Learning fromChildren’s Play and Folklorein South Louisiana
An Interview with Jeanne Pitre Soileau

A Louisiana native, Jeanne P. Soileau has been an educator for forty-sevenyears. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette,
where she used oral and video interviews and notes amassed over thirty-fiveyears of research in South Louisiana for her dissertation, “African American
Children’s Folklore: A Study in Games and Play.” She collected folklore for
the Council for the Arts in Education in New Orleans from 1975 to 1985 andserved as an instructor for the Louisiana Voices: Folklife in Education Projectfrom 1998 to 2001. Her publications include Louisiana Folklife: A Guide to
the State (1985); Yo’ Mama, Mary Mack, and Boudreaux and Thibodeaux:Louisiana Children’s Folklore and Play (2016), which won the 2018 Chicago
Folklore Prize and the Iona and Peter Opie Prize from the American Folklore
Society; and What the Children Said: Child Lore of South Louisiana (2021).
Key words: Black folklore; child lore; children’s game play; hand clapping;jump rope; The Dozens

American Journal of Play: What does the work of a children’s folklorist look like?
Jeanne Pitre Soileau: I cannot speak for all folklorists. Some are concerned withmaterial culture—things children make by hand. But others, like myself,concentrate on the verbal interactions between young people. In my case,I have over the years written descriptions of, voice recorded, and videotaped children as they played traditional school yard games. These games
included ways of choosing “it,” hand games, ring games, jump rope, jokes,
teases and taunts, camp songs, and school yard speeches.
		 Over the years, I was my primary collector. I joined the Louisiana Folklore Society and made contacts with various venues—schools, recreation
1
American Journal of Play, Volume 14, number 1 © 2022 by The Strong
Contact Jeanne Soileau at JPitreSoileau@outlook.com

2

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF

P L AYcenters, churches, summer camps—and got permission from the headsof these organizations to collect. At the appointed time, I showed up witha tape recorder and a set of prompts in the form of a questionnaire andbegan a collecting session. Sessions usually lasted about an hour. At one
summer camp, however, I spent an entire afternoon interviewing campersof various ages who straggled up in small groups.
		 My routine questions to any student who cared to be recorded included:
How do you choose who is it? What kind of hand-clapping games do you
play? Do you play ring games? What tag games (or running games) do you
play? Tell me a joke. What do you say to tease someone? What speeches
do you make on the playground? What do you say when you jump rope?
What cheers do you know?
		 Such collecting was exciting, but transcribing tapes proved tedious.
You listen, write, rewind, repeat, for hours. From the transcripts I fashioned lectures, presentations, articles, and—finally—two books concentrating on the verbal interactions of boys and girls from three totwenty-one years old.
AJP: What inspired you, and how did you get started?
JPS: I suppose my interest in folklore started with my family. Two Frenchspeaking grandmothers lived with us, and both were storytellers. Froman early age, I heard tales of family legends, Jean Sot stories (the French
version of Foolish John tales), and history through the eyes of two very
different women who had begun life in the nineteenth century. Both mygrandmothers were readers and paid close attention to politics and had
loud, and contrary, opinions. My brother, who was three years older than I
and was a great reader, was given the task of being my babysitter. He hated
it and wanted only to read his books. So, he would take me to the libraryand to the Sans Souci bookstore, which was owned and presided over byMiss Edith Garland Dupre, and plonk me in a chair and say, “Read.” I did.
I read through the entire folklore and fairy tale section of the Lafayettechildren’s library by the time I was ten. Then I read books in a wide range of
geographical and historical settings that Miss Dupre helped me select at her
bookstore. She let my brother and me pay a quarter a week for our books.
She was a true inspiration to both me and my brother. I was delighted when
the library at University of Louisiana at Lafayette was named in her honor.
		 Someone had donated a stereoscope to the children’s library where I

Learning from Children's Play and Folklore in South Louisiana

spent so many hours. There were boxes and boxes of stereoscope slides
of faraway places in piles all over the floor. Looking through the viewer, I
travelled to romantic locations and saw historic places. This engendered acuriosity for travel which has never left me. Whenever I have travelled, I
have observed children at play and taken notes.
AJP: Who are the scholars and other folklorists who helped shape your approachto and understanding of child lore and games?
JPS: My thesis director at University of New Orleans was George Reinecke. He
often laughingly described himself as “the last of the New Orleans French
Creoles.” Reinecke was involved in the Louisiana Folklore Society, and hestrongly suggested I join. My early contributions (in the 1970s) included acollection of the French proverbs my two grandmothers had used to guide
me in my early years and an article on the stories about Jean Sot from
St. Martinville, Louisiana. I had a strong alto voice in my twenties, and I
sang French songs provided by Reinecke from the collection of renowned
folklorist Corinne Saucier at festivals and conferences.
		 My other folklore interest stemmed from my three years as a teacher
in the New Orleans public elementary school system in the mid-1960s.
While teaching, I spent hours on yard and bus duty, and I listened to thechildren as they played hand claps, jump rope, and chasing games. The
children played with so much enthusiasm! With so much more excitement
than they approached classroom learning! I wondered whether anyone
besides myself found this schoolyard play interesting. I ran my curiosity
about children’s play by Reinecke, and he encouraged me to do research
into child lore scholars with the idea of becoming one myself.
		 I hit the library, and by the end of the 1970s, I had read through books
by Lady Alice B. Gomme, William Wells Newell, Henry Carrington Bolton,
Roger Abrahams, Philippe Aries, Paul Brewster, Brian Sutton-Smith, andtwo by Peter and Iona Opie. By 1972 I had a couple of notebooks filled withjottings gleaned from schoolyards. In 1973 I got my first tape recorder.
From that point on, using my membership card from the Louisiana Folklore Society, I made appointments at schools, churches, summer camps,
and city playgrounds, and I tape recorded groups of children ages three toeighteen as they demonstrated their games and songs for me.
		 As my interest in child lore expanded, I shared my findings with asecond Louisiana folklorist, Patricia Rickels, who was teaching African

3

4

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF

P L AY

American literature at University of Louisiana at Lafayette. She guided me
to readings that helped me understand and appreciate the play style andmannerisms of the African American children from whom I was collecting. She encouraged me to look for books that would further enhance myunderstanding of the Black aesthetic, and her advice led me to works oflinguist William Labov, political activist H. Rap Brown, writers Langston
Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Wright, and later, Black folklorist
Daryl Cumber Dance, and ethnomusicologist Kyra D. Gaunt.
AJP: Do you remember how you played as a child?
JPS: Good question! I had a really free childhood, much more unsupervisedthan the childhoods I see around me now. Our neighborhood had ten or
more boys and girls close to my age to interact with. We rode bikes, climbed
trees, explored neighbor’s garages, played in empty train cars at the track,fought with one another and made up, and engaged in entire afternoons ofimaginary play where we were knights, cowboys, marines, fairies, hunters,
and monsters.
		 While I played hard, I also read a great deal. I would come home fromriding my bike all the way across town, climb a tree, and read until I was
called for supper.
		 My childhood pursuits have persisted until my late seventies. I still
begin each day with an hour of vigorous swimming and read two to threehours every day.
		 My peers influenced some of my interests. One neighbor girl was a
big movie fan of historical romances. She and I saw Ivanhoe, Knights of
the Round Table, and Quentin Durward, all starring Robert Taylor. King
Solomon’s Mines and The Prisoner of Zenda left me with a lifelong warm
heart for the actors Stewart Granger and Deborah Kerr. I am still a movie
buff. My friend and I spent hours reenacting these movies. She always
had to be the heroine, while I, often unwillingly, had to be the hero. Other
peers in the neighborhood engaged in vigorous outdoor sports such as tag,croquet, badminton, tennis, and swimming. So, I remember my childhood
as stimulating, both intellectually and physically.
AJP: How has your own play and experiences influenced your approach to collecting child lore?
JPS: Although I was very active and I read a lot, in some ways I spent a lot oftime listening to people talk. Our house was the center of family visits,Learning from Children's Play and Folklore in South Louisianawith both grandmothers living with us. There were fourteen aunts anduncles, and it seems that every weekend—and all summers—were filledwith visiting relatives. Some came from Texas, some from New Orleans,some from Birmingham, Alabama. There were so many accents and somany hilarious stories. One summer three boy cousins, who had beenreared in Australia, spent a month with us. The stories they told! The way
they expressed themselves!
		 One of my aunts lived in our neighborhood. She had three children.
She took classes at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette over two summers and I became the babysitter for my three younger cousins when I was
twelve. From 8:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m., five days a week, I had to entertain three
restive cousins ages three, four, and six. I learned to become a storyteller,
camp counsellor, game instigator, referee of squabbles, and organizer oflong neighborhood walks. I also learned that small children were distinct
individuals who had much to say.
		 When I became a long-term substitute teacher for a third-grade classat William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans in 1965, I—as were
the students—was plunged into the throes of acclimating to racial integration. For the children, the 1960s was a frightening time. They did not knowwhether to trust all those white teachers they had to face every day, and not
all white teachers were happy to teach them. I asked for help from one of thebest teachers I have ever known, Renee Gholz, a veteran teacher who had
gained her skills teaching Hispanic children in the El Paso School systemin the 1950s. I learned from her that the best way to capture the trust andinterest of my small charges was to let them talk. Theirs, she explained, wasa culture that highly valued speaking skills. I learned to ask a question thenstep back and allow a free flow of talk. Again, I found that small children
had much to say.
AJP: You have called your work a series of time capsules. Why?
JPS: Whenever I met with groups of children and taped the conversations, I was
limited in time. In a classroom, the taping time ran only to the allotted classperiod. At camps and at churches, the time allotted was often close to only
one hour. Every time I turned off the tape recorder and had to close thesession, I could still hear children shouting, “I know one! I know one!” The
taped sessions included the voices of those children who were bold enoughto step forward. Once the recorder was off, there were so many children

5

6

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF

P L AY

who knew a lot, but had not stepped up. Like snippets of time, the voicerecordings leave out the chatter that led up to them and the conversationthat followed them. I so wish I had had more time to make more recordings
and videos of all those children who could have contributed so much more.
AJP: What are some of the earliest historical forms of children’s play and lore?
JPS: The British folklorists Peter and Iona Opie had great interest in the historical aspects of child lore. In the introduction to their 1959 The Lore andLanguage of Schoolchildren, the Opies stated, “No matter how uncouth
schoolchildren may outwardly appear, they remain tradition’s warmest
friends. Like the savage, they are respecters, even venerators, of custom;and in their self-contained community, their basic lore and language seem
scarcely to alter from generation to generation.” The Opies follow this statement with a list of antecedents to the lore they collected. Throughout The
Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, the Opies included footnotes (thankfully appearing at the actual foot of proper pages) that tied a great numberof the items of lore they presented to examples of similar child lore from
historical sources. These footnotes relate items they collected in the firsthalf of the twentieth century to games, rhymes, riddles, sayings, divinations, and more, from the time of the Greeks and Romans to Henry VIII,
Shakespeare, Jonathan Swift, Queen Anne, and Samuel Pepys.
		 When I visited the New Orleans Museum of Art’s exhibit of the treasures of King Tut in 1977, there I found several examples of the board games
and toys the young king had been buried with.
AJP: Much of your research has focused on African American children’s games,
which you have described as ephemeral artistic expressions. What makesthese games different from other forms of play?
JPS: I collect all children’s folklore because I believe it is a form of ephemeral art.
During our lives we learn most between the ages three (the earliest age ofany child from whom I have ever collected) and twelve (about the seventhor eighth grade), the span of life in which most children learn, share, play,and practice what we call “children’s folklore.” For many children, the lore
shared with other children proves one of their most treasured outlets forartistic expression. They learn rhyme, rhythm, a form of public speaking, formalized game rules, cultural expectations, kinesic aptitude, andself-assurance through play shared with peers. It is the actual playing of
the games that constitutes ephemeral artistic expressions, not the games

Learning from Children's Play and Folklore in South Louisiana

themselves. The games exist as artifacts and, as such, remain expressions
to be handed down through time to new generations of children.
AJP: What is the significance of word play and banter in games such as The
Dozens?
JPS: Dozens are, for the most part, verbal insult contests conducted in frontof groups of friends. The idea calls for players to challenge one anotherto engage in quick flowing repartee while being urged on by friends whocreate an audience. The emphasis lies on fast comebacks in the correct
formula. An “uh” or a hesitation merits a snub and loss of face.
		 Based on the many recordings I have made of “clean dozens” contests,
the first speaker might say, “Yo’ teet so yellow when you went outside, thesun said, ‘Hello, Mama!’” The next line might immediately follow. “I got
one! Yo’ teet so yellow that the sun say, ‘I’m on vacation.’”		 The speakers, if they proceeded to the dirty dozens, began their contest lines with “Yo’ Mama . . .” and “Fuck yo’ Mama . . .”. The point of theverbal contest at any level is to test both verbal quickness and the ability
to formulate a pertinent retort to any delivered line without showing any
loss of face.
AJP: How have the spaces children played in—such as playgrounds, schoolyards,
classrooms, and summer camps—shaped the way they played and the lyricsof the songs they sang?
JPS: Children need spaces where they can congregate freely, without too muchadult supervision, to successfully pass on to their peers the childhood lore
they acquire. School recess time, even if it is only twenty minutes, provides
the space, the setting, and the time for myriad schoolyard events. Summer
camps congregate children from various towns and cities in one venue
where they can share camp songs, tell horror stories, pull pranks on one
another, and do hand claps and share jokes in the afternoons during nap
time. Camp songs and lore remain fond memories for many young people
to be handed down to their younger siblings and friends.
		 The minute children find themselves alone with peers, they begin toshare lore. This is the reason play spaces away from too much adult supervision are so important.
AJP: Can you tell us about some of the different ways you found that children
choose who is it in their tag and chase games? Has this changed over time?
JPS: I would say that choosing who is it might be the most recognizably conser-

7

8

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF

P L AYvative segment of child lore. The phrase “eenie meenie minie moe,” nowtermed racist and offensive, is, however, one prompt line that virtually every
recorded group has recognized and responded to. Today most children say:
		
		
		

Eenie meenie minie moe
Catch a (fella /tiger /teacher)
By the toe		 Choosing who is it is essential to many schoolyard games, and hundreds of formulas exist for doing so. There are one liners like “Boy scout/Camp out,” and there are lengthy jingles that work both for hand claps andcounting out:
		
		
		
		
		
		
		
		
		
		
		

My mama and your mamaLive across the street
1618 Beeston Street
Every night they have a fight
And this is what they say:Boys are rotten just like cotton
Girls are dandy just like candy
Itsy bitsy soda water
Itsy bitsy pooh
Itsy bitsy soda water
Out goes you!

		 I do not think counting out has changed over time. There were always
alternative ways to choose who would be it without a verbal formula. Some
informants told me they flipped a coin for it. Some children said they ran
to a designated place, and the last one to get there was it. And sometimes,
a lead boy or girl simply pointed at someone and shouted, “You’re it.” And
the game began.
AJP: What is the “children’s network” of playground lore
JPS: Elizabeth Tucker in her 2008 Children’s Folklore: A Handbook describes
the way children share their lore as “a network of children that transmits
children’s folklore, with creative variations.” Folklorists who have gatheredchild lore from William Wells Newell’s 1883 Games and Songs of American

Learning from Children's Play and Folklore in South Louisiana

Children to Nigel Kelsey’s 2020 Games, Rhymes, and Wordplay of London
Children have noted that games English-speaking children play in one
country might be played simultaneously in an English-speaking country
quite far away. Games I collected in south Louisiana exist in variations collected by Brian Sutton-Smith in New Zealand. No one knows exactly how
the network works. A child in New Orleans might hear a jingle played byan older sibling and bring it to school. Another child hears it, repeats it,
and in days it is being chanted in Ontario, Canada, or Edinburgh, Scotland.
No one knows how this rapid transmission occurs. It just does.
AJP: You have noted how childhood games and lore are passed down and spread,but are there other kinds of contemporary culture and media that influence how games and lore change or manifest themselves? Do you have any
particular examples?
JPS: Children’s play is influenced by every aspect of the media. Movies, television, and radio have long influenced schoolyard play. My friends and I
reenacted movies we saw in the late 1940s and early 1950s. We madecostumes, built movie sets, wrote scripts, and acted them out. If we saw
a movie with dancing, we imitated the dance numbers in the living roomat home.
		 I recorded young girls acting out their favorite television dramas on
playgrounds from the 1970s to the 2000s. In the 1970s, boys imitated martial arts they viewed in movies, and they danced to music played on theradio and in music videos. In 2022 girls are still singing and dancing topopular songs they listen to on the radio. Even with COVID-19 restrictions, I walk my dog in the city park in New Iberia. Last month I observed abirthday party held under a park gazebo. A player blasted the song “WAP”
by Cardi B, and a small group of young girls who looked to be around eight
to ten years old clapped, sang, and danced along to the music.
		 So, children watch a lot of television, and it influences their play.
According to “Average Television Time, May 1999,” children viewed a totalof nineteen hours and forty minutes a week. On January 16, 2022, I Googled“Television Viewing Time” and these were the stats I found on the Center
for Disease Control’s website: “According to the Kaiser Family Foundation
children ages 8–18 now spend, on average, a whopping 7.5 hours in frontof a screen for entertainment each day, 4.5 of which is spent watching TV.
Over a year, that adds up to 144 full days watching a screen for fun.” This

9

10

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF

P L AYapparent increase in screen-viewing time will almost certainly affect childplay and the transmission of traditional school yard lore.
		 In the last two years, COVID-19 restrictions have pushed the children
I know to greater dependence on electronic devices for amusement. My
grandson, who is eleven years old, wishes to spend four to seven hours a
day playing online video games with his friends. He also watches animeon television. On January 16, 2022, when he was watching JoJo’s Bizarre
Adventure and I suggested he read a book instead, he responded, “ButGrandma, I have to watch it. All my friends are watching it, and I have toknow what they are talking about.”
AJP: How has the Internet, online video platforms, and social media such as
YouTube and Instagram changed the children’s network of lore?
JPS: In 2016 I wrote that the electronic age has simply added, not superimposed,a new play world for children. Play in the electronic age offers an exciting
range of modes of interaction. YouTube, Facebook, smartphones, Xboxes,
video games, TikTok, and much more offer children and young adults new
avenues of play and social communication.
		 YouTube, to cite only one platform, offers many play options. Youngpeople passively watch other individuals play video games; they actively
create and act out videos of their own and post them; they critically watch
videos of other children playing traditional games, and then they upload
comments in the comment section.
		 Children are tech savvy at an early age, and they send one anotherselfies, videos, TikTok and Instagram messages, and texts. The numberof texts alone numbered 2.2 trillion sms or mms messages in the UnitedStates in 2020. We do not know how many of these messages are sharedby children, but I see children walking around with phones to their ears
wherever I go now.
		 Children play with whatever is at hand, and the electronic world offers
many tempting options. However, child lore has in the past required face
to face learning: physical juggling for play space, the touching of hands incounting out, shared chants when jumping rope. Face to face play is being
restricted, and I feel this loss might have an impact because in-person
contact seems essential to the passing on of traditional child lore.
AJP: How might children’s experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic shape
their lore?

Learning from Children's Play and Folklore in South Louisiana

JPS: It is not possible for me to make any prediction about how the pandemic
might shape children’s lore yet. Certainly, the confinement of children,
the hours spent at home rather than at school, the curtailing of sleepovers
and playdates, and the many hours they are spending in front of electronic
devices will make a difference in shaping child lore. It will take careful
questioning and many conversations with children willing to share theirexperience before folklorists will be able to assess the changes the pandemic
might have wrought.
AJP: You have written that many older children and adults fail to recall theirchildhood folk games due to a form of blocking out. Can you explain this?
JPS: The usual time span for child lore to be disseminated stretches from ages
three to about twelve. Children pass along counting out rhymes, jumprope jingles, taunts and jeers, ring games, and tag formulas for about
ten years. Then they stop. Some girls begin trading make-up secrets, sexlore, and fashion facts in middle school and seem almost embarrassed
to try to remember childhood games when prompted as young adults.
These young people block out the memories of their child lore because
they somehow deem that part of their lives childish, or not cool. Teenlore and adult lore, like cheers and jokes and patterned teasing, become
more acceptable.
		 This is not true, though, for all young and older adults. Some of myinformants, both Black and white, who were college aged could recite morethan an hour from memory. My mother, who was in her seventies when I
interviewed her, when properly prompted with my questionnaire, recalled
more than thirty minutes of child lore.
AJP: One final question: Many lament the loss of the kind of play that you documented during the last quarter of the twentieth century and the beginningof the twenty-first century. What do you think will happen to children’slore? Will it survive?
JPS: The death of schoolyard play has been predicted from the earliest years of
its collection. William Wells Newell, the earliest major collector of child lore
in America, felt he had to write down everything he heard the children play
before it “perished at the root.” That was in 1883. Children are still playing, and I believe they always will. Will they continue to recite jump rope
jingles, play hand claps, chase one another in tag games, recite ridiculous
speeches in front of their friends? Yes, if the schools open again and school

11

12

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF

P L AY

officials allow them to participate in all these things.
		 Times have changed, but children still seek out other children to share
their secret world with. That secret world once energized the playground,the day camp, and the sleepover. Now it includes secret information sharedelectronically as well as personally.