Within the Invisible World

For nearly two decades, Francelia Butler's articles about her experiences collecting skip-rope rhymes in distant, frequently turbulent corners of the world have been quietly appearing in Sunday supplements and scholarly journals. She has written of a heart-rending visit to South Vietnam, just as the war was ending, where she listened to a little boy, who had been left in an orphanage by his parents because they were unable to save him from starvation, skipping as he chanted, in an effort to cheer himself up:

A boy who is thinking about his familyIs going out to sell newspapersTo make some money to help his family.

Elsewhere Professor Butler has described her meeting with Indira Gandhi in 1974, and we learn that Madame Gandhi had indeed jumped rope as a child and that one of her favorite skip-rope rhymes began:

Parrot, oh parrotParrot-sharrot . . . .

Over the years, Professor Butler's accounts of these adventures have also made their sometimes hilarious, often moving ways into the personal oral history that she has passed along to her colleagues and friends. There was, for example, the time in Poland in the late 1960s when, along with meeting the priest who would later become Pope John Paul II, she was mistaken for a visiting party official and, like Holly Martins in The Third Man, was pushed onto the stage to give a speech before a group of assembled apparatchiks. All she could think to do was ask them to stand and join with her in a public recitation of a rhyme that she had first heard in Cherrydale, Virginia, in 1949—

My mama and your mamaLive across the wayEvery night they have a fightAnd this is what they say:Acca bacca soda crackerAcca bacca booAcca bacca soda crackerOut goes you!

—using the final command as her exit line. Given these facts, facts that often read like fiction, it is not surprising to hear that Alison Lurie is supposed to have drawn, in part, on Professor Butler's experiences to create the past of the main character (Vinnie Miner) of her novel, Foreign Affairs (1984), about a professor of children's literature who has made a long-time, trans-Atlantic study of American and British children's folk rhymes.

Yet what is most interesting about the personal material—reflections, asides, anecdotes—that Professor Butler includes in Skipping Around the World, along with more than 350 skip-rope rhymes from over sixty countries, is that they serve to establish a context in which the rhymes may be understood and their cultural importance immediately and powerfully experienced. She leaves in what most academic collections leave out—descriptions of the singing children and the frequently unexpected circumstances surrounding a performance. There is perhaps no more compelling example of this than an incident that occurred in Belfast in 1973 when, Professor Butler writes,

going with an Irish driver into a sector where there had been considerable conflict, I started to pull a skipping rope from my purse, when the driver saw me. "You fool!" he said, not mincing words; "Do you want to get us killed?" As he crushed the rope down into my pocketbook he hissed, "It has red, white, and blue handles. Anybody at a window is liable to think you are asking children to jump to the colors of the British flag and will pick us off." He told the children that I had no suitable rope and asked them to fetch a bit of their mothers' clotheslines.

A number of the rhymes that Professor Butler went on to collect that day from these children appear in the text in the section she calls "Protest: Political and Personal" and serve to illustrate the general point of the book: that skip-rope rhymes offer children much more than merely an opportunity to hone their motor skills and verbal prowess. For

within the invisible world of the turning rope, children can relieve pain by chanting their...