II. Evolution

The consistent rhythm and rhyme create the taboo effect, so evolution of this rhyme consists of authors adding on additional lines or events at the ends of previous Versions. I have collected Versions from the 1950’s, 1970s, 1980’s, and 1990’s, roughly four generations. Most of the people who responded to my post on newsgroups were women who stated they had sung the song with hand claps in the second or third grades.

Version 1, the earliest version I collected, comes from Michigan in the 1950s. It is important to note that Version 1 consists of only four lines. Regardless of length, the meter and rhyme scheme are as I described above, and the taboo effect is the focus of the rhyme. The taboo word, "Hell", which seems tame in the 1990’s, was very risqué for a girl to use in the 1950’s. Also, the protagonist’s action, namely a little girl blowing something up, was outlandishly subversive. The theme of thehyperbolic destruction of something in the adult world, namely "blow[ing] [a] steamboat to hell" is also evident here. Both the language and the character's actions are subversive. Even in its most basic form, kids could “get away with” this rhyme. Version 1 of the rhyme seems too tame for today’s kids, but over the course of time, children have added to the rhyme at successive endings, making sure to keep the meter foundation, but adding on new taboo words, events, or themes.

Version 2 comes from 1972, and by then getting away with saying hell was obviously not subversive enough. Appropriately outrageous words, events, and themes have been added. The new generation has scrapped the last line of Version 1, “give me back my dime,” in order to add new outlandish events. In Version 2 surfaces the evidence of “kick[ing],” more violent but less destructive than “blow[ing] [something] to hell.” The section about “behind the ‘frigerator” shows up as well, and there the new taboo word, "ass", comes in.

The next added event ended with “the boys are in the bathroom zipping up their flies.” This phrase is much more raucous than any in the first Version 1. Possibly solely the taboowords were not raunchy enough, and now the authors decide to experiment with mildly sexual images. These images mirror children’s curiosity about sex and about the opposite gender’s parts, but we don’t actually get a description of these parts. The actual viewing of these "parts" is as taboo as the lyrics, but we only access and experiment with these taboos via the rhyme.Also, the taboo words and images relate specifically to sex, not to subversive action. This version effectively mirrors what society accepted in the 1970s.

I collected Version 2 from a woman in Bakersfield, California. People there today are less conservative, and I assume they were so in the 1970’s, and so children knew that it was less problematic to be curious about sex than to, for example, make racial or ethnic slurs. If the climate of the 1970s is reflective of the current climate in Bakersfield, then we can accordingly conclude that society dictates what is or is not taboo at any given historical period.

Next in the evolutionary succession come Versions like 3 or 6. I have grouped them together because they have added yet another event to the plot, and both come from about the same generation. These versions contain the portion about kissing in the dark, another sexual taboo children of this age are often curious about. As a girl in elementary school, your mother often cautions you against kissing boys. My mother warned me it led to other things. At that age, I had no idea what she was talking about, so kissing intrigued me all the more. Kissing is something you would actually do with someone else and seems less voyeuristic and more active than just looking at the boys pulling down their flies in the bathroom. Therefore this addition is more qualitatively taboo, or simply worse, than the previous versions. These two versions also have the piece of glass going up “your ass” or up “Miss Susie’s ass.” These two images are all the more vulgar than just “cut[ting]” you (Version 2). It’s bad enough to have a piece of glass going up someone else’s ass, but to warn against it going up one’s own ass is even more deliciously graphic than the images in previous versions of the rhyme.

After these two ersions, there exists a generational split in endings of the rhyme. At this generation in the song’s evolution, I found a racist ending to a stanza. A friend of mine in second grade (1984) taught me Version 4, which ends "darker than the ocean, darker than the sea, darker than the little black boy who's chasing after me!" At first I thought this ending might be regional, because stereotypically racism still exists in the South, and I heard the racist version in North Carolina. However, I also collected racist Versions 5 and 5a from women my age who had learned and sung it in Pittsburgh. Version 5a was definitely the most outlandish, ending with “darker than the naked boy who’s chasing after me!” These racist endings imply a specific sexual aggression characteristic of young black boys.
The ending I had learned suddenly seemed more tame to me.

When I learned the rhyme, I paid little attention to the fact that the boy was described as "black." I remember having a mental image of a white boy with dark hair and a suntan chasing me. My experience gives evidence as to how subtly racism pervades our culture. It is also a good example of how taboos do not have to refer solely to sex. The ones about sex may be more prominent and more accepted, but racial slurs are another kind of taboo element that exists in this rhyme.

The onslaught of political correctness has cleaned up Miss Susie, however. The version next in the lineage is Version 6, which incorporates the "dark" into a simile about spaces, rather than describing skin color: “The dark is like a movie, a movie’s like a show, a show is like a TV set and that is all I know!” I collected Version 6 from a woman two years younger than me. The final added element, which brings us to the present, is the bra element in Versions 7 and 8. The bra is one of the central factors around which the idea of female unity revolves.