Call the Army, call the Navy, that girl's gonna have a baby!

Joyce Thomas-Washington is a vivacious woman who looks to be in her early thirties but candidly admits being much older. The Community Recreation Director of the North Side's Jefferson Recreation Center is a busy woman—not only is she furthering her education at LaRoche College, but she also runs another center in Fineview. She warmly greets me in the doorway of the Jefferson rec center in a pristine white and red nylon sweat suit with slender framed, slightly hexagonal glasses that match her cream-hazel eyes. She is excited to show me around the newly remodeled building. It's a very homey two-story structure with freshly painted white walls and beautifully treated wood floorboards.
   She introduces me to Tara Calhoun who will be teaching double Dutch to the girls at the center: "Tara used to be one of my kids; she grew up, and now she's got her degree in recreation."
   It was the first week of open gym at a school down the street, and Joyce decides to take us there. The Jefferson Recreation Center has a huge playground, but doesn't have an indoor facility for sports, so it has permission to share the gym with the school.
   We whisk off in Joyce's silver Jetta, pass Charles Street and Brighton Avenue, and journey a couple blocks down some narrow cobblestone streets to the Columbus Middle School gymnasium. This is an old neighborhood—the Mexican War Streets section of Pittsburgh's North Side was featured a famous series of Eugene Smith photographs in mid-twentieth century Life magazines. Today, though, a vibrant mural conveying themes of community pride are ironically displayed near a schoolyard with crude graffiti tags beginning with the diminutive 'Lil'.
   "We should take my car down there because I don't think it's a good idea for us walk back to the center when it gets dark," says Joyce.
   Greatschools.net says 83% of the children who attend Columbus Middle School "receive a free or reduced-price lunch" due to their socioeconomic status, and that the school's math and reading scores are on the bottom rung of the state average. However, Jefferson Recreation Center serves its community by successfully complementing Columbus Middle School's curriculum in a manner that statistics can't perceive. The partnership between the two buildings is crucial because not only is it a healthy environment to develop young bodies and minds, but it's also a safe place where children can escape.

I'm a little Dutch girl dressed in blue, here are the things I like to do: Salute the captain, curtsy to the queen, turn my back on a big submarine!

As the temperature drops, so does attendance at local playgrounds. Pittsburgh doesn't have a legitimate double Dutch league, so I spent a few afternoons driving around schoolyards looking for jumpers, trying not to look like one of those creepy guys who hangs around the jungle gym and tries to bait kids into his car with Tootsie-Rolls. A list of double Dutch team names that I pulled from the ADDL's Web site became the driving force behind my search: Baby Pepper Steppers, Special King Force, Palpitating Panthers, Tiger Turners, Claim Jumpers, Greenbelt Sity (sic) Stars, Wilson Ropes & Rhythms, Rocky Mountain Ropers, High Desert Revolution, ZZ Skippers, Hot Dog USA, Leaping Leopards, and Ebony Force. There had to be a team with a crazy name to represent Pittsburgh, right?
   What also intrigued me was the cryptic yet playful nature of the double Dutch rhymes. It's uncertain as to when rhymes were added to double Dutch, but the verses seem to reflect children's transition from rural to metropolitan communities. I was also fascinated by the oral tradition that accompanied these rhymes. Who were the original narrators of these tales, and why were these stories passed on from generation to generation? The verses somehow melt juvenile angst in quest to understand the opposite sex with moderately disturbing Brothers Grimm- like fantasies.
   The first skilled rope makers emerged from early China, Phoenicia, and ancient Egypt. Jump roping's origins surfaced in the Netherlands, and made its way across the Atlantic in the 1600s. Dutch settlers were America's first jump-ropers. The English, who governed the Dutch colony in the Hudson River Valley, found a sport that involves jumping over one or two ropes to be absolutely ridiculous. Oddly, it was the English who christened the two-roped variety of the sport "double Dutch". The name was a derogatory term because anything associated with Dutch culture was considered absurd and inferior to the English.
   It took until the twentieth century for double Dutch to hit the uptown streets. In the '40s and '50s, jumping rope was all the rage in the inner city. Apartments and buildings were stacked and sandwiched together with sprawling pavement front yards. Girls would head to the sidewalks with their mothers' clotheslines, still wet from laundry day if they could manage it so the ropes would be heavy enough to hit the ground just right. By the late 1950s, double Dutch nearly became extinct as it was overshadowed by the popularity of television and radio among youths. It wasn't until 1973 when Officer Ulysses F. Williams of the NYPD chose to use double Dutch in his youth outreach programs. The project was cleverly named "Rope, not Dope", and its focus was to keep girls away from the destructive temptations of the inner city. The amount of organized double Dutch teams increased during the 1980s, and the New York City had fifteen hundred jumpers alone.
   Before long, the ADDL would be created by former D.C. police officer David Walker. He had seen the positive impact double Dutch had on his community, watching girls being rescued from the lures of gangs, drugs, crime, and sex. Shortly after the ADDL's inception, McDonalds restaurants began sponsoring tournaments locally and nationally. This not only provided much needed financial support for these events, but helped double Dutch gain a wider audience and legitimize it as a sport. When McDonalds severed its ties with the ADDL in the late 1990s, it also single-handedly collapsed the network of rope-jumping leagues. The ADDL continued but struggled as it carried on without McDonalds' clout and resources. Membership declined and tournaments were few and far between. Double Dutch went back to the streets and so did the children.

You and him sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G, first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes the baby in a baby carriage!

We get out of the car in the and onto the level parking lot blacktop. Joyce and Tara exit the car doors and acknowledge the moonlight. Either the streetlights hadn't been adjusted for daylights savings time, or maybe the lamps had been neglected for a couple of years. We pass the high school football field and walk up the steps to the center.
   "A couple years ago we had some contests. At one time, they were always sponsored by McDonalds," Joyce says. "But I still keep double-Dutch ropes at my center so the kids can learn it and do it. Most centers don't; I do. Each rec center in the City Parks program had a contest. In the championships you wore matching T- shirts and shorts. Ours were red and white. Tara's first job is going to be teaching these girls double Dutch."
   In a concerned tone she adds, "I have noticed that the kids haven't been doing it for a while. These girls [in the rec center tonight] aren't trained like they should be. There's so much they need to learn. They don't know the rules, like your supposed to keep your hands in certain places—stuff like that. I have to find an old rulebook somewhere. We hope to have a contest this summer and maybe have another citywide contest. I think that we can find our own funding."
   She suddenly shifts gears on that thought. "That's Jerome Bettis's place over there; he adopted our center. So that means he's going to re-do our playground for us."
   We enter the crowded gymnasium. It's so loud that my hand-held tape recorder can no longer pick up any words that are spoken for the remainder of the evening. Instead, all that's audible when I go to transcribe the interview that night is a series of sneakers squeaking on the basketball court accompanied by the rhythmic pulse of balls echoing off the walls. Kids are laughing and yelling, pre-pubescent boys flirt with girls the best way they know how: chucking five-pound basketballs at their jump ropes in motion.

Down by the river, down by the sea, Johnny broke a bottle and blamed it on me.

The soft white rope beats a muffled steady rhythm on court. These ropes are three times longer than common jump ropes. Two elementary school-aged girls set the pace; knees bouncing and shoulders swaying, they face each other and carve circles in the air with their arms in perfect synch. Carefully studying the rapid pattern of the two twirling ropes, a third girl gracefully hops inside. She synchronizes her footing to dodge the corded arches as they alternately pass over her head and under her feet. They sing rhymes as they turn the ropes:
   "Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, climb the stairs, Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, say your prayers" [then the jumper touches the ground].
   Joyce says to the girls, "You probably don't know this yet, but, if you're in a contest, the first thing that you do is lay the rope down straight. Then you walk up to the ropes and then pick them up and start turning."
   She then points to the littlest girl with a beaming smile, "Do you know how to jump in?" The girl shyly nods her head. The patient rec center director guides her to the swinging ropes, "Come over this way." The girl clears the ropes from head to toe and begins jumping. Joyce speaks over the pitter-patter of their little white tennis shoes on the wooden floor. "Now when you're in a contest you can't swing your feet like that (side to side); you jump straight up and down. And then you got to hold your hands like this," she says, holding her hands to chest.
   She cups her hand over her lips and quietly speaks out of corner of her mouth, "See, we haven't been practicing in a while, see how her feet swing out? It's not straight up and down; you're not allowed to do that. Counters are used in contests to record revolutions made by the rope. Jumpers are judged by who has the highest count without making a mistake. These girls will do a good job, but they'll do better once I teach them the rules. The judges tally scores according to the girl's posture and tricks."

Cinderella, dressed in yellow, went upstairs to meet her fellow.

Tara reminisces of her days in a double Dutch team with Joyce as coach. "I liked jumping and then touching the ground, doing Criss Cross, jumping into the rope then jumping out of the rope, doing the Kid-N-Play. The secret to landing tricks is to just keep one rope out of mind and think of it as regular jump rope. We used to have better ropes than those [points to the ropes that the girls are skipping with]. The plastic ones have the beads on them, and you can hear them better when you're jumping. Some times in the dark, we'd play at night, you can't see the rope but you can hear the rhythm. If the rhythm is messed up then there's no sense in jumping anyway."
   She has only been working at the center for four days, and remembers good times spent at local rec centers vividly. "Some tricks we'd do in elementary school, and then we'd bring it to the rec center and bring it into our routine. I used to practice in front of my house or at the recreation center. We've been doing it since we were real small, and then continued up until high school. At the center you could see other people's style, but we didn't copy their style we made up our own stuff. You want to do something different. Every week, and every contest, we'd try to find something different to do. Who can jump faster, who can do more tricks"
   Joyce walks over to the corner of the gym where Tara and I are watching the girl's jump rope. I listen closely to the girls rhyming. It feels like the rhymes have more power than what Joyce and Tara give them. They're passed down: mother to mother, daughter to daughter, sister to sister as a story to mark some moment in time.
   "They use a lot of community dialect, and they mix it into the rhymes, from kindergarten and school playgrounds," Joyce says. "I think that rhymes were added to help you remember the tricks. The same goes for different drill teams, the same cadence is passed down from their grandmothers, and I think that's the same way that double Dutch continues."
   A basketball comes crashing through the middle of the rope just as the two young girls are jumping in. A pack of boys with mischievous grins plead it foul, but it's obvious they are culprits of flirting. The girls giggle and do their best to feign interest of the pint-sized ballers. They pick up their ropes that had been knocked to the floor from the stray chest pass and franticly turn the ropes to begin a new rhyme.

"Fire, fire, false alarm, Ashante fell into Calvin's arms. Is he gonna be the one? Yes, no, maybe so, yes, no, maybe so."

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