“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.
COMMENTARY
“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 though
t 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.
MARY HELEN’S FIANCÉ
After my great-aunts Mary Helen and Eloise graduated from Mount Saint Joseph Junior College near Owensboro, Kentucky, both secured jobs with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, working in one of its Kentucky offices. During World War II the federal government decentralized its operations by moving many offices out of Washington, D.C., and the headquarters of the Department of Agriculture moved to Cincinnati, Ohio. By the time the war began winding down and government agencies returned to Washington, my great-aunts worked in the Cincinnati headquarters, so when their jobs moved to Washington, they moved too.
After the war Eloise moved to New York with her husband, Ray Martinson, a returning soldier she had married before his three-year overseas assignment. Mary Helen stayed on in our nation’s capital.
One day Mary Helen called home and announced she was getting married. Naturally, her mother, my great-grandmother, began asking questions about her intended. Mary Helen explained his name was Charles Ferrara. He was Italian, a U.S. Army veteran, and a native of the Washington, D.C., area.
My great-grandmother listened to all Mary Helen said as best she could, given that her phone service was a party line shared with several other families. Chances were also excellent that she was not the only one hearing the conversation, because when the phone rang all the houses on the party line heard the ringing. Each house had its own ring—maybe two longs and one short, or two shorts and one long—with the idea that you would only pick up if you heard your ring, but in reality many folks picked up and listened to every phone call. So, that combination of multiple people listening in and poor phone lines to begin with made conversing by phone a challenge. Nevertheless, my great-grandmother persisted in learning all she could about the man her daughter was going to marry.
“What does he do for a living?” my great-grandmother asked.
“He’s an electrical engineer,” she heard Mary Helen reply. Now, my great-grandmother, like most folks in her rural community, had no idea what an electrical engineer did, but it sounded impressive. After she and Mary Helen completed their call, my great-grandmother began calling her friends, telling them about the electrical engineer Mary Helen was going to marry. Even her friends who shared her party line agreed with her assessment of the phone call.
So, you can imagine my great-grandmother’s surprise when Mary Helen came home with her husband who owned his own business—a store selling liquor and beer!
COMMENTARY
This is a family story—one that I had never heard until we had a Hamilton family reunion in 2009 at which the descendants of the great-grandmother in the story, including my great-aunt Mary Helen, gathered. One of my father’s first cousins, Charlie Hamilton, told the tale. If you doubt such confusion is possible, try saying aloud “he’s an electrical engineer” and then “he sells liquor and beer” and imagine hearing either phrase over a crackly phone line. Yep! You could confuse them too.
When I heard this tale, I realized there was a multi-generational thread in the family stories I had heard over the years—mistakes! We tell the stories that evoke laughter at our mistakes! “Jeff Rides the Rides” is another example of the same type of story. So is “A Place to Start,” about my Uncle Sammy’s sandwiches. Both of these were stories I had first heard from my father. I was aware that he told stories that had humorous mistakes as a common theme, but hearing the story of Mary Helen’s phone call at the reunion was the first time I realized that theme had begun before his generation.
For years I thought my daddy just took some sort of unnerving delight in retelling tales of funny errors made by his children and his brother, but then I was interviewed by Pamela Petro for her book Sitting Up with the Dead: A Storied Journey Through the American South.1 When Petro first contacted me to arrange the interview, she told me she wanted to talk with me about how I had grown up to become a storyteller. I insisted that if she wanted to understand, she needed to meet me at my parents’ Meade County farm, not at my home in Frankfort. During that meeting my father, mother, and I told her several stories. My father also commented that he knew that sometimes his kids got aggravated over his choice of stories to tell, but he figured if he could give us the gift of being able to laugh at ourselves, that would be a good gift to have. I was astonished. Until I heard him say that, I had no idea my father had ever thought about why he recounted the stories he chose. Although Petro did not include my father’s comment about his choice of story topics in her book, I remain grateful to her, for I might never have known my father’s storytelling intentions otherwise.2
Looking back, I’m a bit surprised I hadn’t noticed before the reunion that the thread of mistake stories extended well beyond my father and into other branches of the family. Several years earlier, Mike Jones, an uncle by marriage, from Elizabethtown, Hardin County, Kentucky, arrived at a family gathering along with his son Matt. As soon as they arrived, Mike announced, “Well, I’ve got one to tell you on Matt.”
Now Matt was a young teenager at the time, so he moaned in protest, “Daaaad!”
But Mike replied, “Matt, we’re at the Hamilton’s. We’ve got to tell it.” Immediately Matt relented. Here’s the story Mike told:
Matt and his younger brother Chad had each attended a week-long basketball camp, but because they were different ages they attended different weeks. At the basketball camp statistics were kept on every player in a variety of categories—field goal percentage, number of assists, free throw percentage, number of steals, and so forth. At the end of the week, the camper with the highest stats in each category won a basketball.
On his last day of basketball camp, Chad came home and Matt asked, “Did you win a basketball?”
“No, I came in second in everything.”
“But Chad, if you came in second in everything, it seems like you should have won a basketball, because last week when I went to camp, nobody could win more than one basketball.”
“But I didn’t win,” Chad repeated, “I came in second in everything.”
This made no sense to Matt, and he began insisting Chad could not possibly have come in second in everything and not won a basketball. Their father, Mike, overheard the conversation, so to help Chad out, he explained:
“Okay Matt, let’s say John Doe had the best field goal percentage, and Chad was second. John Doe wins the basketball. Then let’s say Jimmy Doe had the most assists, and Chad was second. Jimmy Doe wins the basketball. Then let’s say Jerry Doe had the best free throw percentage, and Chad was second. Jerry Doe wins the basketball. And then—”
Matt interrupted, “Okay, Dad, I get why Chad didn’t win a basketball, but who are these Doe kids anyway?”
At the time I thought: “Wow, we have a strong storytelling tradition in this family if a teenager will give up that easily.” Now I see that it was not just the telling of a story but also the type of story that was part of the tradition. At the time I thought humor was the thread, but now I see humorous mistakes as the thread. And thanks to the Hamilton family reunion, I can see that this story thread was woven into the Hamilton family fabric long before my father became a family storyteller.
Okay, in fairness, I should also tell you at least one tale on myself:
A few years ago I told stories for a gathering at Indiana University in Bloomin
gton, Indiana. I was living in Louisville at the time, so I decided to return home after the evening performance. When folks learned I was driving back to Louisville in the dark, several people warned, “Be careful. That road has lots of curves, and be sure you watch out for deer.”
I promised I would and set off. There I was, just driving along in the darkness, listening to the radio, when I thought: “Hmm, those people sure do have their deer statue close to the road. Why, it’s so close it could be a mailbox. And look, there’s a second one right behind it.”
Fortunately, that second deer statue moved, and my mind registered—“Deer! Brake!”—just in time.
That’s one of my favorite anecdotes to tell on myself. Of course, I told it many times before I realized it, too, fit within the Hamilton tradition of telling and retelling humorous tales of our mistakes.3
In March 2011, I was talking on the phone with my sister, Pat, when the conversation turned to family stories. She told me her favorite story to tell on herself was about the time the two of us were up in the silo pitching down silage for the cows while belting out songs from The Sound of Music. According to Pat, Daddy yelled at us to quit singing because we were scaring the cows—they were walking toward the barn to be fed, but upon hearing our singing they were running away! I was amazed. This was her favorite family story, and I had no memory of the incident. Sure, we did climb up into the silo, and we did have the chore of using a pitchfork to throw down silage for the cows. Acoustics inside the silo were great, so I have no doubt we sang while in there. To this day I know the lyrics of most of the songs in The Sound of Music, so I must have listened to and sung them repeatedly. But the specific incident of scaring the cows? I don’t recall it at all. Just because people grow up in the same family, it would be a mistake to assume they all share the same family stories.
Kentucky Folktales Page 19
