Jeanne Pitre Soileau, winner of the 2018 Chicago Folklore Prize and
the 2018 Opie Prize for Yo' Mama, Mary Mack, and Boudreaux and
Thibodeaux: Louisiana Children's Folklore and Play, vividly
presents children's voices in What the Children Said: Child Lore of
South Louisiana. Including over six hundred handclaps, chants,
jokes, jump-rope rhymes, cheers, taunts, and teases, this book
takes the reader through a fifty-year history of child speech as it
has influenced children's lives. What the Children Said affirms
that children's play in south Louisiana is acquired along a network
of summer camps, schoolyards, church gatherings, and sleepovers
with friends. When children travel, they obtain new games and
rhymes, and bring them home. The volume also reveals, in the words
of the children themselves, how young people deal with racism and
sexism. The children argue and outshout one another, policing their
own conversations, stating their own prejudices, and vying with one
another for dominion. The first transcript in the book tracks a
conversation among three related boys and shows that racism is part
of the family interchange. Among second grade boys and girls at a
Catholic school another transcript presents numerous examples in
which boys use insults to dominate a conversation with girls, and
girls use giggles and sly comebacks to counter this aggression.
Though collected in the areas of New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and
Lafayette, Louisiana, this volume shows how south Louisiana child
lore is connected to other English-speaking places: England,
Scotland, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand, as well as the rest
of the United States.
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