Children’s Folklore Recent Titles in Greenwood Folklore Handbooks Myth: a handbook

Five
Contexts
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Many autobiographies include details from the author’s childhood years. These 
publications offer perceptions of children’s folklore in its familial and cultural 
context. Bernard Mergen’s examination of autobiographies from the seventeenth 
century to the early 1980s resulted in important insights regarding children’s play 
and use of toys (186–90). Study of autobiographies helps us understand how 
children interact with other people and material objects at home, at school, and 
elsewhere.
One of the most detailed and insightful recollections of childhood is Dorothy 
Mills Howard’s 
Dorothy’s World: Childhood in Sabine Bottom, 1902–1910
(1977). 
Having studied childlore in Australia as well as the United States and Mexico, 
Howard understood the traditional patterns of her own early years in Texas. Her 
book includes a chapter for each year from birth to “seven going on eight,” as 
well as chapters devoted to her home, her family’s farm, clothes for everyday life 
and special occasions, play life, and songs. Her long lists of games and songs 
demonstrate the richness of folk tradition in Texas during the first decade of the 
twentieth century.
At the age of four, Dorothy Gray Mills learned to write her name backwards: 
“Sllim Yarg Ythorod.” When her sisters teased her by calling her “Old Gray Mule,” 
she told them that her new name was a secret between herself and her grandmother 
(63). Howard enjoyed many kinds of play and games, from making an indoor or 
outdoor playhouse to staging funerals for pets and dolls, playing the circle game 
Frog in the Middle, rolling hoops, jumping rope, walking on stilts, bouncing up 
and down on a seesaw, and playing Thimble, Thimble on cold, rainy days. Most 

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126 Children’s 
Folklore
toys were homemade; very few came from the revered Sears and Roebuck mail-
order catalog. Howard’s memoir gives the reader a satisfying glimpse of childlore 
in its proper context of family, community, and folk belief.
Other insights come from the autobiography of African American folklorist 
Zora Neale Hurston, who was born in Eatonville, Florida, in 1891. At an early 
age, Hurston learned how boys’ play differed from girls’ play:
I discovered that I was extra strong by playing with other girls near my age. I had no way 
of judging the force of my playful blows, and so I was always hurting somebody. Then 
they would say I meant to hurt, and go home and leave me. Everything was all right, how-
ever, when I played with boys. It was a shameful thing to admit being hurt among them. 
Furthermore, they could dish it out themselves, and I was acceptable to them because 
I was the one girl who could take a good pummeling without running home to tell. (39)
Hurston’s family put a stop to this rough play, believing that it was “not ladylike.” 
Thwarted in her play preferences, Hurston, “driven inward,” developed an inter-
est in telling and listening to stories (40).
C. S. Lewis, author of 
Surprised by Joy,
also experienced disappointments. 
Wynyard School, which Lewis entered after the death of his mother in 1908, al-
lowed bullying, but Lewis’s older brother protected him. Malvern College, which 
Lewis entered in 1913, allowed older boys, called “Bloods,” to give younger “fags” 
long lists of tasks to complete each day. Even though the school paid people to 
shine the boys’ shoes, older boys forced younger ones to keep their shoes spotless 
and to perform other menial tasks (96). Lewis found the school’s status system so 
disturbing that he begged his father for permission to leave school and continue 
studying with a private tutor. Fortunately, his father allowed Lewis to leave, and 
the rest of his school days passed pleasantly.
More jocular memoirs describe pranks. Frank B. Gilbreth Jr.’s book