The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double Dutch to Hip-Hop

Playing for Keeps

Jumping rope may look like kid stuff, but double Dutch separates the women from the girls. Two ropes turn alternately in a pulsing oval, like street art to the untrained eye. But breaching the ropes is a challenge -- and not stomping on a rope once you're inside is even harder. Some girls can handle the pressure and even breakdance between the ropes with precision. Others, myself included, take 10 minutes, if not longer, to conquer the matrix, which proves ethnomusicologist, vocalist, and New York University professor Kyra D. Gaunt's point: Not all black people have rhythm. But like everyone else, we can -- and do -- learn. No amount of book learning can teach you how to sway or step in time to the beat-only black girls, often dismissed as bored improv masters, can show you that.

In The Games Black Girls Play, Gaunt argues that cheers -- songs and seemingly nonsensical chants performed in conjunction with handclaps and foot stomps -- offer entertainment for black girls across the country, but they also play a more important role. They teach young girls aspects of "musical blackness," placing them socially in step with black tradition. The book examines black girls' forays into popular culture -- whether unconscious or deliberate -- and what their invisibility says about hip hop, musicality in the black community, and when and where girls enter the annals of music history.

At first it seems like a stretch to claim that the way girls play has influenced a commercial behemoth like hip hop. But have you heard Nelly's "Country Grammar"? Its sing-song chorus was sampled from black girls' games, and Gaunt suggests that the song gained popularity in part because it was immediately recognizable to black audiences. Gaunt emphasizes that male rappers like Nelly use such games as material, but female rappers do not -- an assessment that's blurry and not as convincing as her other arguments; it doesn't help that the aspiring female rappers Gaunt interviews about why this might be don't offer illuminating explanations.

And lest anyone think girls have been passive creators of sampling fodder for boys, over time girls have appropriated snippets of New Edition's "Candy Girl" and the Jackson 5's version of "Rockin' Robin" for their own rhythmic use in games, which underscores the reciprocal and often unexamined relationship between black girls and popular music. When Gaunt traces the origins of traditional games like "Miss Mary Mack" by fusing academic prose with vividly rendered memories, her journey is refreshing, if sometimes daunting in its technicality. Who else but an academic could refer to spontaneous girl games this way:

Young girls at play are unaware that they are socially performing the embodied memories of a black musical past, but this explains the subconscious links between the generations of youth, between youth and adults, over time…. In other words, girls are telling stories through their embodied play: dramatizing the "infinite process of African-American and black musical identity construction" by practicing and performing the mnemonic rituals of a kinetic orality.

The Games Black Girls Play is most readable for the compelling connections between these games, passed down as an African-American tradition through a kind of intuitive education. The games are explained and shown in the appendix through meter, crediting young girls with creativity that looks complex when rendered as traditional American music. Gaunt successfully lifts ignored girls from obscurity to center stage.

She also recalls her own versions of these games and dances that were passed down to her from her mother and friends, and that's when her writing is most accessible. When she meets and joins the group Double Dutch Divas in Midtown Manhattan, adult women who dance and jump solely to enjoy the games they once played as girls, she is most inspired and inspiring. She writes poems that offer insight into her affection for girls' improvisation, and even throws down a bit between the ropes after she provides a disclaimer to readers that her sense of rhythm is not quite on par with the best jumpers on the team.

Not that her jumping skills matter. With Games, Gaunt has created a necessary space for translating black girls' joy in a society that typically overlooks it. Hopefully, others will take their turn and jump in to keep the games going.

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