








































23

 “I SAW MRS. SARAY, SITTING ON A BOMBALERRY”:  
RALPH ELLISON COLLECTS CHILDREN’S FOLKLORE

ROBERT BARON

Along Harlem streets, in housing projects and on playgrounds, Ralph Ellison 
employed his formidable gifts for observing and rendering speech play as a 
collector of children’s folklore. His collecting for the Federal Writer’s Project 
(FWP) in 1939 represented one dimension of a life long engagement with African 
American folklore. It extended from traditions acquired in his youth in Oklahoma 
City through works of fiction employing multiple folkloric genres and essays 
discussing the centrality of folklore for the African American experience and its 
indispensable role for cultural resilience. Collecting at a time of heavy African 
American migration from the South, Ellison researched folklore that embodied 
both a Southern heritage of largely rural character and traditions adapted to a  
new urban environment. 

As a New Yorker who moved permanently to Harlem in 1938, Ellison 
experienced first hand the struggles of recent arrivals adjusting to a vastly 
different social and cultural situation. Remarking on these challenges in “Harlem 
is Nowhere”, written in 1948, he wrote of how “American Negroes are caught in 
a vast process of change that has swept them from slavery to the condition of 
industrial man in a space of time so telescoped … that it is literally possible to 
step from feudalism into the vortex of industrialism simply by moving across the 
Mason-Dixon line”. In Harlem, the “folk personality” was “caught in a process 
of chaotic change” (321, 325). Writing on “Harlem’s America” in the New Leader 
eighteen years later, Ellison saw continuity as well as change in Harlem’s folklore, 
where “you see the transformation of the Southern idiom into a Northern idiom,” 
in “a place where our folklore is preserved, and transformed” and “the body of 
Negro myth and legend thrives” (1966, 28).

The modern and the traditional were also at play in Ellison’s own fiction. He 
was one of the great modernist writers of twentieth century literature and, without 
contradiction, infused folklore throughout his work. Influenced by existentialism 
and writing surrealistically, counting Eliot, Dostoyevsky, Faulkner, and Malraux 
among his literary “ancestors,” (1995f, 185) Ellison all the while incorporated 
folklore in his work at least as much as any of his peers. Writing in 1958, he stated 
that “I use folklore in my work not because I am a Negro, but because writers like 
Eliot and Joyce made me conscious of the literary value of my folk inheritance,” 
and he found early in his career that the “Negro American folk tradition became 
precious as a result of an act of literary discovery” (1995d, 111, 112). A few years 
after seeing that “in both The Waste Land and Ulysses ancient myth and ritual were 
used to give form and significance to the material” Ellison came to “realize that the 
myths and rituals which we find functioning in our everyday lives could be used 
in the same way” (1995g, 216). The “grist for my fictional mill” included “details 
of old photographs and rhymes and riddles and children’s games, church services 
and college ceremonies, practical jokes and political activities observed during my 
prewar days in Harlem” (1994, xxvii).



“I SAW MRS. SARAY, SITTING ON A BOMBALERRY”  BARON

24

For Ellison and other major mid- and late- twentieth century writers, field 
research for the FWP provided indispensable source material, which was 
utilized along with experiences remembered from their working class youths 
in subsequent literary works. In The Cultural Front, Michael Denning notes 
that “the writings of the plebeian writers who worked on the projects – Algren, 
Ellison, Himes, Tomasi, Sincliar, Conroy — embodied a dialectic between fictional 
invention, autobiographical reflection, and urban fieldwork” (1996, 228). The FWP 
represented for Ellison and many other writers their first employment as cultural 
workers. Through the WPA arts projects, the numbers of people employed as 
artists increased vastly, and many of them, like Ellison, saw that it was possible 
to make a living through their creative work. In New Deal Modernism, Michael 
Szalay contends that the WPA Arts Projects “led to new ways of conceiving literary 
labor”, creating a “newly professionalized industry of salaried writers (2000, 5), 
acting as, according to Denning, “a way-station for the young plebeian artists and 
intellectuals of ethnic working-class backgrounds who would go on to careers in 
the federal bureaucracies, the culture industries, and the universities” (48). 

Making a living for the first time through his cultural work for the FWP, Ellison 
collected personal narratives from compelling Harlem characters (published 
many years later in Ann Banks’s 1980 anthology, First Person America), carried 
out extensive research about local African American history for a planned 
publication, “The Negro in New York,” (which was never published) and took to 
the streets to collect children’s folklore in situ. Rhymes, games and other forms 
of children’s folklore were collected as a major focus of the FWP in New York 
City. In New York City, Ellison was among a group of FWP workers supervised 
by folklorist Herbert Halpert, who instructed them to “look for children’s rhymes, 
making specific note of the nationality of the reciter, the place of collection, 
and any comments made by the children. Since the workers were untrained, 
a questionnaire for each collector’s guidance was prepared” (1946, 5). In all, 
about 1000 items of children’s folklore were collected, and Ellison contributed 
approximately 100 different items. He observed children at play and noted 
contexts while recording texts, conducted interviews with adults as well as 
children, probed their memory culture, and even contributed folklore  
remembered from his own childhood. 

Consisting mainly of folk rhymes, the children’s folklore collected by Ellison 
included texts retained from Southern tradition as well as others transformed 
and localized to New York City. While many were maintained largely or entirely 
within African American tradition, with some exhibiting African derivations, others 
were part of repertoires shared by New Yorkers of diverse ethnic backgrounds. 
In his master’s thesis, “Folk Rhymes of New York City Children”, which included 
rhymes collected by Ellison, Halpert singled out African American and Puerto 
Rican children as each having “unique” rhymes, while noting that they also 
perform variants of nearly all the rhymes he collected elsewhere in New York City. 
However, Halpert found that rhymes introduced to Harlem by migrants from the 
south are not disseminated elsewhere in New York City (1946,15). He suggested 
that a “large part of the stock of rhymes and games … held in common by White 



BARON  “I SAW MRS. SARAY, SITTING ON A BOMBALERRY”

25

and Negro children dates from before World War I,” when the “color barrier” was 
not as strong, and the African American population was smaller (16).

Whatever their cultural source, the rhymes collected by Ellison were 
distinguished by their innovative and improvisatory qualities, features often noted 
by him and consonant with the high value placed upon innovation within tradition 
in African American folk culture. According to Halpert’s proposal for a book based 
upon the entire New York City FWP children’s folklore collection, Children’s 
Rhymes and Games, more old English rhymes make their appearance” in African 
American children’s folklore “than in any other group, but there are, on the other 
hand, considerably more innovation and invention.” They were also distinguished 
by “a greater variety of subject matter and rhythmic pattern” than the rhymes of 
other groups in the FWP New York City collection (n.d., n. pag.).1

The Ellison children’s folklore collection is housed in the Manuscript Division 
of the Library of Congress. While some of the folk rhymes he collected have 
been previously published, they lack the information about Ellison’s collecting 
process and the tradition bearers that appear in the collection housed in the 
Library of Congress and which I am including in this article.2 In the collection at 
the Library of Congress, we see the collector at work as he observed, interviewed 
and recorded texts of children’s traditions. At times, Ellison recorded variants and 
versions of the same folklore item. He had a keen eye for observing creativity in 
process through improvisation, and delight in word play suffuses the collection. 
Ellison recognized the musicality of the rhymes, noting “polyphony” on one 
occasion, and referring to performance as “chanting,” implying that they could  
be viewed as being somewhere between speech and song. The rhymes contained 
influences from popular culture, specific local references, topical references, and 
content reflecting harsh urban realities like problems in paying rent and gun 
violence.

Much of Ellison’s field research occurred near his home at 25 Hamilton Terrace. 
One report, dated October 13, 1939, described field research on “the streets and 
playground located in the area extending from 125th St to 145th St and between St. 
Nicholas and Lenox Avenues.” This report contained the most complete accounts 
of Ellison’s field research on children’s play, offering multi-layered descriptions 
of the collecting situation. He presented multiple dimensions of text, context and 
performance rarely before provided in collections of children’s folklore. 

One group of children demonstrated improvisation and individual creativity 
as they performed a taunt, followed by improvised lines to what Ellison called a 
“jingle,” and a riddle. He describes their performance of folklore as an emergent 
process, rather than as repetition of a fixed text. We see what Hymes has called a 
“breakthrough into performance” as interviewees move from reporting folklore to 
spontaneous performance (1981, 79-86):

Buster Brown 
When you see a guy got on brown pants you say: 
Buster Brown 
Went down town 
With his britches hanging down.”



“I SAW MRS. SARAY, SITTING ON A BOMBALERRY”  BARON

26

When the above was given other members of the group chimed in with the 
following. While most of the jingles appear to have a set formula, there were 
many attempts at improvisation. Each voice followed the other in rapid succession, 
giving an antiphonal effect as varied as the colors named.

“Yellow, Yellow 
 Kiss a fellow.” 
“Blue, Blue 
 I love you” 
“Black, Black 
 Sit on a tack” 
“Green, green 
 Eat ice cream 
 Stick your nose in kerosene” 
“White, white, 
 You can fight”

Hey Mister, if you shut up in an iron house without any windows and 
you didn’t have nothing but a baseball bat?

In an Iron house?

Yeah, yeah that’s right. Come on sister, what’ll you do?

Well, I guess I don’t know.

Gee, don’t you know how to play baseball? Anybody who can play 
baseball knows how to get outa there.

Well how would I get out?

Three strikes and you out, Mister …

You see what he means, THREE STRIKES AN YOU OUT!3

Thickly describing these performances, Ellison anticipated the approach to folklore 
as emergent performance and situated small group interaction developed in 
folklore studies three decades later.4 One actually sees folklore as it is created, as 
“living lore,” the term of FWP national folklore editor Benjamin A. Botkin, who 
stressed that folklore is “living speech … responsive to the mood of the moment,” 
which, rather than disappearing, was still being created, in urban as well as 
rural areas (1958, 190). As Hirsch indicates, Botkin’s Manual for Folklore Studies 
instructed collectors to “submit complete field notes from every interview together 
with a personal history of the informant” (1988, 58). While Ellison regrettably 
submitted minimal personal information about almost everyone he interviewed, 
his field notes, at their best, provide highly textured accounts of the collecting 



BARON  “I SAW MRS. SARAY, SITTING ON A BOMBALERRY”

27

of folklore in, and as, performance. In his later fiction writings, he would vividly 
render the performative and improvisatory qualities of speech in general, and oral 
folklore in particular. These writings embody a “collaboration … between oral 
and literary techniques and traditions; between performance and composition” 
which John F. Callahan sees in “Frequencies of Eloquence: The Performance 
and Composition of Invisible Man” as intrinsic to Invisible Man (1994, 89). While 
Ellison scholars have long emphasized the influence of improvisation in jazz 
upon his fiction, his folklore collecting for the FWP demonstrates an emphasis 
upon improvisation, emergence and performance in folklore which reemerges in 
subsequent literary works. 

Ellison’s field research involved close observation of children at play as well as 
interviews with both adults and children to elicit traditions both in active tradition 
and memory culture. He drew reports and performances of folklore from tradition 
bearers young and old who recalled folklore from a younger age. His October 13, 
1939 report included a series of descriptions of traditions both reconstructed from 
memory and actively practiced, with some traditions presented in the sequence in 
which they were performed: 

Helen Simons, of 201 W. 139th Street, gave the worker the following 
chants. Helen is now eight years old and had some difficulty in 
remembering some of the chants since “only the little kids play them.” 
The following verse was sung to the tradition melody of “Pop-Goes 
the Weasel!” and as far as Helen knew is not used in any of the games 
the children in the neighborhood play.

I went up to Mary’s house 
Mary had the measles. 
This is the way the measles go, 
Pop! Went the measles.

The following rhyme was chanted very fast and like the above was 
not used in a game: 

 Once upon a time, 
 Goose drink wine. 
 Monkey chewed tobacco on a street car line. 
 Street car broke, 
 Monkey choke 
 And they all went to heaven on a streamlined boat.5

“When we play ‘Blue Bird’ in my window we all stand in a circle and 
one girl skips around behind us and we all sing:

 Blue bird, Blue bird 
 In my window …



“I SAW MRS. SARAY, SITTING ON A BOMBALERRY”  BARON

28

 And when she gets to the one she wants to be next she taps him on 
the shoulder and sings:

 Oh, Johnny I’m sorry.

 Or whatever the kid’s name is. Then the one what got tapped skips 
around and you go like that.”

 London Bridges All Broke Down 
 (Sung, to the tradition melody)

 London bridge is all broke down 
 All broke down, all broke down. 
 London bridge is all broke, 
 My fair lady.

 London bridge is half built up, 
 Half built up, half built up, 
 London bridge is half built up, 
 My fair lady.

 London bridge is all built up, 
 All built up, all built up. 
 London bridge is all built up, 
 My fair lady.

Mrs. Julia Fisher of 2816 Eighth Avenue sung the following words to a 
slightly varied melody of “Little Sallie Walker.” Mrs. Fisher learned this 
version as a child in Key West, Florida:

 Little Sallie Water 
 Little Sallie Water 
 Sitting in a saucer, 
 Crying and weeping for a young man 
 Oh, rise, Sallie, rise, 
 Wipe your weeping eyes, 
 And turn yourself to the water front 
 And tell them who you love the best.6

Versions and variants of “Little Sally Walker” and “Little Sallie Water” have been 
collected widely in the United States, including two versions collected by Zora 
Neale Hurston in Florida and included in her writings on folklore for the FWP, Go 
Gator and Muddy the Water (1999, 100, 101-102). Another “Little Sallie Water” was 
collected by Ellison at the Utopia Children’s House. He described it as a “singing 
game” in which “the child chosen as ‘Sallie Water’ stands in the middle of circle as 
the others sing the song. She goes through the directions of the verse pantomime.”



BARON  “I SAW MRS. SARAY, SITTING ON A BOMBALERRY”

29

Little Sallie Water 
Sitting in the saucer 
Rise, Sallie rise,    
Wipe your winking eyes 
Turn to the East, my darling, 
Turn to the West, my darling, 
Turn to the very one that you love the best 
Put your hands on your hips, 
And let your backbone shake my darling 
Shake it to the East, my darling 
Shake it to the West, my darling 
Shake it to the very one that you love the best.

A group of young girls demonstrated singing games substantially maintained from 
Southern folklore, embodying the creolization of traditions. One game included 
a refrain, “Sail Away, Sail Away, Sail Away,” well known in Anglo-American folk 
song. A tap dance, perhaps a new element, was introduced in another game. 
Had moving images and/or sound recordings also been used, African cultural 
sources for these games might be adduced, since, as Bess Lomax Hawes has 
noted in notes to the film “Pizza Pizza Daddy-O,” African American singing 
games “stylistically, especially in terms of musical and kinesic elements … seem 
equally clearly African, or at least Afro-American as British and Anglo-American 
in derivation” (qtd. in Sanches and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1976, 69). At times, 
such as in the following accounts of “Buckeye the Rabbit,” “Lady in the River 
and “I Had a Little Dog His Name Was Buster,” Ellison demonstrates how the 
singing games of African American girls involve a tight interrelationship between 
song and movement, which Kyra D. Gaunt, in The Games Black Girls Play, sees 
as “embodied musical practices” (2006, 2) incorporating “intrinsic” relationships 
between movement and music (7). 

“Buckeye the Rabbit,” in another variant, appears in Invisible Man as the 
narrator experiences electroshock treatment after the factory accident. Asked “Who 
is Buckeye the Rabbit?” the narrator responds in a manner both “giddy” (1972 
[1952],183) and grounding, a moment which, Keith Edward Byerman notes in 
Fingering the Jagged Grain: Tradition and Form in Recent Black Fiction, brings out 
“cultural history” which “prevents his total loss of identity” (1985, 27). The narrator 
in Invisible Man remembers that “I was Buckeye the Rabbit … or had been, when 
as children we danced and sang barefoot in the dusty streets” (1972 [1952], 184). 
In Harlem, Ellison had observed children dancing as they sang in this children’s 
singing game played in both the North and the South:

Buckeye the Rabbit 
I’m riding through Kentucky 
I’m riding through the sea, 
And all I catch behind me 
Is a buckle on my knee 
Buckeye the Rabbit, 



“I SAW MRS. SARAY, SITTING ON A BOMBALERRY”  BARON

30

Shake it 
Shake it  
With a buckle on my knee, 
I swing to the bottom 
I swing to the sea 
And all I catch behind me 
Is a buckle on my knee 
So Buckeye the Rabbit 
Shake it 
Shake it 
So Buckeye the Rabbit 
Shake it  
Shake it 
With a buckle on my knee.   

The worker observed this game played by a group of five girls, four 
of whom joined hands and formed a circle around the fifth. All five 
took part in singing the above verses up to the line “Buckeye the 
Rabbit” upon which the girl in the center began dancing steps from 
a tap dance routine. One girl, Mary Suarez of 259 W. 139th St., sung 
the following words as she continued to dance after the others had 
finished one of the songs.

 “You jump to the front 
 And you jump to the back 
 And you do the snake-hips 1,2,3 
 A riding to the sea.”

The others joined in:

 “So Buckeye the rabbit, 
 Shake it shake it etc.

Upon finishing this, girls took her place in the circle and one of the 
others took her place, whereupon the same routine began again. The 
game is flexible and allows for the use of varied dance steps. The 
worker was informed that this game was learned from other children, 
while one girl, Catherine Mason, said she learned it in Richmond Va. 

Lady in the River (a game song) 
There’s a lady in the river 
Sail away, sail away, sail away 
There’s a lady in the river 
Sail away, 
Looking for her lover 
Sail away, sail away, sail away. 



BARON  “I SAW MRS. SARAY, SITTING ON A BOMBALERRY”

31

Then she found her lover 
Sail away, sail away, sail away 
Then she found her lover  
Sail away, sail away, sail away.

This game was not played for me but the lyrics were sung.

Helen and Fredric Lewis vividly described and demonstrated another singing 
game. Ellison noted that it was “spoken rhythmically”:

“‘I had a little dog his name was Buster’ is a game that had a rhyme 
to it. You pick some body to get in the circle and when we sing they 
shake their duster.” Helen placed her hands upon her hips and sang, 
while Fred stamped his foot and clapped his hands: 

 I had a little dog, 
 His name was buster. 
 I sent him to the store to shake his duster 
 Oh, come on, buster 
 Shake your duster.7

When she came to the end of the verse she shook herself and flipped 
the tail of her dress.

Helen Lewis offered what she claimed was an original, collectively created “taunt”. 
It expresses the competitiveness and fierce identification that many New York 
City residents have felt for their own block. In City Play, Dargan and Zeitlin note 
that streets, like public schools, buildings and playgrounds, are often identified by 
number in New York City, but can be the subjects of great pride. They describe 
play about such numbered places, and indicate that while “identified by number 
seemingly anonymous places in a crowded city are rendered meaningful through 
play” (1990, 10). This “taunt” contains, like older rhymes of Southern provenance 
collected by Ellison, the formulaic refrain, “buckeye the rabbit,” along with newer 
content. 

“When the 134th Street girls get together we all say this rhyme, we 
made it up ourselves.”

Take off your shoes and stockings, 
and let your feet go bare. 
For we are the girls from One hundred-thirty-four 
So don’t you dare come near. 
So, buckeye, the rabbit, 
Shake, shake 
Buckeye the rabbit 
Shake, shake 
So don’t you dare come near.



“I SAW MRS. SARAY, SITTING ON A BOMBALERRY”  BARON

32

Ellison documented several folk rhymes on October 13th used for quick repartee 
between friends or acquaintances. This speech play seems as if it might be 
primarily used by older children and adults:

“You know this one, mister? 
See you meet a guy you know and he’s doing something good 
and you say “Gee, that’s fine!” 
And the other guy says, “wine!!” 
And you say, `Sho nough, that’s fine as wine, 
As a Georgia pine 
Two old grandmothers drinking wine.” 
“Here’s another one. You ask me ‘Gimme a nickle’”  
“Gimme a nickle.” 
“Go down town and tickle.” 
“You want a dollar? Go on, say ‘yes’” 
“Yes” 
“Go up on the roof and holler!”

Ellison recorded a number of ball bouncing rhymes found, with variations, in 
other New York City neighborhoods and ethnic groups. Ball bouncing involves 
hitting a rubber ball or tennis ball with the open palm, with the bouncing in 
time to the rhyme (Halpert 1946, 41). Ellison asked the children performing the 
rhymes about acquisition and observed that the traditions were learned from other 
children rather than adults – a characteristic of children’s folklore that folklorists 
have noted wherever it is collected: 

The following are rhymes chanted by little girls while bouncing their 
balls and were collected at the corner of 141st Street and Hamilton 
Terrace, Manhattan. None of the children questioned were able to tell 
where they learned the rhymes. In each instance they replied that they 
had been taught by “another girl”, or “another kid.” Sometimes the 
writer was told that certain rhymes were the original creations of the 
child involved, but in no case was I able to obtain a rhyme which had 
been taught a child by his parents.

One Two Three a Nation  
One, two, three a nation,  
I received my confirmation 
In the Church of the Annunciation 
One, two, three a nation.8

One, two, three a nation 
Doctor, doctor here’s a patient 
Waiting for an operation, 
One, two, three a nation.9



BARON  “I SAW MRS. SARAY, SITTING ON A BOMBALERRY”

33

One Two Three O’Lerry  
One, two, three, O’Lerry, 
I saw Mrs. Saray 
Sitting on a bombalerry 
Just like a chocolate ferry.10

I Had a Little Monkey 
I had a little monkey, 
I sent him to the country 
To buy a loaf of bread. 
Along came a choo choo 
And knocked my monkey coo coo 
And now my monkey’s dead 
With a bullet in his head

Charlie Chaplin 
Charlie Chaplin went to France 
To teach the ladies how to dance 
This is what he taught them: 
“Heel and Toe, Clap your hands and over you go.”11

A marginal note by Ellison alongside “Charlie Chaplin” indicates a “contemporary 
reference.” He collected other rhymes featuring such figures from radio, film 
and comic strips as Charlie McCarthy, the Lone Ranger, Rin Tin Tin and Buster 
Brown. Remarking on the use of characters from popular culture, Halpert said that 
“girls blithely incorporate their heroes and heroines from these media (a startling 
number) into the world of play” (1946, 48). 

Like “Charlie Chaplin,” another rhyme which appears in Ellison’s October 13th 
report, “Gypsy, gypsy lived in a tent” was used as both a jump rope rhyme and 
counting out rhyme. 

Gipsy Gipsy 
Gipsy, gipsy lived in a tent, 
She couldn’t afford to pay her rent. 
She borrowed one 
She borrowed two, 
She passed it over to y-o-u12

The October 13, 1939 report was unique in its substantial number of detailed 
accounts of folklore in performance. On other occasions, Ellison relied entirely 
upon interviews, apparently recognizing that it would have been preferable to 
observe spontaneous performance. A report dated December 15, 1939 noted that 
because of the “weather and the seasonal character of the games I was unable to 
see, and hear, these games in the actual play situation.” He reported that these 
rhymes “were received near the corners of 134th and 135th Streets and Lenox 
Avenue, around Public School 89” and “in all instances the informants were born 



“I SAW MRS. SARAY, SITTING ON A BOMBALERRY”  BARON

34

in New York City, though several said that their parents came from the South.” 
P.S. 89 itself was the subject of two rhymes. In his book proposal for Children’s 
Rhymes and Games, Halpert indicated that there were few rhymes in the entire 
New York City FWP collection which referred to schools, with the exception of 
derogatory ones (like the ones reported by Ellison). In this collecting situation, 
Ellison noted the effect of his presence upon the performance:

Most of the rhymes in this group were collected in the vicinity of 
Public School #89 and in every instance the informant was a boy. 
The followingrhyme reveals one boy’s attitude toward P.S. #89; the 
first version before he knew the words were to be taken down, and 
the second, more respectable version, when he saw the pencil put to 
paper.

Remember the Eight 
Remember the Nine 
Remember that ‘City Dump’ 89

Remember the Eight 
Remember the Nine

Remember that ‘White House’ 89

Ellison’s remarks about his impact as a collector upon the content of these rhymes 
reflects his awareness of the dynamics of subject/object relationships in fieldwork 
situations. He became at once both the subject and object of his own research 
when he acted as his own informant. Interspersed among the texts collected in 
Harlem are several items of children’s folklore remembered from his Oklahoma 
childhood. Ellison, after all, was part of the great migration of African-Americans 
to Northern cities, and he retained his own memory culture of Southern tradition 
even while moving in literary circles and beginning his writing career in New York 
City.

Ellison remembered a “choosing rhyme” from 1925. Other versions of this 
widespread counting out rhyme have been reported from Canada, England, 
Scotland and the United States:13

My mother and your mother 
Were hanging out clothes 
My mother hit your mother 
Right in the nose 
O-U-T Spells Out!

A “taunt” was remembered from 1920, when he was about six years old:

Patty on the brooms tick 
Patty on the sea 



BARON  “I SAW MRS. SARAY, SITTING ON A BOMBALERRY”

35

Patty tore his britches 
And layed it on me

Another taunt, from 1922, was “used to taunt white children as well as for the 
choosing of sides”:

Enny meany minny moe 
Catch a white peck by the toe 
If he bites you let him go 
Enny meany minny moe!

Both Ellison’s texts and children’s folklore collected from non-African Americans 
in New York City for the FWP include a number of taunts referring to other ethnic 
groups. Coming across the taunts in these collections came as no surprise to me, 
having grown up in the Bronx in the 1950s and 1960s and remembering folklore 
performed by members of various white ethnic groups referring disparagingly to 
other groups, most viciously about African Americans. Taunts, whether with ethnic 
reference or not, are a widespread genre of children’s folklore. Halpert indicates 
that “the pattern of insulting another group” has long been practiced in the United 
States, although sometimes they “reflect an attitude that children do not feel 
with any particular force (1946, 17, 19). They are pervasive among children, and 
Jorgensen, in “Teases and Pranks,” notes that as “forms of victimization”, represent 
“behaviors that children are likely to experience at almost any time and in any 
place.” Taunting, especially when it involves “socially unacceptable words or 
taboos,” is “usually not done in the presence of adult authorities, but otherwise it 
is a fairly everyday type of occurrence” (1999, 213-14). The large number of taunts 
collected by Ellison testifies to his ability to establish rapport with his research 
subjects. They included taunts referring to various kinds of other groups. One, 
about “crackers,” collected on 142nd and Eighth Avenue from William and Eddie 
Freeman, was both pithy and pointed. The Freemans reported, “that’s what we 
used to say when the white boys made us mad”:

Cracker, cracker ring the bell 
Cracker, cracker go to hell!

Children who “cannot read well” felt the signifying sting of another taunt:

Can you read 
Can you write 
Can you smoke your daddy’s pipe?

An overweight child was the target of another taunt:

Fat and skinny had a race 
Fat fell down and broke his face 
Skinny said I won the race 



“I SAW MRS. SARAY, SITTING ON A BOMBALERRY”  BARON

36

Fat said that ain’t fair 
Cause I lost my underwear

“Delaware” rhymed easily with “square” and “fair” (for the 1939 World’s Fair) in a 
taunt used for “strangers”:

Look at them squares 
From Delaware 
They musta got left  
from the World’s Fair

Ellison noted that the following version was recited “when a stranger or out-of-
town license on a car driven by Negroes, is noticed.” The last two lines were 
recited by Herbert Lambert, sung to the tune of Shave and a Haircut. Lambert, who 
recited other rhymes for Ellison, used this tune “to end off every verse he gave.”

I’m a square from Delaware 
Just in town to see the Fair 
Boom da dee ah dee 
Boom, boom!

While Lambert is named as the tradition bearer, Ellison usually did not give the 
names of the performers. An unusual amount of personal history was provided for 
William and Eddie Freeman, who like many other African American New Yorkers, 
before and since, spent time during their childhood visiting relatives in the South:

The following rhymes were given the writer by William and Eddie 
Freeman, who operate a vegetable cart in the Eighth Avenue market 
near143rd Street. William was born in Charleston, South Carolina but 
was brought to New York when three months old. Eddie was born 
in Conn. During 1936 the boys visited relatives in Charleston and the 
“Cracker Cracker” rhyme was learned there. Eddie chose to recite the 
rhymes and during the recitation was advised by William not to use 
the word black, but to use the word dark instead. The boys are twelve 
and thirteen years of age.

 Once upon a time 
 A darkey found a dime, 
 Dime turned red, 
 The darkey fell dead

 I know something you caint tell 
 Three dark niggers on a peanut shell 
 One kin sing, 
 One kin dance, 
 One kin sew my old man’s pants.



BARON  “I SAW MRS. SARAY, SITTING ON A BOMBALERRY”

37

Topical references appear in other items collected by Ellison. The Opies, in The 
Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, categorize such rhymes as “topical rhymes” 
since “the era in which it has belongs is immediately apparent,” but caution that a 
“topical rhyme” may be a version of much older rhymes (1959, 98). Halpert found 
widespread reference to “contemporary events, personalities and institutions” in 
rhymes collected during the 1930s (1946, 14). Joe Louis appears in the following 
rhyme, with a notation in Ellison’s hand about the “trucking” dance : 

Joe Louis and Bob Pastor 
Bob Pastor was on his knees 
Said, “Joe, 
Don’t hit me please, 
Just go on trucking on out the ring.”

(Use) This rhyme tells the story of the Pastor-Louis fight, which took 
place in 1939. The term ‘trucking’ refers to a dance step popular at 
that time; a version of which was inspired by Louis’ peculiar, shuffling 
footwork.

According to Halpert, children “quickly became adept exponents of truckin’,” 
introducing it in a number of songs and games” (1946, 114). He indicated that the 
“truckin’ “rhymes were not known outside of Harlem. Halpert viewed them as a 
kind of emergent folklore, as “for the most part recent compositions either based 
on older rhyme forms or composed from scratch” (15-16).
 Another rhyme was chanted rhythmically to African American dance steps which 
“were popular in New York around 1928”:

Hay, hay,  
Farmer gray, 
Took another 
Load away

Ellison collected a ball bouncing rhyme about an encounter with a policeman 
guarding Macy’s department store. While this rhyme was found among other 
ethnic communities in New York City, it might have had special resonance 
for residents of Harlem. During the mid and late 1930s, struggles against 
discrimination in hiring in department stores were a focus for African American 
political activism. This rhyme illustrates how children’s folklore (in any culture) 
provides mechanisms for working through issues, concerns and anxieties through 
play: 

I won’t go to Macy’s any more, more, more! 
There’s a big fat policeman at the door, door, door 
He grabbed me by the collar  
And made me pay a dollar 
And I won’t go to Macy’s any more, more, more!14



“I SAW MRS. SARAY, SITTING ON A BOMBALERRY”  BARON

38

Only a few jump rope rhymes appear in the collection. As in ball bouncing 
rhymes, the rhymes used for jumping rope act to structure movement, as Sullivan 
notes in “Songs, Poems and Rhymes” (153). Halpert, in his proposal for Children’s 
Rhymes and Games, speaks of how specific words may be used to indicate 
actions. In the first of the two rhymes which follow, the rope jumper is expected 
to either straddle the rope or miss her turn, allowing the jumper to avoid a “faux 
pas”. Both of these rhymes are found extensively in Anglo-American tradition and 
Great Britain:

I know a lady  
By the name of miss 
Sat by the fire and gave me a kiss 
All of a sudden 
She missed like this!15

Johnny on the ocean 
Johnny in the sea 
Johnny broke a windowpane and blamed it on me 
I told ma 
And ma told pa 
And Johnny got a beating and ha ha ha16   

Ellison almost always presented ball bouncing and jump rope rhymes as texts, 
without describing the form of the activity which the rhymes accompany. An 
exception was the following ball bouncing rhyme, with Ellison’s comments 
alongside the text:

 I live in Chinka China 
 My name is Carol See. 
 I wash and dry the dishes 
 For fifty cents a week. 
 So sister, sister, sister 
 You ought to be ashame 
 To marry, marry, marry 
 A man without a name. 
 So my father is a butcher 
 My mother cuts the meat. 
 I am a little hot dog 
 hat runs across the street.

This is one of the longer ball bouncing jingles. The repeated words 
represent variations in the bouncing, for instance on the words `Sister, 
sister, sister’ the leg is crossed over and the ball bounced over it, after 
which the bouncer returns to the straight pattern. 



BARON  “I SAW MRS. SARAY, SITTING ON A BOMBALERRY”

39

A rhyme beginning “Your old man is a dirty old man” was collected in different 
versions and variants by Halpert in various parts of Manhattan. He characterized it 
as an adaptation of the song “Old Dan Tucker”, well known as a minstrel song in 
the nineteenth century. For Halpert, it demonstrated how some children’s folklore 
in New York City can contain the “remnants” of older adult folklore (Children’s 
Rhymes and Games). The version collected by Ellison includes a street address in 
the Lower East Side, on the other end of Manhattan from Harlem: 

My mother and your mother 
Live across the way 
315 East Broadway 
Every night they have a fight 
And this is what they say 
Your old man is a dirty old man 
He washes his face with the frying pan 
He combs his hair with the leg of a chair 
Your old man is a dirty old man17

Ellison ascribes various genres to the folk rhymes he collected. Categorization of 
children’s rhymes, however, is a tricky business. Sanches and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 
contend that taxonomies created through categorizations of rhymes cannot 
be “predictive” since the same rhyme in different play groups can accompany 
jumping rope, ball bouncing, or taunting another child (1976,67).18

This “gag” collected by Ellison was also recited in my own childhood in the 
northwest Bronx, with the addition of a “the” before “ice”:

Ladies and gentlemen 
Take my advice 
Pull down your pants 
And sit on ice.

A variant called for movement:

Ladies and gentlemen 
Take my advice 
Pull off your pants 
And slide on ice.19

A very short verse collected by Ellison was labeled a “baseball rhyme.” Short 
verses were found widely among New York City children — Halpert speaks in his 
proposal for Children’s Rhymes and Games of the “distinctly New Yorkese rhyme 
which is short, snappy and to the point.” 

In and out 
Three strikes and out



“I SAW MRS. SARAY, SITTING ON A BOMBALERRY”  BARON

40

Another rhyme was used as a mnemonic, with Ellison noting the use of such 
rhymes in the South: 

Columbus was a Jew 
Fourteen-ninety-two!

(Use) Such rhymes are used to aid the memory; in this instance it is a 
historical date which is memorized. In the South, superstitions, moral 
and other observations are given such a statement.

A “dare” was also categorized by Ellison by its “use”:

You can slip 
And you can slide 
But I’ll kick you for a buggy ride.

(Use) - Dare

Some rhymes were classified as “pastimes.” The polysemy of the word “bill” 
was at play in one of these rhymes. As Sanches and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 
note, it embodies two kinds of rhetorical patterns found in children’s rhymes, 
“adnominatio (pun and wordplay) and conversio (repetition of the last word in 
successive phrases” (1976, 109). Variants of this rhyme were recorded by other 
FWP fieldworkers among Italians and Puerto Ricans in East Harlem, and in the 
Bronx and Brooklyn among performers whose ethnicities were not indicated.

Well hello Bill 
Where you going Bill 
Down Town Bill 
What for Bill 
To pay my gas bill 
How much Bill 
Ten dollar bill 
So long Bill

Some rhymes were uncategorized by Ellison. The text of a rhyme which 
improvised upon a popular song was followed by a note about continuities 
between African American folk and “commercial” song:

Margie is a swimming pool 
All around the house 
But never in the pool 
Well allright then …

The above rhyme is an improvised lyric to a popular song, originating 
in Harlem, the title of which is “Well All Right Then.” This title, which 



BARON  “I SAW MRS. SARAY, SITTING ON A BOMBALERRY”

41

gives the tune its refrain, is nonsensical as far as actual meaning is 
concerned. And as is typical of such Negro songs, the pattern of 
“WELL ALLRIGHT THEN” is very elastic in order to allow for such 
improvisations; a characteristic which comes out of the folk period of 
Negro music and which has been carried over into the commercial.

African American children’s rhymes and singing games have continued to 
incorporate popular music. Kyra Gaunt shows that this relationship works both 
ways in an ongoing circulation between folk and popular traditions, citing 
many examples of rhythm and blues, blues and hip hop songs appropriating 
children’s game songs (2006, 2-3, 68-69, 89-110). Ellison saw how such use of 
popular song underscores the fluid, improvisatory character of African American 
music, characteristic of both a “folk period” when African American music 
consisted largely of folk music, and his own time, when commercially produced 
popular music had become a dominant force shaping cultural preferences. In 
referring to continuity and change in African American music, Ellison speaks to 
transformations in Black American culture occurring during the interwar period, 
when he was working for the FWP. He collected traditions brought by migrants 
from the South who maintained them in Harlem, as both active and passive 
carriers of tradition. These traditions were often adapted, localized and changed 
by children in Harlem, who also performed traditions maintained as well by other 
ethnic groups, and practiced emerging folklore newly created in New York. 

In The Craft of Ralph Ellison, O’Meally indicates that Ellison perceived 
Southern sources “even when the Harlem lore seemed indigenous,” and he 
would sometimes “recognize a remnant of a saying or rhyme he had heard in the 
South reduced to a `mumble’ or nonsense phrase in Harlem.” O’Meally discusses 
Ellison’s contention that these traditions suggested a bridge to the south and 
to African ancestry, and he cites Ellison as stating that their “tradition goes way 
back to the South, and some of it goes back to Africa” (1980, 34). While much of 
the children’s folklore collected by Ellison was distinctively African American in 
provenance and current practice, some of these traditions were also practiced by 
whites, including traditions with sources in Great Britain. In Zora Neale Hurston’s 
collections of African American children’s folklore in Florida, she noted that they 
included “white games that have been learned by Negro children in contact with 
whites” like “ ‘London Bridge is Falling Down’, … white games that have been 
modified by Negro use, like ‘Little Sally Walker’, and purely Negro games like 
‘Bama,’ ‘Rabbit Dance,’ and ‘Chick-Mah-Chick” (1999, 105) — a pattern like that 
of the games Ellison collected in Harlem. The critical essays and fiction of Ellison 
embody his views of the creative genius and cultural distinctiveness of African 
American cultures, the importance of Southern roots, and the Americaness of 
African Americans, all characteristics evident in the children’s rhymes he collected 
early in his career.

The children whose rhymes were collected by Ellison experienced both 
tradition and change, through their folklore as in other aspects of their lives. 
In his own life at this time, Ellison was experiencing personal and professional 
transformations as a migrant as well as a writer. Like other FWP folklore workers, 



“I SAW MRS. SARAY, SITTING ON A BOMBALERRY”  BARON

42

he collected during the day and wrote in the evenings (35-36), working for the 
first time as a full time cultural worker, now possessing a primary occupational 
identity as a writer.

Ellison’s experiences collecting folklore resonated in later works of fiction and 
short stories. O’Meally notes that “the project’s structured examination of language 
and folklore planted seeds that helped his writing grow beyond the limits of 
literary realism” (1980, 36). He writes of how the “process of interviewing and 
transcribing” the narratives “sharpened Ellison’s ear for idiosyncrasies of speech 
and gave him practice in getting particular speech patterns onto paper”(34).” His 
performative and improvisatory renderings of African American speech and oral 
traditions of various genres demonstrates, as Callahan puts it, a “commitment to 
an American improvisatory vernacular” (89). Rather than serving only illustratively, 
folklore was deeply infused within Ellison’s fiction. Ellison viewed the use of 
folklore in fiction as absorbing “folk tradition into … thematic structures … plots, 
symbolism and rhetoric” (1995d, 111). As his collecting was informed by both text 
and context, so was his fiction, as O’Meally indicates:

Many of the rhymes, jokes and peculiarities of speech which enrich 
Ellison’s fiction were drawn from his experience in Oklahoma 
and Alabama; many others were drawn from notes he made while 
researching and interviewing in Harlem for the Federal Writer’s 
Project. Beyond simply copying bits of already collected folklore into 
his fiction, Ellison developed a working knowledge of Afro-American 
rhymes, games and stories. Moreover, he refined his sense of the 
folkloric context: the moments and the settings in which persons, 
particularly Afro-Americans, were likely to use the stylized speech of 
folklore. He studied text as well as context. In his fiction … the lore 
is more than local color; it is ritualistic as well as reflective of a whole 
lifestyle (1980, 35).

Folklore also figured multifariously in Ellison’s essays and creative non-fiction. 
Drawing from wellsprings of memories from his Oklahoma boyhood, formative 
years as Tuskegee student and migrant to New York, and keen observations as a 
FWP field researcher, he possessed an abundant store of folklore material borne 
out of first- hand experience. While working for the FWP, Ellison was associated 
with leftist politics and wrote about folklore in publications self-consciously 
identified with the working class. The writers for these publications, who were 
of working class origin, asserted, according to Michael Denning, “pronounced 
class awareness or consciousness” which framed “working class ideologies” 
central to a “cultural front” that shaped American culture for generations to come. 
(8). During this early phase of his literary career, Ellison authored essays and 
reviews about folklore found among African Americans and elsewhere in the 
world which Marxist literary scholar Barbara Foley, in her article “Ralph Ellison 
as Proletarian Journalist” sees as demonstrating “a materialist and internationalist 
approach” which views “folklore as a site of resistance” Ellison definitively 
rejected Communism by the mid-1940s and became increasingly critical of 



BARON  “I SAW MRS. SARAY, SITTING ON A BOMBALERRY”

43

the Left. Nevertheless, he continued to see folklore as a means of resistance 
despite a profound ideological shift which has been variously interpreted by 
Ellison scholars. Foley contends, for example that his view of folklore remained 
consonant with the ideology of the popular front , arguing against critics who 
saw the representation of folklore as resistance in Invisible Man as representing 
“a culturalist tendency antipathetic to Marxist analytical categories” (1998-99, 543) 
. As Rampersad demonstrates in Ralph Ellison: A Biography, Ellison’s immersion 
in leftist intellectual circles and, eventually, in the New York literati, was 
accompanied by personal disengagement from participation in African American 
vernacular culture. Nevertheless, even as he became personally more distant from 
working class culture, he continued to strongly assert the significance of folklore 
for African American cultural resilience and survival. 

As a young writer, Ellison was profoundly influenced by the Cambridge 
school’s view of the relationship of myth and ritual, especially Lord Raglan’s 
archetypal study of the hero. He was also inspired by the applications of 
mythology and folklore by Eliot and Joyce, and he came to see that African 
American folklore could be used in his fiction as well. According to Rampersad, 
this revelation emerged during Ellison’s collecting of folklore in Harlem for the 
FWP. “Ironically,” Rampersad states, “explaining New York street life had taken 
him back into the arcane world he had entered in exploring the footnotes of T.S. 
Eliot’s The Waste Land, and especially the indebtedness of Eliot to Jessie Weston 
and other British scholars in the so-called Cambridge school of myth and ritual 
studies” (2007, 116).

The Cambridge school’s approach to folklore differed greatly from other 
twentieth century folklore scholarship, including the approaches of both 
comparative, text oriented European folklorists and American folklorists engaged 
in ethnographic studies of living traditions. Its conceptualization of the origins 
of myth in ritual is unverifiable and reductive, positing relationships belied by 
systematic field research. For Ellison, there was apparently no contradiction 
between his systematic collecting of folklore in a project guided by ethnographic 
methodologies and the inspiration his studies of myth and ritual brought to the 
genesis of Invisible Man as well as his essays about African Americans.

Ellison viewed folklore as central for understanding African American culture, 
and over the years he increasingly spoke in terms of both its universal significance 
and cultural specificity. In “Richard Wright’s Blues,” published in 1945, Ellison 
saw the blues as a quintessential African American art form, “an autobiographical 
chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically” (129). A 1948 New York Star 
article, “A Journalist Considers the Position of the Negro in American History,” 
contended that “Negro Americans … evolved, from disparate influences, a folk 
culture embodying … a conception of human life, a ‘style,’ a musical culture, a 
somewhat crude psychology, and a very advanced philosophy of human freedom” 
(qtd. in Rampersad 2007, 240). 

Later writings argued against reducing African American folklore to archetypes 
and seeing it primarily as a vehicle of resistance, as they stressed its transcendent 
value for African Americans in particular and humankind in general. In “Change 
the Joke and Slip the Yoke,” written in 1958, Ellison criticized Stanley Edgar 



“I SAW MRS. SARAY, SITTING ON A BOMBALERRY”  BARON

44

Hyman’s view of the archetype of the trickster in Invisible Man, with Ellison 
asserting his freedom as a novelist to create characters with specific cultural 
resonances. He stated that “spirituals .. blues, jazz and folk tales” have “much to 
tell us of the faith, humor and adaptability to reality necessary to live in a world 
which has taken on much of the insecurity and blues-like absurdity known to 
those of us who brought it into being” (112). His 1964 review of Blues People 
argued against its sociogenic approach and emphasis upon the blues as a means 
of political protest. He underscored the universal significance of the blues and 
its importance as an art form along with its value for African Americans as a 
technique of cultural survival. For Ellison, the blues “speak to us simultaneously of 
the tragic and comic aspects of the human condition and they express a profound 
sense of life shared by many Negro Americans precisely because their lives have 
combined these modes” (286). 

Folklore was integral to Ellison’s view of African American culture as a major 
shaping force in the lives of all Americans, and the continuing cultural interactions 
of blacks and whites throughout American history. Stressing the importance of the 
vernacular in American culture, and Black influence on American culture, a news 
release for Ellison’s first course at New York University in 1970 stated that it would 
be “exploring the relationship between sophisticated and vernacular culture in the 
United States … one of the abiding phenomena in this country starting from our 
American and British background.” European cultural traditions had come “into 
ceaseless contact with the imaginations of Negro Americans who have been in the 
unique position of being inside the society and yet outside” (quoted in Rampersad 
2007, 471). 

Ellison’s collections of children’s folklore for the FWP incorporated traditions 
distinctive to African Americans as well as others shared by New Yorkers and 
other Americans from diverse cultural backgrounds. While Ellison did not note 
that many of these traditions were also practiced by non-Blacks, their provenances 
reflected the interactions through culture of blacks and whites as well as the 
distinctive contribution of African Americans to American life, themes which ran 
through Ellison’s writings over the years. In his scathing critique of Blues People by 
Amiri Baraka (known at the time as LeRoi Jones), Ellison contends that “Jones has 
stumbled over that ironic obstacle which lies in the path of anyone who would 
fashion a theory of American Negro culture while ignoring the intricate network 
of connections which binds Negroes to the larger society. To do so is to attempt 
delicate brain surgery with a switchblade” (1964, 283). Mutual influences between 
African Americans and other Americans were seen by Ellison as continuous and 
ongoing. In “Some Questions and Some Answers,” written in 1958, Ellison wrote of 
a “body of folklore” as among the fundamental expressions of “American Negro” 
culture, but hastened to add that “it must, however, be pointed out that due to the 
close links which Negro Americans have with the rest of the nation, these cultural 
expressions are constantly influencing the larger body of American culture and in 
turn influencing them” (292). While recognizing the reciprocal cultural influences 
between African Americans and other Americans, Ellison viewed African American 
folklore as a hallmark of African American cultural genius, asserting humanity 
and creativity over centuries of oppression. Much of African American folklore, 



BARON  “I SAW MRS. SARAY, SITTING ON A BOMBALERRY”

45

like many of the children’s traditions Ellison collected, is distinctively African 
American in character, created and shaped by blacks in the Southern United States 
and Harlem. Like folklore, fiction by Ellison and other African American writers 
counters dehumanizing representations of their culture20, following from the 
imperative Ellison states in “Twentieth Century Fiction and the Mask of Humanity” 
for “Negro writers” to take on the “task of defining Negro humanity” (1953, 99), a 
task which for Ellison integrally involved folklore. 

While Ellison’s FWP folklore collections have enduring significance as a 
foundation for both his fiction and non-fiction, they also have substantial but 
unrecognized value as folklore collections on their own terms, drawing from 
multiple cultural sources while demonstrating creativity in the creation of emerging 
traditions. Reading Ellison’s field notes and texts of seventy years ago from the 
standpoint of a folklorist trained in the performance centered approach to folklore 
study, I am struck by his accounts of performance situations, his sensitivity 
to performance styles, and the contextual details he provided. Contemporary 
folklorists should also be impressed by his frequent notes about the uses of 
particular traditions and his remarks about distinctive features of form and the 
localization of particular traditions.

As a writer, Ellison was a literary modernist who wrote stylistically advanced 
fiction deeply infused with folklore, representing African Americans maintaining 
traditions while experiencing modern life. As a folklorist, he was a modern 
folklorist, observing and reporting context while recording texts, collecting older 
traditions maintained by southern migrants, folklore localized and transformed 
in the city and emerging urban traditions. Rather than seeing folklore as residual 
culture, as static relics of a Southern past, Ellison projects a dynamicist view of the 
children’s folklore he collected as emergent in performance. Folklore, and speech 
in general, are viewed performatively, marked by improvisation and innovation. 
Folk culture is located within modernity, rather than outside it, through the 
folklore research he carried out at the outset of his career as well as in subsequent 
fiction and essays about African-American culture. Tradition and modernity 
are intertwined throughout the body of Ellison’s folklore research and literary 
production, embodying a view of the traditional and the modern in dynamic 
interaction rather than as disjunctive forces. While Ellison’s brief period collecting 
folklore occurred early in his career, it represented a highly formative episode in 
his literary career which continued to reverberate on many levels. 

NOTES 

An earlier version of this work was presented at the American Folklore Society’s 
annual meeting in Milwaukee in 2006. Research for this article was carried out 
while I was a Non-Resident Fellow of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African 
and African-American Research at Harvard University. I am grateful to Roger D. 
Abrahams, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Felicia R. McMahon and John F. Szwed for their 
encouragement and critical comments about this article.

1. While the manuscript for the proposal for Children’s Rhymes and Games 
in the Manuscript Collection of the Library of Congress does not include the 



“I SAW MRS. SARAY, SITTING ON A BOMBALERRY”  BARON

46

author’s name, Halpert refers to it an account of his early career in “Coming Into 
Folklore More Than Fifty Years Ago.” He recounted that he was “fired” from the 
FWP, “mainly because the book I had proposed, on New York City children’s lore, 
was thought to be too large a project – one that would take too long to reach 
publication” (451). The proposed book was never published.

2. Nine “Children’s Street Rhymes” in this collection were included in a book 
of photographs by Aaron Siskind, Harlem: Photographs 1932-40, taken for the 
“Harlem Document” initiative associated with the Photo League, as Battle indicates 
in “Harlem: A Document” ( 2-6). The Book of Negro Folklore, edited by Langston 
Hughes and Arna Bontemps, has a section “Harlem Children’s Rhymes and Gags” 
in a chapter on playsongs and games, which included four items collected by 
Ellison, each framed by either Ellison’s notes or comments by the children reciting 
the rhymes (433-35). A number of the rhymes collected by Ellison also appeared in 
Halpert’s master’s thesis.

3. All of Ellison’s transcriptions of children’s rhymes and associated field notes 
are reprinted here as they appear in the reports held in the Manuscript Collection 
of the Library of Congress, without emendation, except for small changes to 
regularize spelling.

4. During the 1970s, the academic discipline of Folklore turned from an 
emphasis on textual analysis to a performance-centered approach. Viewing 
folklore as artistic communication in small groups, it focused upon how folklore 
emerges in face-to-face interaction, and its social and cultural context. In their 
“Introduction” to an issue of Western Folklore marking the twentieth anniversary 
of the landmark Toward New Perspectives in Folklore which articulated the new 
approach to the study of folklore in context and as performance, Shuman and 
Briggs write of how “style, content, and context” were “brought under a single 
theoretical aegis as they were studied in particular, situated acts of communication” 
(114).

5. Abrahams indicates that this rhyme derives “from a formula opening of 
English tales” (145).

Versions of this rhyme were collected by Johnson on St. Helena Island (134, 
137, 155) as opening formulae for folk tales:

Once upon a time  
Monkey chaw tobacco an’ spit white lime

Once upon a time 
Monkey chaw tobacco an’ de cat drink wine

Once upon a time, a very good time 
Monkey chaw tobacco on de railroad line

6. Bessie Jones and Bess Lomax Hawes suggest that little Sallie’s last name 
as “Water” is found in “perhaps the oldest versions” of this game of British 
origin which they collected as an African American ring play. They note that 
the concluding stanza, “Shake it to the East/Shake it to the West,” is an African 



BARON  “I SAW MRS. SARAY, SITTING ON A BOMBALERRY”

47

American addition to this game (1972, 107). 
7. Hale and Hale indicate that the expression “Shake Your Duster” dates to the 

second decade of the twentieth century or earlier, when it had an “admonitory” 
purpose, to “speed up a person’s effort in the business at hand,” and they “suspect 
it may refer to long coats, or ‘dusters’” which the “first automobilists” wore “when 
the motor car was young.” (1938, 918). 

Another version collected by Ellison had a more plausible rationale for the visit 
to a store:

I had a little dog 
His name was buster 
Sent him to the store 
To buy some mustard 
Oh well a come on  
Buster 
Bring that mustard!

8. Variants of this rhyme were recited throughout New York City, its suburbs, 
and in Northwestern Connecticut. Halpert notes variants of this rhyme recited 
in New York City, with a different third line, as “On the day of decoration” or 
“On the day of declaration” (Folk Rhymes 172). In her dissertation, “Folk Jingles 
of American Children”, Dorothy Howard indicated that “the day of declaration” 
variant was found in East Orange, New Jersey, Nangotuck (sic), Connecticut and 
Westchester County (1938, 115).

9. Halpert notes that this rhyme was also collected at Greenwich House, in 
Greenwich Village (1946, 172). Greenwich House served a largely immigrant 
population at the time. 

10. This rhyme was also reported from throughout New York City. A variant 
included in “Folk Rhymes of New York City Children” was transcribed (or 
spelled) differently, as “One, two, three a-lairry,/ I spy Mrs. Sarey,/ Sitting on a 
bumble lairry,/Just like a chocolate fairy” (1946, 171). Howard reported a version 
from “New York State” as “One, two, three a-larry/I spy sister Sarrie/Sitting on a 
bumbleberry/ Eating Chocolate like a fairy” (1938, 116). Ethel and Oliver Hale 
indicated that “no one has told us what a bumble-airy or bumble-eery is, so we 
must assume it is a concocted word, created to fit a rhyme scheme” (1938, 126).

11. Abrahams provides 39 references from throughout the United States of 
variants and versions of “Charlie Chaplin” as a jump rope rhyme (1969, 26-27). In 
New York City, Halpert reports, in “Folk Rhymes of New York City Children” that 
Charlie Chaplin as counting out rhyme and jump rope rhyme included a variety of 
last lines, “And turn yourself around,” “And turn around to the submarine,” “And 
turn your back to the Kaiser,” from Greenwich and Church House, Jones House 
and Greenwich House, respectively.

12. According to Halpert, “Gypsy, gypsy, lived in a tent” was found throughout 
New York City (1946, 192). Abrahams notes, that it is more frequently found as a 
counting-out rhyme than as a jump rope rhyme (57) Versions of this rhyme are found 
in England and Scotland (Abrahams 1969, 57; Abrahams and Rankin 1980, 87).



“I SAW MRS. SARAY, SITTING ON A BOMBALERRY”  BARON

48

13. Abrahams reports that more common versions than the one Ellison 
remembered begin with the same two lines, but the following lines say;

My mother gave your mother 
A punch in the nose 
What was the color of the blood? 
Blue [or Red] 
B-L-U-E or R-E-D (152)

Halpert collected another version, from the West Side, as:

Your mother and my mother 
Were hanging out the clothes 
Your mother gave my mother 
A sock in the nose. 
What color was the blood? 
‘Red’ 
R-E-D (1946, 125)

14. Versions collected by Halpert had different third and fourth lines. In one 
from the West Bronx, “I socked him in the nose/And I stepped on his toes,” in 
another from Jones House “I squeezed him like a lemon and sent him up to 
heaven, and, in a text from Brooklyn’s Willoughby House, “He’ll pull me by my 
pants/And make me do a dance .” Abrahams reports that as a jump rope rhyme, “I 
won’t go to Macy’s” has been collected in California and Nevis (1969, 97).

15. Abrahams references sixteen versions of “Miss, miss, little miss, miss:/When 
she misses she misses like this” from the throughout the United States, Britain and 
Scotland in Jump-Rope Rhymes: A Dictionary, including one from Britain which 
begins, “I know a woman/And her name is Miss (1969, 123-24). 

16. In Jump-Rope Rhymes: A Dictionary, Abrahams lists references to versions 
and variants found in thirty one states and Scotland (1969, 102).

17. This rhyme is used both as a counting-out rhyme and a jump rope rhyme. 
Abrahams’s Jump-Rope Rhymes: A Dictionary and Abrahams’s and Rankin’s 
Counting-Out Rhymes: A Dictionary identify, all together, versions and variants 
from thirteen states (Abrahams 135-36, Abrahams and Rankin 154-55). 

18. Sanches and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett reference the research on rope skipping 
games of the Cooperative Research Project in Rope Skipping Games: Language, 
Belief and Customs, Tri-University Project on Elementary Education, University of 
Nebraska and U.S. Office of Education. 1968.

19. Another variant, which Halpert dates to 1918 from East 78th Street, was 
reported as “Ladies and Gentlemen/Take my Advice/Take off your Britches/And 
Slide on the Ice” (1946, 93).

 20. Ellison’s views of the received dehumanizing and distorted representations 
of Blacks in American literature are akin to Toni Morrison’s notion of the 
“Africanist” presence in American literature discussed in her Playing in the Dark: 
Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992). 



BARON  “I SAW MRS. SARAY, SITTING ON A BOMBALERRY”

49

WORKS CITED

Abrahams, Roger. 1969. Jump-Rope Rhymes: A Dictionary. Austin: University of 
Texas Press.

Abrahams, Roger and Lois Rankin. 1980. Counting-Out Rhymes: A Dictionary. 
Austin: University of Texas Press. 

Banks, Ann, ed. 1980. First Person America. New York: Knopf. 
Battle, Marcia. 1990. Harlem: A Document. New Introduction to Aaron Siskind, 

Harlem: Photographs 1932-1940, 3-6. Washington: Smithsonian Institution 
Press.

Bauman, Richard and Américo Paredes, eds. 1972. Toward New Perspectives in 
Folklore. Austin: University of Texas Press. 

Botkin, B[enjamin] A. 1958. We Called it Living Lore. New York Folklore Quarterly 
14(3): 189-201. 

Byerman, Keith Eldon. 1985. Fingering the Jagged Grain: Tradition and Form in 
Recent Black Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press.

Callahan, John F. 1994. Frequencies of Eloquence: The Performance and 
Composition of Invisible Man. In New Essays on Invisible Man, ed. Robert 
O’Meally, 55-94. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.

Dargan, Amanda and Zeitlin, Steven. 1990. City Play. New Brunswick: Rutgers 
University Press.

Denning, Michael. 1996. The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in 
the Twentieth Century. London; New York: Verso. 

Ellison, Ralph. 1939-40. Harlem Children’s Folklore. New York City 
FolkloreCollections, United States Work Projects Administration (WPA) 
Records, Federal Writer’s Project: Folklore Project. Manuscript Collection, 
Library of Congress. Container A 648.

______. 1966. Harlem’s America. New Leader. 26 September: 22-35.
______. 1972 [1952]. Invisible Man. New York: Vintage Books.
______. 1994. Introduction [from the 1981 printing; 1952]. Invisible Man, xvii – 

xxxiv. New York: Modern Library. 
______. 1995a [1945]. Richard Wright’s Blues. In The Collected Essays of Ralph 

Ellison, ed. John F. Callahan, 128-44. New York: Modern Library.
______. 1995b [1948]. Harlem is Nowhere. In The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, 

ed. John F. Callahan, 320-27. New York: Modern Library.
______. 1995c [1953]. Twentieth Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity. 

In The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed. John F. Callahan, 81-99. New 
York: Modern Library. 

______. 1995d [1958]. Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke. In The Collected Essays 
of Ralph Ellison, ed. John F. Callahan, 100-112. New York: Modern Library.

______. 1995e [1958]. Some Questions and Some Answers. In The Collected Essays 
of Ralph Ellison, ed. John F. Callahan, 291-301. New York: Modern Library. 

______. 1995f [1963/64].The World and the Jug. In The Collected Essays of Ralph 
Ellison, ed. John F. Callahan, 155-58. New York: Modern Library.



“I SAW MRS. SARAY, SITTING ON A BOMBALERRY”  BARON

50

______. 1995g [1964]. The Art of Fiction: An Interview. In The Collected Essays of 
Ralph Ellison, ed. John F. Callahan, 210-24. New York: Modern Library.

______. 1995h [1964]. Blues People. In The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed. 
John F. Callahan, 278-87. New York: Modern Library. 

Foley, Barbara. 1998-99. Ralph Ellison as Proletarian Journalist.” Science & Society 
62(4): 537-556.

Gaunt, Kyra. 2006. The Games Black Girls Play. New York: New York University 
Press.

Hale, Ethel and Oliver. 1938. From Sidewalk, Gutter and Stoop: Being a Chronicle 
of Children’s Play and Game Activity. Manuscript, New York Public Library, 
Special Collections. 

[Halpert, Herbert]. n.d. Children’s Rhymes and Games. Proposed book manuscript. 
Work Projects Administration (WPA) Records, Federal Writer’s Project: 
Folklore Project. Manuscript Collection, box A647. Library of Congress.

Halpert, Herbert. 1946. Folk Rhymes of New York City Children. Master’s thesis, 
Columbia Univ. 

______. 1992. Coming Into Folklore More than Fifty Years Ago. Journal of 
American Folklore 105(418): 442-457.

Hirsch, Jerrold. 1988. Cultural Pluralism and Applied Folklore: The New Deal 
Precedent. In The Conservation of Culture: Folklorists and the Public Sector, 
ed. Burt Feintuch, 46-67. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.

Howard, Dorothy G. Mills. 1938. Folk Jingles of American Children: A Collection 
and Study of Rhymes Used by Children Today. Ph.D. Diss. New York 
University. 

Hughes, Langston and Arna Bontemps. 1958. Book of Negro Folklore. New York: 
Dodd, Mead.

Hurston, Zora Neale. 1999. Go Gator and Muddy the Water: Writings from the 
Federal Writer’s Project, ed. Pamela Bordeon. New York: W.W. Norton.

Hymes, Dell. 1981. “In Vain I Tried to Tell You”: Essays in Native American 
 Ethnopoetics. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Johnson, Guy B. 1930. Folk Culture on St. Helena Island, South Carolina. Chapel 

Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Jones, Bessie and Hawes, Bess Lomax. 1972. Step it Down: Games, Plays, Songs 

and Stories from the Afro-American Heritage. New York: Harper and Row. 
Jorgensen, Marilyn. 1999. Teases and Pranks. In Children’s Folklore: A Source Book, 

ed. Brian Sutton-Smith, Jay Mechling, Thomas W. Johnson, and Felicia R. 
McMahon, 213-24. New York: Garland, 1995.

Morrison, Toni. 1992. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. 
 New York: Vintage. 
O’Meally, Robert G. 1980. The Craft of Ralph Ellison. Cambridge: Harvard 

University Press. 
Opie, Iona and Peter. 1959. The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren. Oxford: 

Oxford University Press.
Rampersad, Arnold. 2007. Ralph Ellison: A Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 



BARON  “I SAW MRS. SARAY, SITTING ON A BOMBALERRY”

51

Sanches, Mary and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara.1976. Children’s Traditional 
Speech Play and Child Language. In Speech Play, ed. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 

 65-110. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 
Shuman, Amy and Charles Briggs. 1993. Introduction. Special Issue, Theorizing 

Folklore: Toward New Perspectives on the Politics of Culture. Western 
Folklore 48(2,3,4): 109-34. 

Siskind, Aaron.1981. Harlem: Photographs 1932-1940. Washington: 
 Smithsonian Institution Press. 1990.
Sullivan, C.W. III. 1999. Songs, Poems and Rhymes. In Sutton-Smith, et al, 145-160. 
Sutton-Smith, Brian, Jay Mechling, Thomas W. Johnson and Felicia R. McMahon, 

eds. 1999. Children’s Folklore: A Source Book. Logan, Utah: Utah State 
University Press.

Szalay, Michael. 2000. New Deal Modernism: American Literature and the 
Invention of the Welfare State. Durham: University of North Carolina Press.


	CFR_2010_Part7
	CFR_2010_Part8
	CFR_2010_Part9
	CFR_2010_Part10
	CFR_2010_Part11
	CFR_2010_Part12
	CFR_2010_Part13
	CFR_2010_Part14
	CFR_2010_Part16
	CFR_2010_Part15



