First grade babies
Second grade tots
Third grade angels
Fourth grade snots
Fifth grade peaches
Sixth grade plums
And all the rest are dirty bums.
I heard that rhyme on my first day of school, which at Flaherty Elementary in Meade County, Kentucky, was the first day of first grade. I’m not sure who started the rhyme. Could have been the snots. They were proud of themselves. Might have been the peaches. Might have been the plums. I don’t believe it was the dirty bums because, if memory serves me correctly, the dirty bums were much too old for recess.
I heard that rhyme on the playground, day after day, recess after recess. Even when the bell rang, and our teachers left the school building to meet us and we left the playground to meet our teachers, I could still hear the rhyme, now a whispered taunt:
First grade babies
Second grade tots
Third grade—
I was in first grade, but I was not a baby. I was the oldest child in my family, and the only one old enough to walk all the way out our long, winding gravel driveway, stand by the highway, catch the big yellow school bus, and ride it to school. I wasn’t a baby. I was a big girl. But somehow I knew if I said, “Teacher, teacher, do you hear . . . ?” there would be laughter, and I wouldn’t think it was funny. The big kids were the ones who chanted the rhyme, and at my school the big kids were the rulers of the playground.
The big boys ruled the kingdom of marbles. Marbles, a game played in rings drawn in the dust beneath the shade of trees. I can’t tell you what happened in the kingdom of marbles, because when I was a girl marbles was a boys-only world.
The big girls ruled a kingdom too—the jump rope kingdom. They decided who was going to turn the rope, who was going to jump, what chants would be chanted—they ruled the jump rope kingdom.
When I began first grade, I knew how to jump rope. I did! My mama would tie a rope to a porch post, and then she would string the rope across the porch. My mama would pick up the end of the rope. I’d stand beside the rope and watch her carefully. She would turn the rope, and I would jump. I knew how to jump rope when I began first grade.
But in the jump rope kingdom ruled by the big girls, no one stood beside the rope and waited for the rope to turn. Oh no, the big girls ran in while the rope was turning! They ran in as they chanted the words of the jump rope rhymes:
Not last night but the night before
Twenty-four robbers came a-knocking at my door.
As I ran out [the big girl would run out]
They ran in [and she would jump back in, called “going in the back door”]
And hit me on the head with a rolling pin
And this is what they said for me to do:
Fancy Dancer, do the twist [the big girl would twist and jump at the same time]
Fancy Dancer, give a high kick [she’d kick and jump on one foot]
Fancy Dancer, turn all around [she turned in a circle while she jumped]
Fancy Dancer, get out of town [the big girl would run out; the next would run in, and the chant would begin all over again]
The rope never stopped. If a rope-turner grew tired, a second big girl would walk over, stand beside her, take hold of the rope, and the two of them would turn the rope together. Then the one who was tired would step away—the rope never stopped.
I was not prepared. So I sat on the sidewalk and I watched—recess after recess, day after day. I learned the rhymes, took them home, and taught them to my little sister. But I did not, because I believed I could not, jump rope with the big girls.
One day, one of the big girls, Anna Jo Hinton, walked over, looked down at me, and said, “Don’t you want to jump rope?”
“Oh, I do. I do, but . . .”
“But you don’t know how, do you?”
“I know how to jump. I know the rhymes and everything. I just don’t know how to run in.”
Anna Jo looked back at the other big girls. “Hey, she knows how to jump. She just doesn’t know how to run in. I believe I can teach her.”
Some of the other big girls laughed, but Anna Jo offered me her hand. “You hold my hand. When I say run, you run. When I say jump, you jump.”
I held her hand. “Run!” she said. I ran.
“Jump!” she said. I jumped.
Missed—I missed, and the rope stopped. Some of the big girls laughed—at me. But Anna Jo said, “Hey, she almost got it. Turn the rope again.”
And again, “Run!” I ran. “Jump!” I jumped. I wish I could tell you I got it on my second try, but it wasn’t an easy thing for me to learn.
Over and over Anna Jo made the other big girls turn the rope, until . . .
“Run!” I ran.
“Jump!” I jumped.
And I was jumping rope!
Anna Jo looked at me, “You’d better hold my hand again. I need to teach you how to get out of here.” And I stopped the rope several more times learning how to run out.
Anna Jo Hinton was a queen in the jump rope kingdom. A queen who could lead the other big girls with wisdom enough, and courage enough, to offer her hand to one they laughed at and called a first grade baby and bring that first grade baby all the way inside the jump rope kingdom.
“Jump Rope Kingdom” is a true story from my life. It is built on the briefest of memories. One day I was thinking about how easy it is to recall specific details of negative events, and I began to wonder what story I would tell if I told of a specific remembered act of kindness. The memory of Anna Jo Hinton teaching me how to run into the jump rope immediately came to mind. Of course, “I remember that when I was in first grade, an older girl named Anna Jo Hinton taught me how to run into the jump rope” does not a story make. So, I had work to do.
I began by asking myself why. Why did I remember this incident? Why did it matter to me at the time? Why do I think it would matter to today’s audiences? And the answers came flooding in.
I remembered because Anna Jo’s kindness was so unexpected. I was a mere first grader. She must have been a fourth or fifth grader. I not only admired the big girls for their rope jumping skill, I also feared them because some of them were mean to little kids. I remembered the intense longing I felt—wanting to join in, knowing I lacked needed skills, and being too afraid of being laughed at or chased away to approach any of the more skillful girls for help.
Once I understood why the incident had mattered so much that I could still recall it over fifty years later, my task was to figure out how to make the incident live for my audience. By the time I worked on this story from my life, I had told stories long enough to know that the listening experience is stronger for the audience if they put images together and reach their own conclusions. Show, not tell, is one common way of expressing this idea. Instead of telling my audience the big kids were sometimes mean to the little kids, I needed to provide an example. I could remember some of the boys in my first grade class coming back from recess struggling to hold back tears because the older boys had engaged them in a game of marbles, playing for keeps, which meant at the end of the game you kept every marble you won during the game. Given the older boys’ greater skills, it was not unusual for a younger boy to literally lose all his marbles. But I needed an example that would apply to girls, or to girls and boys. And then I recalled the first grade babies taunt. At my school it was never a jump rope rhyme, although it had the proper rhythm to work as one; instead it was a means of taunting the younger students. And at that time at Flaherty Elementary School, the first graders were indeed the youngest students. No public school kindergartens or preschools existed in my rural Kentucky community.
In the in-person tellings of the story, there is no need to specify that the older students softened the chant to a mere whispered taunt when they were near the teachers. Instead, I can use one hand to represent the teachers coming from the school building, and use my other hand to represent the students coming from the playground. As my hands move closer together, I can chant the rhyme at a lower and lower volume, bringing it from a loud taunt to a whisper with the sound of my voice. By then the audience knows this chant does not meet with approval from the teachers, and they soon understand my six-year-old self’s objection to it too.
Instead of telling my audience the big girls’ rope jumping skills awed me, I needed to paint a word picture of the big girls skillfully jumping rope. The logical solution? Use a jump rope rhyme. I was surprised at how many I actually remembered. Some proved too difficult to explain, even though jumping skill was required. Others incorporated popular cartoon characters, and so had the potential for copyright issues I wanted to avoid. Finally, I remembered the one I used. I only made one change. In my memory, the words are “Spanish dancer,” not “Fancy dancer,” but the more I pondered the rhyme, the more I could see that there was no reason to state a specific origin for the dancer in the rhyme for the rhyme to serve the story. After all, the point of using the rhyme was to demonstrate the fancy jumping skills of the big girls, not provide an example of remembered childhood oral lore. “Fancy” had the same two-syllable beat as “Spanish,” so I made the change.
Like all orally told stories, this story has evolved over time. I’ve had the occasion to write it down before—three times, in fact. First, in my newsletter, Telling Stories . . . Creating Worlds, in 1996. Second, when I prepared a written version so the sound engineer would have an easier time communicating with me when I decided to record it in 2001.1 And third, in 2006, when I typed it up for Ellen Munds, executive director of Storytelling Arts of Indiana, so it could be included in The Scenic Route: Stories from the Heartland, an anthology of “stories from a dozen storytellers who have graced our stages and who share our midwestern heritage,”2 published by the Indiana Historical Society to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of Storytelling Arts of Indiana. I can now look back at the earliest written version and see that the jump rope rhyme and the metaphor of Anna Jo as a queen in the jump rope kingdom are later additions in comparison with the use of the first grade babies rhyme. Both changes were included by the time I recorded the tale, after many, many retellings.
Although I developed this story as a memory of an incident of kindness, the story developed its own life as a commemoration of Anna Jo Hinton after I included it in my newsletter in 1996. At the time I published the story, I did not know what had become of Anna Jo. She was an older girl in school, and this incident is all I remembered of encounters with her. It turns out the newsletter including the story was distributed not long after her death. One of Anna Jo’s coworkers, Elizabeth Foote Cross, saw my newsletter, read the story, and called. According to Elizabeth the young Anna Jo’s behavior in the story matched that of the adult Anna Jo, who had been a wonderful colleague.
When I visit schools to tell stories, I rarely see children jumping rope on the playground. Oh, sometimes I’ll see them jumping rope in physical education classes, but each child is working alone, turning and jumping his or her own rope. Once in a while I’ll see a second child run in and jump with the rope-turning jumper, but jumping rope is simply not the communal activity it once was. I’m not sure when this change happened, but even when I first started telling this story, in the early 1990s, I noticed, and I wondered if school children would be able to relate to the story. I received an answer one day at Medway Elementary in Medway, Ohio.3 After listening to “Jump Rope Kingdom” and other stories, upper elementary students were walking not far from me as they left the school library. I overheard two girls having a conversation that went something like this:
“I know the boys have the basketball kingdom, but what kingdom do we have?”
“I’m not sure; maybe gymnastics, or cheerleading?”
“I think the boys let the younger boys in, but do we let the little girls in . . . ?” and on they walked. I never heard the end of their conversation, but I cherish the moment for the reassurance it gave me that the story could indeed matter to school children, even if they no longer jumped rope.
Adults relate to the story too. I’ve seen more than one adult’s mouth moving when I’m chanting the rhymes because women in my age range, who grew up in certain parts of Kentucky, learned the same two rhymes.4 Of course, knowledge of the specific rhymes is not a necessity for the story to connect with audience members. After I told the story at the Cherokee Rose Storytelling Festival, audience member and storyteller Tersi Bendiburg5 told me that hearing the rhymes had taken her back to her childhood in Cuba. Once transported back by the rhymes, many memories from that time in her life had come rising up. No, Tersi had not chanted the same rhymes during her childhood, but she had chanted rhymes—rhymes she hadn’t thought about in years. Moreover, the memories that arose were not limited to memories of times she had chanted the rhymes. Instead, as she listened to my story, she was reminded of her own stories.
Reminding listeners of their own stories—that’s what the telling of personal narratives in performance settings can do. Something about the story has to resonate beyond whatever has driven the teller to tell it, and yes, the teller needs to do the work of structuring the narrative and recounting the events so the audience hears a tale artfully told. Personal narratives told just to satisfy the teller’s need to get the story out are appropriately told to a therapist, with the teller paying to be heard, not to an audience whose members are paying to listen.