents usually happened with those who tried to jump from a certain 
height without experience or had not jumped properly.  However, despite the fact 
we plummeted a full story on a regular basis, this was not the most dangerous 
variation of “jumping” that we engaged in. That was saved for fifth grade.

Every recess during our final year of elementary school, there would be a mad 
rush on the part of the girls (for whatever reason, this variation failed to catch on 
with the boys) to grab one of the swings at the far end of the playground, away 
from the eyes of the teacher monitors. The closer swings, well within their view, 
were not suitable for what we had in mind---swing bouncing.  Swing bouncing 
was, and still is, an obsession at Forest Lake Elementary, and strangely enough, a 
tradition my year started, though I am told it is popular at other schools as well. 
The idea is to swing in a normal fashion, but at the same time try to swing as high 
as possible. Then, once maximum elevation is achieved, the swinger “bounces” 
off the seat and flies through the air, eventually landing several feet away. While 
dangerous in its own right due to the acceleration from the swinging, swing 
bouncing was particularly dangerous for us because of the five-foot-high metal 
fence that was set up several feet from the swings, running the length of the area, 
to protect passers-by from being kicked. 

Although it was a well thought out protective measure in theory, all it actually 
did was create a challenge for us bouncers. The key was to place your jump short 
(landing a couple feet before the fence), or long (clearing the fence). However, it 
was extremely difficult to clear the fence, and only a few of us (mostly the smaller, 
lighter ones) pulled it off. But the pursuit of this goal was quite fun. Yes, people 
hit the fence on a regular basis, but with the exception of one large dent made 
by a friend of mine (which is still there ten years later and apparently revered as 
a warning sign), most people bounced right off of it. The real danger was if one 
landed on the fence, which never happened while I was there. However, someone 
from my brother’s grade did break a leg on it four years later, so apparently it 
was possible. There also have been many attempts on the part of my old school 
to eradicate swing bouncing, but I still see it on the playground when I pass by 
during the summer.  

When I think about why jumping and swing bouncing appealed to me so 
greatly, I always go back to the feeling that it created. The sensation of flying 
through the air, hurtling towards the ground, anticipating the impact — it was 
all exhilarating. There was something about being utterly free while falling that 
gave me a rush. I think there was the fact that when I jumped, I was completely 
in charge of myself. My life, my body, literally depended on my ability to land 
properly. Being raised in an environment where I was never in control of anything 

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and cooped up beyond all reason (to this day, I cannot walk around my incredibly 
white bread, suburban neighborhood alone … at least as far as my parents 
know), there was something wonderful about flat-out defying every single rule of 
safety and toying with gravity. As mentioned in Children’s Folklore: A Handbook, 
“dangerous games let children prove their courage and skill” (Tucker, 36), and 
I think that for me, jumping was my way of proving to myself that even if my 
parents did not believe so, I could handle myself in the outside world.

WORK CITED

Tucker, Elizabeth. 2008. Children’s Folklore: A Handbook. Westport: Greenwood 
Press.

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The aPProPriaTion oF a CommerCial Trademark:  
The golliwog as a CulTural marker 

robert mACgregor

Peebles is an ancient small rural town in the border region of Southern Scotland. 
It was granted a Royal Burgh Charter in 1140 by King David I of Scotland. A major 
claim to fame is that it is the home of and a key breeding center for the world-
famous Border collie.

Infamy surrounded the town in June 1991, when what should have been 
a joyous annual children’s parade turned into a national incident over a small 
number of children who were “blackened” up in a minstrel/Samboesque mode 
of dress. Critics of the costumes and “blacken-faced” young people saw them as 
golliwogs, a highly criticized doll-like figure from Enid Blyton’s “Noddy Series” of 
children’s books. Others saw them as a golliwog, the international trade character, 
of a major British jam manufacturer, James Robertson and Sons. Numerous 
dimensions that surrounded this incident and many other related points of view 
will be critically analyzed.

The Golliwog, a Brief History

Historically, in Britain, Florence K. Upton (1873-1922) used a golliwog figure in 
a series of children’s books. Soon after the publication of the first book in 1895 
it became a commercially used symbol to sell a large array of products, such as 
toys, games, dolls, postcards, novelties, dishes, packaging, and, in the 1920s, food 
products. From the late 1920s until 2001, the golly was used by Robertson’s, the 
jam manufacturer (Nicholson 1981; Hartlap 1984, Fisher 1975).

Throughout the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, controversy has ranged from 
the local grassroots to public debates, discussions of the golliwog in the House of 
Commons, letters to her Majesty the Queen, and many other avenues of discourse. 
All of these discussions have basically focused on whether or not the golliwog was 
a cherished doll, a cultural icon, an integral toy/doll that many British children 
had played with and loved; or was it a racist image, a play object that could instill 
racist values in children and psychologically harm minority, non-white British 
children?

January of 1987 marked a watershed point in this ongoing heated debate. 
British book publisher Macdonald Purnell decided to delete the Golliwogs from 
Enid Blyton’s “Noddy Series.” The director of children’s publishing at Macdonald 
Purnell said:

We have produced a completely new Noddy library and the decision 
was taken to revise the text, the illustrations and characters. A 
decision was taken to take the golliwogs out. A lot of people feel 
uncomfortable about gollies either because they are felt to be racist or 
because they always seem to be villains (Bates 1987, 2).

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The new Noddy books of 1987 were welcomed by the Commission for Racial 
Equality (C.R.E.). A spokesperson said, “We had a number of complaints from 
people who felt that the depiction of the Noddy characters was insensitive.”

Writers and critics of children’s literature Dixon (1978) and Mullan (1987) 
discussed at length the serious, damaging implications that these grotesque, 
malevolent characters may perhaps have conveyed to young minds. Dixon 
believed that the golliwog was a part of most children’s fictional nursery. 
He suggested focusing upon two considerations. Firstly, the golliwog was a 
standardized racial caricature, the Sambo, the minstrel, a creation of whites. 
Secondly, the names of the characters were widely used as racial epithets.

Seemingly, this grotesque doll, Dixon believed, was meant to confirm the 
connection and association of fear with black faces in particular. These naughty, 
mean, evil and menacing roles allowed Blyton to portray blackness a la golliwogs 
a sufficient cause for their dislike by young readers. Her “The Three Golliwogs,” 
published in the early 1940s, had three golliwogs called Golly, Wollie, and Nigger 
who were disliked by Angelae, their mistress, because of “the blackness of their 
faces.” The names, as stated previously, did not change until 1973, and the “Three 
Golliwogs” book was sold into the early 1990s. As early as 1964 some libraries 
phased out the Blyton books.

Mullan reinforced the outlook that it was extremely important not to perpetuate 
racism by drawing misleading stereotypes of cultures and races in literature, 
especially those focused on children, where the images tended to work on a 
symbolic and unconscious level.

As Elaine Moss (1986) has argued, the 1970s were years in which “Britain was 
coming to terms with its post-Imperial role as a multicultural nation” and this 
had its effect on the content of the content of children’s books. The editors of 
Children’s Books for a Multi-Cultural Society (1985) argued that unless:

we want our children to develop an inward-looking, insular 
perspective, educating them for the future must imply educating them 
to live and play a positive role in a society where cultural diversity is 
recognised and respect (Mullan 1987, 124).

Wilkinson (1984, 1987) discussed the psycho-cultural analysis and impact of 
black dolls and role stereotypes. She believed the vivid symbolic artifact called 
the golliwog was a most grotesque example of frightening images. Ironically, she 
stated, psychologists continued to criticize children’s play with golliwogs “on the 
grounds that the black face, the pop eyes and the red mouth are the unconscious 
source of many childish nightmares” (Wilkinson 1987, 21).

Forster (1989) condemned Blyton’s The Little Black Doll (1937, 1964) because 
of its character ‘Sambo’ and Oliver Tinkle’s The Golliwog (1982). Forster stated the 
golliwog had rapidly established itself among the characters of the English nursery, 
but by way of its longstanding use as a commercial trademark, it had entered the 
repertory of contemporary racist abuse (73) ; more on this point later.

Opposition to Macdonald Purnell’s decision was immediate. Critics of the 
changes saw it as a process of degollification, a bowdlerisation of the 1940s 

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classic. Newspaper columnists called opponents of the golliwog ‘barmy’, ‘the 
loony left’, left-wingers, labour councillors, left-wing councils dividing the right 
from the left with political labels such as those forementioned. Newspapers that 
carried articles on the Macdonald Purnell decision would include the News of the 
World, the Daily Mail, the Daily Star, the Guardian, the Sun, the Daily Mirror, 
and the Daily Telegraph; see works cited for more complete details.

As previously stated, many other forms of protest against the golliwog gained 
national momentum in the 1980s. Although protestations against the trademark 
had begun approximately 30 years previous to the Blyton affair, historically, 
Robertson’s golliwog appears to have been used by the firm since about 1910. 
It was in 1928, however, that the lapel badge began to be used as a three-token 
redemption item. Children and mothers were encouraged to buy a jar of jam, 
cutting from the label a small stamp-like token, collect three, mail them to the 
company, and receive an enamel badge of the golliwog. To date, well over twenty 
million badges of the golliwog have been distributed. The golliwog also appeared 
on cups, towels, pens, pencils, writing pads, erasers, cutlery, ties, and other items, 
all purchasable from Robertsons (see examples).

One major campaigner against the perceived racist promotional items was 
the National Council Against Racism in Children’s Books; other institutions 
would include The Commission for Racial Equality, the Greater London Council, 
the Camden Council for Community Relation, Searchlight magazine, Dragon’s 
Teeth, the North Lewisham Project, the George Jackson Media Collective, the 
Merseyside Labour Council, and many, many individuals from various walks of 
life. All protesting discourses intersected on the complex, multidimensional, widely 
circulated stereotype. The ‘grotesque’ golliwogs, whether portrayed in books, 
commercial trademarks, or numerous and varied commercial items, all had a wide, 
simple grin, large, bulbous, round eyes, a shock of fuzzy/wool-like hair, and thick 
lips. The clothes are always in bright, basic colours: usually red blue, green and 
yellow. The trousers frequently have blue and white stripes; the brightly colored 
jacket is short, and the golliwog usually wears a bow tie. This image clearly 
indicated the historical associations, the southern Sambo, the Minstrels of ‘burnt 
cork’, vaudeville, theatrical fame and infamy. One must also remember that until 
the 1973 Pan edition, when golliwogs’ names change, the three Blyton characters 
were called ‘Nigger’, ‘Wollie’, and ‘Golly’. These racial and racist epithets were 
changed to ‘Wiggie’, ‘Waggie’, and ‘Wollie’.

Examination of racial labels and their conventional meanings, as in Blyton’s 
golliwog trio, reveals some insights into Britain’s racial outlook towards such 
names; that is, they were acceptable. MacGregor (1993) highlighted examples 
where the word ‘golly’ and golliwog epithets were used in numerous social 
settings. Salman Rushdie, in Hamilton’s New Yorker article (1996), recalled the 
school life of the well-known author in England. In 1961, at the age of 13, Rushdie 
was sent to Rugby Public School in England, His time there was one of taunts and 
anti-Indian jokes. He described catching a studymate crayoning “wogs go home” 
on a wall. The slogan, he thought, was clearly aimed at him. He said, “I went 
insane … I banged him as hard as I could against the wall he was writing on “ 
(94). Rushdie has called this a determining moment in his school career; indeed, 

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his whole attitude toward life in England. It was the moment when he learned 
how to strike back. Later, in an end-of-term satirical revenue during his final year, 
he heard himself lampooned: “What is this shape ‘midst the nebulous fog?’ Merely 
the resident Bradley House wog” (95).

Rushdie, in his book of essays, Imaginary Homelands (1991), openly discussed 
racism in Britain; he believed that the English language historically coined 
many terms of racial abuse such as ‘nigger’ and ‘wog’ and posed the question, 
“Can there be another language with so wide-ranging a vocabulary of racist 
denigration”(130). He went on to say, “Yes, the golliwog, too; at football grounds, 
black players are taunted with the cry, “Get back on your jam jar’” (146). This last 
example was widely used as one of many racist slogans that football hooligans 
hurled at black soccer players in the 1980s.

Describing in some detail numerous examples of racial labeling and role 
stereotypes from various written sources, we now turn our attention to the 1991 
Golly Parade at the Peebles Beltane Festival.

The Golliwog Controversy: Beltane Festival

On February 15, 1991, The Peebleshire 
News reported that the wearing of 
golliwogs costumes had been banned 
from the 1991 Beltane Festival Parade 
in Peebles. It was found that the 
costume contravened the spirit of the 
Regional Guidelines on Multicultural 
Education. The costumes owned by 
the Beltane Committee and stored at 
the town’s Kingsland Primary School 
were not to be used in the Children’s 
Parade. In 1990, a Mrs. Margaret 
Macintosh, a retired schoolteacher living 
in Edinburgh expressed her concern 
about the costumes She was shocked 
when she saw ten children riding on 
the back of a truck dressed as golliwogs 
and in blackface. She thought that the 
costumes and blackface were racist and 
she offered fifty pounds to help replace 
the gowns. The Festival Committee met 
with the local school board and the 
“no” golliwog decision was reached, 
reluctantly.

It is worthwhile to note that the 
Regional Guidelines on Multi-cultural 
Education were established in 1986 by a special working group under the title 
“Multi-Cultural Education in Primary Schools.” It was up to the head teachers to 

Figure 1. Marchers in the Beltane 
parade in Peebles, 1991.

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decide on the implementation of the Guidelines and until Mrs. Macintosh’s protest 
no one locally had thought about or given their opinions on the Beltane costumes. 
The document stated: “Everyone involved in education must instill in children a 
respect for themselves and other human beings regardless of race, color, or creed.” 
It was not clear why it took five years for the guidelines to be applied to the 
Beltane costumes and why other stereotypical costumes — Arabs, Chinese —  
were also not affected and eliminated.

Once the banning decision was made public, there arose much local protest 
against that outcome. The first major player to enter the fray was the former 
principal and teacher of history at Peebles High School. Ted Smith “begged” the 
committee to reconsider its decision. Part of the text of his letters follows:

Two of the highlights of the Beltane Festival are the Children’s 
procession and the parade of floats containing numerous characters, 
some of which represent real-life people but not all. The rest may 
be mythical creatures, animals, or even toys such as soldiers and 
golliwogs. The latter simply depict dolls or inanimate objects which 
like teddy bears are usually to be seen on a child’s pillow. To pretend 
that they are racially offensive is so ludicrous that one is inclined to 
retort ‘You cannot be serious’ (Keddie 1991, 1).

Mr. Turnbull, the chairperson, of the annual general meeting for the Festival, 
went on to read a second letter that had been sent to a national newspaper. 
Scott Kerr believed that Mrs. Macintosh’s offer of fifty pounds was offensively 
patronizing. He believed that she evidently failed to understand that education 
was about establishing children’s community identity and had nothing to do with 
indoctrinating socialist shibboleths. This is an interesting last comment, particularly 
since it invokes the word ‘socialist,’ which has somewhat specific politically 
ideological overtones. This reference to socialism and the political left reappeared 
in numerous ways throughout the Golliwog debate.

During the week of March 15, 1991, the Beltane Festival Committee announced 
that it had reached a compromise with the head teachers of the three local primary 
schools. The members felt that under the Education Guidelines covering Multi-
Cultural Education in Schools the following changes would be made:

As far as the Beltane Committee is concerned these costumes were 
never intended to be seen as any form of racial jibe, but were 
meant to represent a Golliwog doll, as they have done for many 
years. However, we agree that perhaps the term ‘Golliwog’ was now 
outdated and could, in some eyes, cause offence.

The Golliwog costumes will be used within new characters to 
be created, called Rag Dolls. They will be placed in the Beltane 
Programme under ‘Toyland.’

It is hoped that this clarification of the much loved character will end 
this controversy (Golliwogs 1991, 1, 2).

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The statement did not specify if the new characters would be “blacked up,” but 
one committee member believed that the black make-up would cover the entire 
face and not leave white rings around the eyes and the mouth, as had been 
the case with the previous golliwogs. He believed that the woolly wigs would 
continue to be used.

The golliwog compromise did not succeed and one week later, it was 
announced by lan Thorburn that although there had been initial agreement, the 
staff of Kingsland Primary School, who had to handle the costumes, refused to 
accept the compromise. On March 22, the school staff gave Mr. Thorburn the 
following statement:

Although it was felt after a meeting between Beltane Committee 
office-bearers and the head teachers of Peebles Primary schools that a 
compromise could be reached as to how the golliwog’s costumes may 
be used in future years, this has proved not to be the case.

The staff of Kingsland feel that to use the costumes with 
accompanying blackface and hair is unacceptable.

It is with regret, therefore, that we have decided that the costumes be 
returned to the Beltane Committee (It’s Goodbye Gollies 1991, 1).

Head teacher of Kingsland Mrs. Marlene Galashan, who had agreed to the 
compromise solution of renaming the dolls, said that her staff believed that the 
costumes were still “golliwogs with another name” and felt unable to administer 
them (Golliwogs Renamed 1991). Reaction to the banning of the golliwogs was 
quick and, at times, demeaning. Ex-Provost Alex Walker told the Peebleshire News:

I can contain myself no longer. As far as I can see there are a few 
jackaroos who are posing a threat to our way of life and creating 
problems where none existed.

Howard Purdie, the local self-styled bard of Traquair, had the following satirical 
article published in the local newspaper. He called Mrs. Macintosh a Mrs. Mary 
Maclntrouble who, at 91, objected to the Peebles police wearing black uniforms: 
“Your policemen, I see a black-and-white minstrel. That is a racial stereotype and 
should not be tolerated.” When she was asked what sort of uniform would fit the 
situation in Peebles:

“Oh, I envisage something really colourful,” trilled the excitable lady 
who used to teach Mixamotosis at the Golliwog’s Primary School. 
“Something like funny-worded t” shirts, tartan boxer shorts and 
American baseball caps.”

“After all, our friendly bobbies should keep up with fashionable 
trends” (1991).

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In the satire, Mrs. Maclntrouble sent the fifty pounds to the desk sergeant for 
new-style uniforms. The bard asked the policeman, Al Jolson, aged 113, if he was 
concerned about the lady in question.

“Mammy!” sang the policeman, frantically waving his white-gloved 
hands. “I’d walk a million miles for one of your smiles, Mammy!”

Eyes bulging enormously, our friendly bobby tap-danced on the pavement outside 
the police station, causing acute embarrassment to a person from Edinburgh 
(Keddie 1991).

By May 31, the controversy had reached a national audience and more and 
more attention was focused on the parade and the town. Sides in the issue were 
chosen, and it was rumored that the National Front would be at the Festival to 
defend the pro-golliwog side and that anti-racists groups would give their support 
to the ban the golliwog position. The situation was getting out of hand. There was 
also a proposed mass “black-up” by Peebleans protesting Mrs. Macintosh’s ‘outside 
interference’ in seeking to have the golliwogs banned.

A Mr. White, a local businessman, put up a prize of fifty pounds for the ‘Best 
Beltane Golly.’ Mr. Edge, a local hotel owner, announced that he would change 
the name of his hotel, The Green Tree, to The Golliwog’s Rest, for June 21 and 
22. Doug Mann, the Peebles singer-songwriter, saw his protest song “I Wanna Be 
a Golly in the Beltane Parade” become a local cu!t hit and eventually sell almost 
2,000 copies (Mann 1991). A well-known black dancer and television personality, 
Clive Donaldson, would support the pro-golliwog group. Ironically, his stage 
name is Wiggi, which is one of the golliwogs in the Enid Blyton series The Three 
Golliwogs. He read some of the newspaper reports, and he was not offended at all 
by the golliwog costumes.

Two weeks before the six days of festivities, some of the local officials started 
to worry about the “untold damage” to the event and to the future well-being 
of the event. An editorial of June 7, 1991, tried in an objective manner to clearly 
outline the two positions in the golliwog controversy. The writer went on to 
say that in fact the picture of the pros and cons of the golliwog were more 
complicated than they seemed and the nuances might be lost in some of the 
stories that were published in the tabloid press. A golliwog parade might be 
portrayed as some kind of Ku Klux Klan rally in a red-neck backwater of Scotland. 
Throughout the newspaper articles, there appeared to be a growing acceptance 
that there would be a golly protest parade. Seeing this protest as an inevitability, 
the local authorities pleaded with the would-be marchers to take to the street on 
Friday night and not to interfere with the Saturday’s Red Letter Day Parade for the 
local children.

Throughout the major protest time frame, the Peebleshire News started a 
“Golliwog Forum” to allow people to voice their opinions with letters to the 
newspaper. From February 22 to June 28, 1991, 37 letters were printed in the 
paper. From February 22 to June 28, 1991, 37 letters were printed in the paper. 
There were twenty-eight letters for keeping the golliwog costumes, eight against 
keeping the costumes, and one neutral reply; approximately seventy-five percent 

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of the respondents wanted to keep the golliwog costumes and the woolly hair and 
the blacked face.

Trying to discover just how long the golliwog imagery had been part of the 
children’s parade was difficult. Some of the age estimates say that the golliwogs 
had been in the festivities since 1901 (ninety years), one said seventy years or 
sixty years. Whatever date was the real one was not that important; what was 
more germane was that the tradition of the golliwog was old and firmly fixed and 
accepted by the majority of the respondents. Initially, Mrs. Macintosh was the lone 
dissident, with some slowly growing support.

The major theme that repeatedly appeared in the golliwog support letters was 
basically that the costume and the blackface were traditional images that were part 
and parcel of Britain’s heritage. The image was simply that of a harmless doll and 
only that, with no possible racist connotations.

Numerous people also strongly indicated that Mrs. Macintosh was a limousine 
liberal from Edinburgh, a sociologist, and not a true native Peeblean (a 
Gutterbluid). In fact, Mrs. Macintosh was born in Peebles and had worked in the 
community before moving to Edinburgh. This idea of an outsider causing trouble 
in a local community was echoed time and time again, as my on-site interviews 
and correspondence will show.

As a Stoorie Foot (someone who had left the community), Mrs. Macintosh 
defended her opinions and her six-month campaign to get rid of the golliwogs in 
the following manner:

1.  She firmly believed that this was not the most important issue 
but it is an issue. She believed that to many people the golliwog 
was an offensive image.

2.  The abusive term ‘wog’ which black people have to endure 
daily comes from this innocent source.

3.  Britain in general was becoming more racist and there were 
many ways of combating it. This protest was her way. She 
believed that schools should be promoting positive images of 
all ethnic and racial groups. She believed that golliwogs were 
unhelpful and were an impediment to good teaching.

4.  Her offer of a cash donation for the cost of the replacement 
costumes was neither generous nor patronizing. She felt if 
change occurred because of her action she should contribute to 
that change (Macintosh 1991, 7).

For the persons who saw the costumes as unacceptable, their basic point was that 
the United Kingdom was becoming a multi-racial society where greater tolerance 
and humanity to others were a necessity. Peebles was seen as a town that was 
parochial, insular and unsympathetic to the needs and feelings of ethnic minorities.

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What I have tried to convey in the previous pages about the golliwog is that the 
image and name, in many different forums, have been controversial for many years. 
Considering the length of the controversy and the widely debated, widely reported 
nature of the various incidents, it is difficult to believe that some people of Peebles 
were not aware of the incidents; more and more the image of the golliwog was 
being seen as racist by a substantial segment of the population in Britain.

Within the town itself, a number of local “poets” and a well known folk singer 
had their works published and recorded which in themselves are revealing, The 
three verses of George Lewis clearly showed his sentiment and the frequent tie-in 
to the Robertson’s jam product:

“THE BIRTH OF A RAG DOLL”  
Sin-How nice to learn my Golliwog wasn’t just a jolly wog, but sad his 
smiling black friendly face, not longer will my table grace.

The golden shreds, and orange jelly too, hot buttered toast, and tea 
to brew, there’s something missing, this I know, I don’t want my 
Golliwog to go.

But nothing now can bring him back, you see his face was much too 
black for two-bob-bits afraid to see, he’s just another chap, like thee 
and me (1991).

Part of the wording in “The Birth of a Rag Doll” clearly echoed the long held 
outlook by the traditionalists that the golliwog image is nothing more than a doll, 
a cultural artifact, of folkloric and commercial Britain; note the references to jams. 

Perhaps the artistic endeavor with the greatest longevity was Doug Mann’s 
recording of “I Wanna Be A Golly in the Beltane Parade” (Golly Song Released 
1991, 2). The words suggest the importance of rules, the interference by outside 
forces, yet acknowledge the golly problem did exist. Doug eventually became 
so identified with the song that he was called “The Golly Man.” All the sales, the 
attention, and the controversy apparently delighted the artist. These words were 
recorded from the tape of the song sent to the author by the writer Doug Mann:

I WANNA BE A GOLLY IN THE BELTANE PARADE

I’d just one ambition when I was but a boy, Just one ambition tae fill 
my heart with job,

No to enter a profession or tae tak a trade  
But just to be a golly in the Beltane Parade.

Chorus: 

In the Beltane parade, in the Beltane parade, 
I wanna be a golly in the Beltane parade.

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A wifie up in Edinburgh frustrated aw’ my plans, Declaring golly’s 
racial and said they should be banned, She read it in some guidelines 
and guidelines must be right, And who would are tae argue when it’s 
Doon in black and white

Tae dress as an Egyptian I hear wid be just fine, 
A geisha or a gaucho frae distant Argentine, 
A songie Hielan laddie or ev’n an Injun brave, 
So what’s so wrong with gollies in the Beltane Parade?

Peebles golly problem is important there’s nae doubt, Ye’d think from 
a’ bickering, sae bitter is the rage, Small wonder they’re a symbol on a 
jar o’marmalade.

The Parade and The Gollies’ Protest

The first evidence of a “golly” protest took place on Wednesday, when two gollies 
waded across the River Tweed. Some say there were fifty; some counted seventy-
six, and other observers say over one hundred golliwog protesters marched in 
the parade. The actual figure was not all that important, but the fact did remain 
that despite the national media attention given to the event a sizeable section 
of the community dressed as gollies and blackened their faces, all to protest the 
withdrawal of the ten children’s golly costumes. Some of the titles and images that 
I researched include the following: Kingsland Escapees (Primary School “home” 
of the costumes), Gollie Busters (Ghost Busters film), Golly For Us, I am no Golly, 
Robertsons, Oily and his golliwog, Persil washes gollies whiter, Jollie Gollies, Rev. 
I. M. Golly, A Funeral Cortege, A Golly Detector Van, and Mrs. Maclntrouble. For 
some of the actual costumes that were used in the parade, see figure 1.

Rumors had circulated throughout the town on Friday that contingents of 
the National Front and the Anti-Racist League would be making an appearance, 
but they did not prevail. Nevertheless the media was out in force, and a BBC 
television crew did record the parade. Their interviewer and spokesperson was 
the black actor Craig Charles. Charles told the viewers of the eventual program 
“Them and Us” that he found the golliwog costumes “a hideous caricature of 
black people and offensive.” After interviewing the owner of the Green Tree Hotel 
who had changed its name to The Golly Rest for two days, he turned to the still 
running camera and said: “I think the people of Peebles need a good kick up the 
backside.”

Some other media personnel believed that the golly protesters showed “a good 
humored gesture of defiance.” Mrs. Galashan, of Kingsland Primary School, closed 
off the school’s involvement by saying:

As an educational establishment we are concerned with the academic 
and social education of our pupils in preparing them for life in the 
modern world. We must not be seen to promote anything that might 
be taken as racially offensive.

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Sadly, however, the staff of Kingsland Primary believed they had been let down 
by the Border’s area School administration. Mrs. Galashan took a swipe at the 
educationalists by saying:

We have not actually had any official backing from any official body 
even among professionals, the whole of the Region. I don’t know 
what that says, but I find it rather sad (It’s Goodbye Gollies 1991, 1).

As one writer from the region wrote: “If golliwog costumes in a children’s parade 
are an anachronism they are not alone. Why it happened this year, and not during 
the Jam Jar row of the ‘70s, is still a mystery.”

Cultural Markers and the Appropriation of Names and Images 

Said (1993) believed that self-definition is one of the activities practiced by all 
cultures. It has a rhetoric, a set of occasions, such as festival, and a local and 
regional acceptance and familiarity all its own. Peebles had its Beltane Festival and 
parade for close to one hundred years.

This festival and parade were part of the local cultural traditions. In 1991 an 
‘outsider’ threatened the longevity and continuation of a black-face’ tradition. The 
‘insiders,’ the locals, took to the walls and defended this cultural icon atavistically. 
According to Said, people were mobilized, throwing their outlooks and discourses 
back to an earlier imperial, colonialistic time (1993, 37). He also believed that 
culture comes to be associated, often aggressively, with a nation that differentiates 
‘US’ from ‘THEM.’

Rehin (1975, 1981) discussed the long history of the Harlequin character, Jim 
Crow, to blackface minstrels in Victorian London and its seaside resorts. Hern 
(1967) discussed blackfaced minstrelsy in England’s seaside resorts and theatres. 
Pickering (1986) was interested in how minstrelsy symbolically worked out 
questions about the status of white Victorians posed within a framework of social 
and biological and class orders and distinctions. He went on to say that minstrelsy 
in Britain was responsible for crystallizing and establishing certain stereotypes of 
blacks and black ‘racial’ characteristics in Britain. In helping to shape a symbolic 
lexicon that people carried away in their minds after leaving minstrel shows, the 
presentations contributed to the development of racial prejudice. Later, when 
scapegoating took place towards blacks and other visible minorities, they had a 
ready-made lexicon of derogatory ideas, images, and names at hand: ‘Sambo’, 
‘Wog’, ‘Golliwog’, and ‘Nigger’.

As of November 2000, this lexicon, this ideological legacy in Britain had still 
to be overcome (Pickering 87). Lively (1999) briefly mentioned the successful 
television show in Britain ‘The Black and White Minstrel Show,’ which, in the 
1960s, attracted an audience of over twenty million viewers on approximately fifty 
percent of Britain at that time. It ran until 1978. Even today, a continuing debate 
appears in the media concerning AI Jolson impersonators who appear in British 
benevolent venues and local halls (Kuttner et al. 1987).

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Britain has a long tradition of differentiating blacks as ‘THEM’ from its white 
population as ‘US,’ the insiders; this ideological outlook almost always is discussed 
with some degree of xenophobia. Culture and its racial markers provide a 
source of identity. The numerous arguments that have been presented in this 
paper against changing the cultural icon known as the golliwog were linked 
to the ‘loony left’ a liberal discourse and philosophy associated with hybridity 
and multiculturalism. Culture conceived in this way can become a protective 
boundary, an enclosure supported in some instances by manufactured commercial 
constructions such as the golliwog stereotype.

Ziff and Rao (1997) have defined cultural appropriation as ‘the taking’ from 
a culture that is not one’s own of intellectual property or cultural expressions. 
Expressions include artifacts, history and knowledge (1). Cultural appropriation 
is a multidimensional phenomenon. In the case of the golliwog, the ‘black-faced’ 
minstrel-like figure, where and when and how did the act of cultural blackening 
one’s face begin? Lively and Rehlins both discussed the very origins of the practice 
of’ ‘blacking up.’ In the context of English Morris dancing, Lively traces its origins 
to Africa and especially Morocco. The French Harlequin, or Italian Arlecchino, 
may have had its origins in the late Middle Ages. Rehlins discussed the early 
English example of 1377, when the Lord Mayor of London visited King Richard 
II at Kensington. Then and there mummers disguised as African princes, for 
example, danced and entertained the audience. In 1510, at the court of Henry 
VII, foreign ambassadors were entertained by Henry in a ‘blackface’ disguise, 
dressed as a Turk accompanied by twelve torchbearers “like Moreskoes, their 
faces blacke” (Rehlins 1975, 686). The humorous Negro made his appearance 
on the English stage in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Throughout 
most of the nineteenth century Negro minstrelsy was popular as vaudeville, 
theatrical entertainment. The idea, the process of taking, appears to have a long, 
long tradition: maybe first African, then European, with other appropriations of 
the Jim Crow representational format from America. The doll-like images, the 
representations of a minstrel-like, Samboesque figure, however were already 
widely seen and accepted by large sections of the British public. The stereotype 
of the dandified, brightly clothed persona of the black comic figure had already 
been somewhat fixed with British theatrical and other venues of popular culture, 
parades, dances, children’s puppet shows, jokes, cartoons, and vernacular 
expressions, for example. What seems to have happened is a chronological 
serialization of cultural appropriation taking place over many centuries.

The pro-golliwog protesters in 1991 were a fleeting continuation of this 
adaptational process. They basically converted a ‘black-faced’ brightly costumed 
child into a somewhat parallel, similar image, the Robertson’s golliwog. Much 
of the discourse and protestations for and against the golliwog clearly used the 
commercial trademark as the anchor, the cornerstone for all discussions.

In 1991 the golliwog, as a cultural icon, was part of the symbolically 
constructed social order of Britain. However, as we have previously discussed 
in this work, there has been a growing demand from 1950 to the present, for 
a recognition and re-allocation, of social status by visible minorities in British 
society. The historically collective identity was fragmenting, due mainly by the 

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large influx of non-whites, and images such as the golliwog were oriented and 
constructed with the view of a white Britain.

With the growing awareness of their own collective identity and power, black 
Britons and their supporters began to express their displeasure with numerous 
institutions (publishing houses and football teams and manufacturers, for example) 
and demanded change. There was a victory in 1991. The Beltane Festival stopped 
the ‘black-faced’ dolls. Robertson’s and Sons, in 2000, continued to use the 
golliwog trade character. The pressure for change in the symbolic cultural capital 
in Britain is changing, but resistance to change also presently continues into the 
new millennium.

WORKS CITED

Akass, John. 1987. I Can’t Bear It. Daily Express (5 January): 9.
Barmy 87! The Sun (2 January): 17.
Bates, Stephen. 1987. Golliwogs Lose their Place in Noddy’s Tales. Daily Telegraph 

(2 January): 17.
Bell, Colin. 1987. Al Jolson Lookalike Is Blacked. Daily Express (28 March): 25. 
Black And White Set? 1986. The Standard. (23 October): 14. 
Blyton, Enid. 1951. Here Comes Noddy Again. London: Sampson Low, Marston and 

Co., Ltd. 
Breton, Raymond. 1984. The Production and Allocation of Symbolic Resources: 

An Analysis Of The Linguistic And Ethnocultural Fields In Canada. The 
Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 21 (2): 123-44. 

Camden CCR Campaign. 1980. Dragon’s Teeth 2 (September): 6. 
Clark, Beverly Lyon. 1992. American Children’s Literature; Background and 

Bibliography. American Studies International 30:1 (April): 4-40.
Cockrill, Pauline. 1997. Teddy Bears and Soft Toys. Buckinghamshire, England: 

Shire Publications Ltd.
Deleting Golliwogs. 1987. The Daily Telegraph (2 January): 16. 
Dixon, Bob. 1978. Catching Them Young 1. London: Pluto Press. 
Dixon, Bob. 1980. Money For Jam. Dragon’s Teeth 2:3 (September): 15.
Ezard, John. 1987. Outlook Not All Black For Golly. The Guardian (2 January): 3. 
Fisher, Marjery. 1975. Who’s Who In Children’s Books: A Treasury of the Familiar 

Characters of Childhood. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. 
Forster, Imogen. 1985. I Love My Golly but ... Dragon’s Teeth 21 (Spring).
______. 1989. Nature’s Outcast Child: Black People In Children’s Books. Race and 

Class 31 (1): 59-77.
Fraser, Pamela. 1991. Boycott. Peebleshire News (12 July): 6. 
Golliwogs Renamed. 1991. Peebleshire News (22 March): 1, 2. 
Golly Gets the Sack. 1987. The Sun (1 January): 9. 
Golly Song Released. 1991. Peebleshire News (10 May): 2.
Golly What A Silly Row. 1987. Daily Star (5 January): 18. 
Good Golly! 1987. Daily Mirror (12 January): 4. 
Hamilton, Ian. 1996. The First Life of Salman Rushdie. The New Yorker (25 

December): 90-97, 100-102, 104-108, 110-113.

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Hartlap, Diane. 1984. Florence Upton and the Golliwogg Doll. The Black 
Memorabilia Collector’s Monthly Newsletter. Mt. Arlington, New Jersey: 
Jacquie Greenwood, 1-5.

Hern, Anthony. 1967. The Seaside Holiday. London: Cresset Press. 
It’s Goodbye Gollies. 1991. Peebleshire News (29 March): 1.
Keddie, Andrew. 1991. Gollywogs Miss Out on Beltane Parade. Peebleshire News 

(15 February): 1.
______. 1991. Golly Cash Arrives. Peebleshire News (22 February): 1, 6. 
Kuttner, Julia. 1987. Jolson Blacked Out As Irene Sees Red. The Standard (27 

March): 3.
Lewis, George. 1991. The Birth of a Rag Doll. Peebleshire News (29 March): 6. 
Lively, Adam. 1999. Masks. London: Vintage. 
MacGregor, Robert M. 1993. The Beltane Festival Golliwog Controversy: Moral 

Entrepreneurs and Symbolic Restructuring of Social Order in British Society. 
Paper presented at the conference “Studying Human Lived Experience: 
Symbolic Interaction and Ethnographic Research,” 1993, University of 
Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, May 14-22.

Macintosh, Margaret M. 1991. Defending My Beliefs on Golliwogs. Peebleshire 
News (8 March); 7.

Mann, Doug. 1991. Golliwog. Peebleshire News (26 April): 6. 
Mullan, Bob. 1987. The Enid Blyton Story. London: Boxtree Ltd. 
Newman , David. 1987. Noddy Blacks Golly! Daily Star (1 January): 7. 
Newton, Neil Jessup. 1997. Memory and Misrepresentation; Representing Crazy 

Horse in Tribal Court. Borrowed Power, ed. Bruce Ziff and Pratima V. Rao. 
New Brunswick. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 195-224. 

Nicholson, Susan. 1981. The Golliwog. Collectibles. Spinning Wheel (January/
February): 12-14. 

Pickering, Michael. 1986. White Skin, Black Masks: ‘Nigger’ Minstrelsy in Victorian 
England. Music Hall: Performance and Style, ed. J.S. Bratton. Milton Keynes, 
England: Open University Press, 70-91.

Purdie, Howard. 1991. Racism in Peebles, the Latest. Peebleshire News (12 April): 
16. Rehin, George F. 1975. Harlequin Jim Crow: Continuity and Convergenie 
in Blackface Clowning. Journal of Popular Culture 9: 682-701. 

______. 1981. Blackface Street Minstrels in Victorian London and its Resorts: 
Popular Culture and its Racial Connotations as Revealed in Polite Opinion. 
Journal of Popular Culture 15 (1): 19-38. 

Said, Edward W. 1993. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books. The 
Naughty Gnomes Oust Those Robber Golliwogs in the Alternative Noddy. 
1987. The Daily Mail (1 January): 3.

The Press, the Jam Jar, and the Gollywog. 1984. Searchlight (September): 16, 17. 
Trew, Winston. 1985. Campaign Report. Dragon’s Teeth 21 (Spring): 5. 
Waterhouse, Keith. 1987. Golly Gumdrops. Daily Mail (5 January): 5. 
Welcome to Toytown: No Golliwogs! 1987. Daily Mail (2 January): 15. 
Wilkinson, Doris Y. 1987. The Doll Exhibit”: A Psycho-Cultural Analysis Of Black 

Female Role Stereotypes. Journal of Popular Culture 21 (2): 19-29. 

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______. 1988. The Toy Menagerie: Early Images of Blacks in Toys, Games and 
Dolls. Images of Blacks in American Culture, ed. Jessie Carney Smith. New 
York, Greenwood Press, 273-287. 

Wyatt, Woodrow. 1987. Golly! What a Load of Noddy Nonsense. News of the
World (4 January): 8. 
Young, Sydney.1987. Toyiand Kicks Out Noddy’s Gollies. Daily Mirror (2 January): 

3.
Ziff, Bruce and Pratima V. Rao. 1997. Introduction to Cultural Appropriation: A 

Framework For Analysis. Borrowed Power, ed. Bruce Ziff and Pratima V. 
Rao. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1-27.

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disasTrous alTernaTives:  
Boy sCouT disasTer sTories and legends  

and imagining The naTural world

sPenCer linColn green

Introduction

Hiking the Narrows in Zion National Park as an adolescent, I remember well the 
stories we shared of the flash flood that killed an entire Scout troop earlier that 
year or the year before. It was recent. The troop had been hiking up the Narrows 
just like we were, on a clear day, just like this was. Although they had taken all 
necessary precautions, the clear sky above them hid the fact that farther upstream 
a storm was adding large quantities of water into the canyon. Out of nowhere the 
flash flood came and killed the entire troop. Although we may have wondered 
why we hadn’t heard about it at the time, or why we were allowed to hike the 
same area, we did not challenge the veracity of the tale since someone had read, 
or had heard from someone who had read, the news article or seen it on TV. 
This was news, not legend we were sharing. The similarities between the ill-fated 
troop and ours gave it an ominous reality. Just like us, the Scout troop had come 
from Northern Utah and just like us, they had walked past these narrow sandstone 
canyons with the detritus of past flash floods as living proof that the stories were 
true. On another trip, a Scout cuts a green branch to roast a hot dog. Another Scout 
warns him that green branches have poisons that can seep into the hot dog when it 
gets hot. The Scout abandons his green branch to find one less likely to kill him.

Scouting legends such as these do more than exert social control on Scouts 
liable to damage local trees or get themselves into danger in the outdoors; they 
express deeply felt fears and values in how humans relate to the outdoors: the 
scene and subject of many of these fearsome tales. Jay Mechling suggests that 
campfire legends and lore, with their thematic obsessions with death and disaster, 
meet the psychic needs of those who share them. Beyond the obsession with 
death and injury we see here, Mechling notes a preoccupation with sexuality and 
resistance to authority (1980, 43). These are the taboos against which children’s 
folklore often pokes and prods, looking for a way to handle these serious issues 
about which they are aware, but unable to talk openly for fear of censure. 

Mechling describes these camps as an “exaggerated male group experience” for 
pubescent boys seeking to differentiate themselves “from the other gender” (1980, 
45, 47). While I did not observe nor recall explicit needs to differentiate from the 
other gender in the present legends, there is an intense masculinity at work, and 
young boys seeking to differentiate themselves from their urban lives and the 
authority figures who dominate it become their own authority figures in a frontier 
or wilderness setting which hearkens to past modes of manliness.

The Scout troop I was part of included fifteen to twenty boys, ages twelve to 
seventeen, all Latter-day Saints, all members of the same ward, and all from an 
upper middle-class neighborhood of Provo, Utah, a college town of about 100,000 

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people. Our troop was fairly informal. While we did have different patrols, they 
were rarely, if ever, recognized or used in camp activities; we rarely brought our 
uniforms on campouts and were organized loosely in terms of camp duties. We 
hiked and associated with our usual friends rather than having to confine our 
activities to those in our patrols. The older boys sometimes gave orders to the 
younger boys that were usually followed. We shared tents, scattered around our 
site in the National Park’s campground, with our friends and siblings. We were boys 
camping with three to four adult supervisors who also came from our LDS ward. 

Scouts at camp are betwixt and between in many ways. As adolescents, they 
are between childhood and adulthood, the worlds of sheltered life and direct 
confrontation with the world. With limited oversight at camp, they are between 
the stricter parental oversight they know at home and the freedom of being 
with their peers. They are also between the city and the wilderness, where they 
imaginatively play out various possible consequences and dangers of life in their 
wilderness setting.

Bill Ellis notes that camping, in the United States, “involves playacting, by 
its very nature. Adults and adolescents, mainly from the city and the suburbs, 
voluntarily give up modern comfort to live for a while in an imaginative recreation 
of the ‘frontier’ world” (1981, 486). The world they are going out to experience 
is fueled by nostalgia and full of the drama, heroes, and excitement of the Old 
West. And just as the homesteaders and pioneers encountered a land that did 
not conform to their myths and ideals, modern campers do not find a land that 
conforms to the dreams of nostalgia that often propel them there. More than a 
place to experience nature and prove one’s manhood, the Scout camp can be a 
place of tedium and struggling to participate in domestic chores that are more 
tedious and difficult than they were at home. Rather than trading the comforts of 
home for the excitement of the wilderness, they find they have traded the comforts 
of home for greater difficulty in accomplishing similar menial tasks. Cooking is 
more time consuming; cleaning requires multiple trips down to the river; only 
making your bed is easier, and the absence of expectations to wash mitigates the 
increased difficulty of many necessary tasks. The role of these disaster narratives, 
the poison lurking in branches, or the death that can descend without notice 
on a clear day are ways of infusing the quotidian experience of camp life with 
the intensity of the frontier drama. These stories bridge the gap between lived 
experience and the world of the legend by transforming the natural surroundings 
of the Scout camp into the world of the legend.

How is this done? Victor Turner speaks of liminal monsters that are not 
intended to terrorize initiates but to startle them “into thinking about objects, 
persons, relationships, and features of their environment they have hitherto taken 
for granted” (1967, 105). Often the legends told between Scouts at a camp involve 
fearful figures who inhabit the geographical area like Bigfoot, the Wendigo, or more 
local figures like Jack Haggerty of Northern California (see Gyemant 1965). The Zion 
Narrows legend does not involve a fearful figure so much as the fearful presence 
of nature. Hiking up the Narrows, river debris and drying tree stumps seen high up 
the canyon walls act as reminders that a flash flood would rise far above the Scout’s 
ability to escape and come with such power that we would be overwhelmed. 

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Seen in this way, stories of death and injury in the outdoors can foster a 
ritualistic experience with nature that prompts a reevaluation of the teller’s 
relationship with the land. In this case, the legends and stories transform the land 
into the setting of the legend, which the scouts are then able to inhabit with its 
attendant masculinity and independence. It not only allows adolescents to change 
their relationship with the land, but also their relationship with reality. 

Are these stories legends, though? There are documented accounts of people 
experiencing some versions of the story that was told in my Scout troop in the 
summer of 1994. While the story we heard and shared involved the deaths of an 
entire Scout troop in the Zion Narrows, where we were hiking, there is an account 
of a group of three leaders and five explorer Scouts descending nearby Kolob 
Canyon when, due to high water levels, the canyon became dangerous and two 
of the leaders died. The remaining leader and all five boys were rescued after 
four days in the canyon (see Burrows 2002, Canyoneering 2005, and Hanscom 
1996). This was certainly a real event that was well documented and debated. The 
debates surrounding the tragedy center on the dangers: who was responsible for 
those dangers, the leaders or the park rangers, and how to avoid them for one’s 
own group. But those sorts of debates do not make a legend according to Linda 
Dégh who, in Legend and Belief, writes that a legend “entertains debate about 
belief … informs, explains, instructs, warns, or exemplifies through the telling of 
an extraordinary, unexplainable experience that a known person has encountered” 
(2001, 97-98). 

The original story does not entertain debate about belief, although it is often 
used to explain, instruct and warn. One informant, inspired by some beautiful 
pictures, planned a hike in the Zion Narrows in the summer of 2003 with a 
roommate. Another roommate’s girlfriend, hearing their plans, told him to be 
careful because “my cousin went to hike the narrows with his Boy Scout troop 
and got caught in a flash flood. A wall of water came and he died” (Ellsworth 
2009). Similar to the stories we shared on our Scout trip, my informant was told 
that “A storm up in the nether regions caused a flash flood that came down and 
killed him.” Certainly the message of the story was one of warning. Another 
informant heard about a Scout troop camping in a dry creek bed “somewhere in 
Southern Utah” when a flash flood during the night — “which often happens in 
those areas” — wiped most if not the entire troop away (Rife 2011). This version 
lacks many of the specifics of the other accounts but maintains some of the story’s 
most basic elements: the desert of Southern Utah, Boy Scouts, death, water, and 
unseen danger. 

While news accounts of disasters in Zion are not numerous, an article in the 
Salt Lake Tribune sought to identify the major disasters that have occurred there 
since 1927. The two leaders dying in Kolob Canyon is mentioned as well as two 
hikers dying in the Narrows in 1998 in a flash flood (Havnes 2009). The article 
adds that most people die falling from cliffs rather than drowning. However, in the 
world of our Scout camp, it was not the precipitous cliffs our stories led us to fear, 
but the canyon and the unpredictable water. It seems it is the unlikely fear that is 
most compelling. Looking over the side of a cliff, the outcome of inching towards 
it is obviously death. But in our Scout disaster narratives, it is the unlikely danger 

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of being drowned in a desert, the rare surge of massive amounts of water where 
there is so little, that inspires fear and the excitement of danger. 

Zion National Park’s website contains a page outlining safety information. Steep 
cliffs come in at the top of the list, followed by water (as in drinking and staying 
hydrated), driving, heat exhaustion, heat stroke, hypothermia, and firearms (Your 
Safety). The main warnings that have anything to do with the Narrows come from 
hypothermia or the temperature of the water, rather than the amount encountered. 
On hot days walking up the knee-deep waters, the temperature doesn’t seem to 
be a major concern, nor does the amount of water, so why do these fearsome tales 
center on them? Why these many discrepancies in the accounts versus the stories 
we told ourselves? 

There were many differences between the stories we told and the event we 
were supposedly recounting. We told stories of an entire Boy Scout troop from Salt 
Lake City being wiped out by a flash flood in the Narrows, the canyon we were 
then hiking. The facts of the story had been altered in transmission. The original 
troop was not Boy Scouts but Explorer Scouts, older and more experienced. We 
imagined the disaster hitting the Scouts when it was the leaders who died in 
the real event. And while the two troops did indeed come from the same area, 
Northern Utah, the Explorer Scouts were hiking in nearby Kolob Canyon, not the 
Narrows. While geographically near each other, they are vastly different canyons. 
Kolob Canyon, the site of the disaster, is a narrow slot canyon requiring a wet 
or dry suit, rock climbing gear for one hundred fifty-foot rappels, and a permit 
that indicates the water flow expected based on the release of a dam above the 
canyon. The Narrows, on the other hand, while sounding like a narrow canyon, 
is wide enough for two to six lanes of car traffic through most of its length and 
requires very little equipment beyond what any hiker might need. The Narrows do 
not require a permit, though they do post general conditions for the causal hikers 
who come to hike part or all of the canyon. 

Looking closely at what changed, we can piece together how this local story 
went from a news story to a local legend told and modified to apply to those 
telling the story. Returning to Dégh’s definition of a legend, we see that some 
of the changes involved making the story come more from a “known person.” 
What we lacked in actual knowledge of these people was made up for by making 
the characters as similar to ourselves as we could. Thus the Explorer Scouts 
were made into younger Boy Scouts, the tragedy fell on those we identified 
more closely with, the Scouts, rather than the leaders, and, what needed no 
modification, they were a troop coming from Northern Utah to Southern Utah, 
and the differences of the specific canyons were erased by trading the one we 
were hiking for the one where the tragedy actually occurred. Were the events 
extraordinary? Extraordinarily regrettable, certainly. The increased drama involved 
in the eradication of an entire troop was certainly an extraordinary aspect of 
the event as we knew it. The story did entertain debate about belief, in that the 
apparent veracity of the tale was part of what gave the tale so much force in our 
young minds. As Robert Gyemant writes, “As it is with most legends, there is 
historical detail enough to imply historical truth” (1965, 106). The accuracies and 

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inaccuracies indicate that folkloric processes were at work in digesting the facts of 
the event into the details of the legend. 

On the same trip to Zion’s, as with many Scout troops, we hiked not only the 
Narrows, but Angel’s Landing, where more people die and where the danger is 
more apparent. So why hadn’t we heard or why didn’t we share any stories about 
that hike? We certainly enjoyed it through the heat and the arduous hike and the 
amazing panorama of the three canyons meeting in the valley around us. At times 
on the trail, cliffs drop away on either side. It is a site of actual excitement and 
danger that does not inspire stories like the seemingly placid and safer Narrows. 
Why that discrepancy? Part of it may be in the combination of thrill and safety in 
the Narrows. With less immanent danger, we are left to enjoy the thrill of danger at 
a safe remove through story and imagination rather than through bodily risk. The 
thought of danger is, in this case, far more enjoyable than actual danger. 

Water holds a mystery of danger that heights and heat, which kill more people 
in the park yearly than does excess of water, do not. Part of the reason is found in 
the material conditions of the West. Scouts growing up in or familiar with the West 
know the importance of water and their reliance on it. Droughts, water rationing, 
and children’s folklore in the West emphasize the importance of water. “One 
two, three, water hog!” and “Save some for the whales!” are good examples of 
children’s folklore emphasizing the importance of water. 

As LDS youths, the Scouts were familiar with scenes of water-based destruction. 
Biblical stories including the flood, the destruction of the Egyptians in the Red Sea, 
Jonah and the fish, and even Christ calming the Sea of Galilee as he walked on 
the water show that water can be a source of punishment and an unruly element. 
Although water is used in one of the holiest ordinances in Mormonism, baptism, 
and symbolizes a new birth, it also symbolizes death and is a frequent scene of 
hardships. The Book of Mormon tells of the dangers for Lehi and his family as 
they crossed the ocean to the Promised Land. Later the Jaredites also experience 
difficulty as they cross the ocean. Further, when Christ visits the Americas, he 
punishes the wickedness by sinking many cities in the ocean (see 3 Nephi 8 
and 9). In the Doctrine and Covenants, a more modern book of scripture, there 
are many pronouncements about the dangers of water. In a revelation given 
after some dangers experienced by early church elders as they canoed down 
the Missouri and after one saw “in a daylight vision … the destroyer riding in 
power upon the face of the waters,” warning about the dangers of water abound: 
“behold, there are many dangers upon the waters, and more especially hereafter” 
(D&C 61:4), “For I, the Lord, have decreed in mine anger many destructions upon 
the waters; yea, and especially upon these waters” (meaning the Missouri) (D&C 
61:5), “Behold, I, the Lord, in the beginning blessed the waters; but in the last 
days … I cursed the waters” (D&C 61:14), “Wherefore, the days will come that no 
flesh shall be safe upon the waters” (D&C 61:15), and others. While water as an 
evil force is certainly not a pervasive doctrine and receives such specific focus in 
only one chapter of scripture, combined with the stories, they may account for a 
tendency to vilifying water. Combine that with the West’s reliance on the peskily 
absent element, and water becomes a dangerous element in need of such legends 
to explain, warn, and instruct us to be wary. 

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Legends of disasters in the wilderness often act as explanation, instruction, or 
warning. When Brant Ellsworth heard from his roommate’s girlfriend about her 
cousin who had died in the Narrows in a flash flood, she told it, and he heard it, 
as a cautionary tale. The warning included the knowledge that the danger might 
be unseen, “You won’t see it overhead. But ten miles upstream there could be 
a massive downpour which will cause the flash flood,” and summarized by his 
roommate’s words “yeah, people die down there” (Ellsworth 2011). Here, Dégh’s 
interpretation of the function of the legend fits perfectly with its function in the 
urban world, but to read the meaning of the legend as it was told in the setting 
where it occurred, we look at Elliot Oring’s definition of the legend. Oring writes 
that legends are about “the creation of a story which requires the audience to 
examine their world view — their sense of the normal, the boundaries of the 
natural, their conceptions of fate, destiny, and coincidence” (1986, 126). Beyond 
requiring the audience to examine their worldview, these stories allowed our troop 
to re-imagine the boundaries of the natural world and place ourselves in the most 
dangerous, exciting version of that natural as exemplified in the legend. Rather 
than live in the hot, weary, sometimes menial and tedious world of camping, it 
allowed us to immerse ourselves in a world of dangerous possibilities where we 
could play with the possibilities of death and disaster.

Part of what makes that playing possible is the immediacy of the natural 
details of the legend. While there are many definitions of what makes a legend, 
the “message” is only part of what makes this legend so persistent and vivid. The 
immediacy of the physical facts of the legend, and how that immediacy imbues the 
geographic area with a heightened sense of excitement, is what lends the legend 
such force and narrative power. While tales of entire Scout troops being washed 
away in desert floods are amazing enough, walking the very banks of the calm 
river while noting the stumps and debris of the flood forty feet above you on a 
cliff wall, a vivid reminder of the tale’s reality, emphasizes the potential threat and 
actual excitement.

In The Vanishing Hitchhiker Jan Brunvand discusses the function of legends. 
They can be entertaining, validate cultural ideals or institutions, explain the 
unusual or supernatural happenings of the world or they can “show that the 
prosaic contemporary scene is capable of producing shocking or amazing 
occurrences which may have actually happened to friends or to near-
acquaintances but which are nevertheless explainable in some reasonably logical 
terms” (1981, 12). The legends and legend telling can infuse a boring situation 
with more excitement because of the possibility that something amazing will 
happen. In One Space, Many Places Mary Hufford makes the observation that 
“Through stories people deepen their relationship to the places surrounding them” 
(1986, 8). These particular stories deepen that relationship by infusing it with the 
drama, excitement, and mythos of the frontier where life was hard, but real men 
were made.

This kind of play with danger is distinct from legend trips and what Bill Ellis 
terms “mock ordeals,” in that the legends and stories are evoked by the place 
rather than the other way around, as in legend trips. Further, the ordeal is real 
only in that there is a heightened sense of potential danger while experiencing 

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the more mundane discomforts of camping life. And here is where playing 
with masculinities and adulthood enters into the stories and their appeal. The 
adult world, as well as the natural world, is largely unknown and as such can 
be a source of anxiety and fear for adolescents. Imagining the dramatic danger 
transforms the discomforts of camping life into more exciting, manly adventures; 
gives them a handle on perceived, real, but unrealized fears; and serves as an 
outlet for the fears and anxieties of wilderness, manhood, and adulthood.

Conclusion

Legends lie on a spectrum between the real and the imaginary. These Scouting 
stories and legends, like many others, are drawn from real stories and become 
legends only in their telling and retelling as fact surrenders to a good, gripping 
story. In moving each way, towards the more imaginative and towards the more 
real, an interesting picture of why we create, share, and perpetuate stories of 
disaster emerges. 

If we move first towards the more fictive side, Susan Sontag, in The 
Imagination of Disaster, contends that the strength of science fiction films is “their 
immediate representation of the extraordinary” (1976, 119). In what she calls 
“sensuous elaboration,” these films allow viewers to participate in the fantasy 
of their own death, or the destruction of the world itself. Sontag privileges the 
spectacle over the words or story, but in the case of disaster narratives in and of 
the wilderness, they combine to create a vivid, participatory narrative the boys 
can enter and come to the edge of death and destruction, take a look around, and 
return unharmed and victorious. Similar to the monsters in science fiction, nature 
as liminal monster seeks not only to kill them, but to obliterate them, just as it has 
the other Scout groups in the stories (127). Sontag concludes that the imagery of 
disaster in science fiction is above all the emblem of an inadequate response … 
which shows “the inadequacy of most people’s response to the unassimilable 
terrors that infect their consciousness” (130). Sontag’s hyperbole aside, the 
terrors being dealt with in science fiction are the same ones being escaped in the 
wilderness: an urban world dictated by forces more powerful than the boys such 
as parents, mothers, or school or work schedules. 

Moving towards the more factive, we might look at the anticipatory response 
to Hurricane Irene this summer. The wind of Irene held many comparisons 
with Hurricane Katrina, which was similar in size and force to Irene. CBS news 
warned that “Irene could bring Katrina-style flooding to coast” (Condon 2011). 
While other predictions were more accurate, like the loss of power to much of 
the affected areas, the comparison of Katrina to Irene seemed to ignore some 
vital facts — such as the levees in New Orleans which caused most of the deaths 
and damage and their absence anywhere in Irene’s path — and focus on mother 
nature as monster and force of immanent destruction. She “slammed” into the 
coast, “marched” up the coast. Similar to how Scout legends can imbue an area 
with potential danger, many news accounts wrote of the potential dangers of the 
real storm, the “potentially affected population” and “potential damage” (Ranii 
2011). Anticipation of the actual event, while very different from the imaginary 

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anticipation experienced by Scouts hiking in the Zion Narrows, shared with the 
Scout’s anticipation an entrance into the realm of fantasy. Just as legends combine 
truth and fiction, so too do our views of the future, even the immediate future, 
partake of imagination. While the Scouts were able to use this imagination to 
imbue the present with greater excitement, intensifying that potential danger even 
a bit can turn it into the great fear and panic in anticipation of Irene. 

Sacvan Bercovitch, in The American Jeremiad, explains how this might happen. 
The particularly American form of the jeremiad, he explains, rhetorically fused the 
sacred, supernatural world of God’s will with the secular, natural world of man’s 
actions (1978, 9). The legend, for many and these disaster legends in particular, 
seems to elevate the commonplace and everyday into a world of the supernatural. 
There is something proleptic in this exercise when we compare the legends with 
its cousins on the extremes of the fictive/factive spectrum. In all of them, science 
fiction, fact-based Scouting legends, and anticipation of natural disasters, we are 
again fusing those supernatural and everyday worlds in mixtures to excite, appall, 
or amaze ourselves or others. As such, legends, like news and science fiction, are 
a way we invent and interpret the world. As invention and interpretation they can 
be productive or destructive: ways to increase excitement, ways for urbanites to 
respond to the crushing demands of modernity, and added fuel for widespread 
panics. Seen this way, the legend is not merely a way to negotiate the possible 
and the actual, but is a persistent and pervasive human negotiation between our 
imagined world and our lived experience. 

WORKS CITED

Bercovitch, Sacvan. 1978. The American Jeremiad. Madison: University of 
Wisconsin Press.

The Book of Mormon. 1989. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: Salt 
Lake City.

Brunvand, Jan Harold. 1981. The Vanishing Hitchhiker. New York: W. W. Norton 
and Company.

Burrows, Shane. 2002. Kolob Canyon Disaster: Zion National Park. Climb Utah. 
http://climb-utah.com/Zion/kolob1.htm.

Canyoneering USA. 2005. Kolob Creek Canyoneering Route. Tom’s Utah 
Canyoneering Guide. http://canyoneeringusa.com/utah/zion/kolob.htm. 

Condon, Stephanie. 2011. Hurricane Irene could Bring Katrina-style Flooding to 
the Coast, FEMA Warns. cbsnews.com, 26 August.

Dégh, Linda. 2001. Legend and Belief: Dialectics of a Folklore Genre. Bloomington: 
Indiana University Press.

The Doctrine and Covenants. 1989. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: 
Salt Lake City.

Ellis, Bill. 1981. The Camp Mock-Ordeal Theater as Life. Journal of American 
Folklore. Oct-Dec, 486-505. 

Ellsworth, Brant. 2011. Personal Interview. 25 August.
Gyemant, Robert E. 1965. “Jack Haggerty” and a California Legend. Western 

Folklore. Apr, 105-108.

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Hanscom, Greg. 1996. Feds Set ‘Terrible Precedent” with Kolob Canyon 
Settlement. High Country News. Paonia, CO. 5 August. http://www.hcn.org/
issues/87/2695.

Havnes, Mark. 2009. Disasters Are a Part of Zion National Park’s History. The Salt 
Lake Tribune. Utah, 5 June http://www.sltrib.com/outdoors/ci_12513410. 

Hufford, Mary. 1986. One Space, Many Places. American Folklife Center: 
Washington DC.

Mechling, Jay. 1980. The Magic of the Boy Scout Campfire. Journal of American 
Folklore. Jan-Mar, 35-56.

Oring, Elliot. 1986. Folk Narratives. Folk Groups and Folklore Genres: An 
Introduction. Ed. Elliot Oring. Logan: Utah State University Press.

Ranii, David. 2011. Hurricane Irene Slams North Carolina Coast, Targets Northeast. 
Miami Herald, 27 August. 

Rife, Jared. 2011. Personal Interview. 26 August.
Sontag, Susan. 1976. The Imagination of Disaster. Science Fiction: A Collection of 

Critical Essays, ed. Mark Rose, 116-31. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. 
Turner, Victor. 1967. The Forest of Symbols. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967.
Your Safety. Zion National Park. 2011. National Park Service US Department of the 

Interior, 7 July http://www.nps.gov/zion/planyourvisit/your-safety.htm. 

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77

Children’s Folklore seCTion: 2010 annual meeTing

The Children’s Folklore Section met on 14 October, 2010 in Nashville, Tennessee 
with Secretary-Treasurer Priscilla Ord acting for President Libby Tucker, who could 
not be present and Chip Sullivan acting for Priscilla.

The Minutes from the 2009 meeting were approved.
Priscilla explained (1) Libby’s desire to step down from the presidency (which 

had nothing to do with her not being at the meeting) and explained the duties of 
that office, (2) the need to add a person to the Aesop Committee and decide who 
will chair that committee this year, and (3) the request from Journal of American 
Folklore for a history of the section.

There was a printed President’s Report and Children’s Folklore Review Report 
from Libby. 

Priscilla gave the Treasurer’s Report. Subsequent discussion of the Treasurer’s 
Report involved the fact that the section is well in the black and there are currently 
only minor expenses for CFR and for the various awards.

Old Business:

Discussion of epublication of CFR resulted in a decision for at least a one-year lag 
between print publication and epublication of upcoming issues.

Aesop Prize winner and accolades were announced.
The Newell Prize was given to Trevor Blank for “Cheeky Behavior: The 

Meaning and Function of Fartlore in Childhood and Adolescence.” Trevor is a 
student of Simon Bronner’s.

Other prizes were discussed.

New Business:

Kevin Cordi was elected to the Aesop Committee and Kate Schramm was 
appointed chair of that committee.

Spencer Green, Penn State Harrisburg, was elected president by acclamation.
Priscilla and/or Spencer were asked to find out more details about the section 

history JAF has requested. Simon Bronner did a history of the section some time 
ago for CFR, and Chip Sullivan did a history of CFR sometime before he passed 
the journal on to Libby Tucker; both of those histories were published in CFR and 
could be consulted for the JAF piece.

The membership voted to increase the Newell Prize effective for the 2010 prize.

Respectfully Submitted,
Chip Sullivan
Secretary Pro Tempore

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79

noTes and announCemenTs

Newell Prize

The Children’s Folklore Section of the American Folklore Society annually offers 
the William Wells Newell Prize (which includes a cash award) for the best student 
essay on a topic in children’s folklore. Students must submit their own papers, and 
published papers are eligible. Instructors are asked to encourage students with 
eligible papers to enter the competition.

Papers must be typed, double-spaced, and on white paper or a Word 
document. On the first page, include the author’s name, academic address, home 
address, telephone numbers, and e-mail address. Deadline for this coming year’s 
competition is September 1, 2012. Submit papers or write for more information to 
Dr. C.W. Sullivan III, English Department, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC, 
27858-4353; electronic submissions should go to sullivanc@ecu.edu.

Book Reviews

Children’s Folklore Review is seeking book review submissions for its next issue, 
to be published in October of 2012. This is an excellent opportunity for graduate 
students interested in building their writing credentials and demonstrating breadth 
in folklore, literature, and childhood studies. Books are selected for review in 
Children’s Folklore Review according to their relevance to the field of children’s 
folklore and their year of publication (within the past two years). If you would like 
to request a book for review, please contact the book review editor, Li Cornfeld 
(licornfeld@gmail.com). Book reviews should not exceed 750 words.

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81

ConTriBuTors

Spencer Lincoln Green, co-winner of this year’s William Wells Newell Prize, is 
finishing his PhD studies in Penn State Harrisburg’s American Studies program. He 
completed his B.A. and M.A. at Brigham Young University in English with minors 
in editing and folklore. He researches folklore and the environment. His thesis 
used personal hiking stories of British ramblers to examine changing attitudes 
towards landscape in the UK. His dissertation looks at how technology influences 
American’s ideas about wilderness and how those ideas are expressed in folk and 
popular culture in the digital and physical worlds.

Neal A. Lester is Professor of English and Dean of Humanities at Arizona State 
University. With specialties in African American literary and cultural studies, Dr. 
Lester is an award-winning teacher and the author or co-editor of four books. He 
has written or lectured extensively on such topics as the “n-word,” black/ white 
interracial intimacies in popular music, Little Black Sambo as a non-trickster, the 
race and gender politics of African Americans and hair, African American children’s 
literature, black masculinities in hip hop music, Disney’s first African American 
princess, and personal ads as African American autobiography and biography. His 
writings have covered such authors as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Zora Neale 
Hurston, ntozake shange, Ernest Gaines, bell hooks, Carolivia Herron, Sapphire, 
and Richard Wright. Dr. Lester chairs the Board of Directors of the Arizona 
Humanities Council.

Robert MacGregor is Professor Emeritus at The Williams School of Business 
Administration, Bishop’s University, Sherbrooke, Quebec. The major focus of 
his research interests includes cultural analysis of national, racial, and ethnic 
identities visually represented in many forms of communication conduits. Folkloric 
texts are also critical to his research especially concerning African Americans. 
The author has received three certificates of excellence from various academic 
groups. Publications of his have been published in The Journal of Eastern 
Township Studies, Contemporary Legends, The Canadian Journal of Administrative 
Science, Proceedings of the Academy of Marketing Science, Proceedings of The 
Administrative Sciences of Canada, Proceedings of World Marketing Congress, 
Journal of Professional Marketing Services, Atlantis, The Journal of Popular 
Culture. Numerous essays have been published in books.

Karin Phillips is a senior at Binghamton University majoring in English. Her 
Children’s Folklore field research begins at home, observing husband Scott and 
sons Devon, Dylan and Aidan. She’s an aspiring graduate student and full-time 
dangerous games monitor.

Mona Lisa Saloy, author and folklorist, is currently Professor of English at 
Dillard University. Most recently, Dr. Saloy’s essay “New Orleans Black Indians 

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82

at Mardi Gras” appears in New Orleans: What Can’t be Lost! (Lafayette: University 
of Louisiana, 2010). Saloy’s article on Zora Neale Hurston collecting lore along 
River Road will appear in the next issue of Louisiana Miscellany, the journal 
of the Louisiana State Folklore Society. Dr. Saloy presented research on kids’ 
lore at the 70th conference of the Society for Applied Anthropology in Merida, 
Mexico (March, 2010); she has collected kids’ lore since the late 80s in Louisiana, 
Michigan, California, and Washington State, where she taught folklore after 
Hurricane Katrina.

Katharine R. M. Schramm is a doctoral candidate of the Indiana University 
Department of Folklore & Ethnomusicology, and a two-year member of the 
Aesop Prize committee of the Children’s Folklore Section. While her M.A. research 
centered around proto-folkloric expression and ritualization in infancy, her 
doctoral research will center on community ritual and its visiting deity figures in 
southern Okinawa, Japan. She is the chair of this year’s Aesop Prize Committee.

Pamela Weintraub is a student at Binghamton University.

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