The Nursery Rhymes My Grandmother Rewrote
Her versions had braver girls and much better endings.
I was seven years old before I learned that Jill was supposed to come tumbling after. In my grandmother's version, Jill saw Jack fall, put the pail down, and went for help, because, as my grandmother said, "one broken crown in a family is enough."
Her rhymes were like that. Familiar melodies, unfamiliar outcomes. She sang them at bath time, at bedtime, and during the long power cuts of my childhood summers, when the ceiling fan died mid-spin and the whole neighborhood moved to its rooftops like a tide.
In her version, Miss Muffet did not run away from the spider. She named it. She fed it a crumb of the curds and whey, and they came to "an understanding," which is also how my grandmother described her forty-one years of marriage.
Humpty Dumpty still fell. She was not a liar. But after all the king's horses and all the king's men gave up and rode home for dinner, a girl came along with a tube of glue and a full afternoon, and she sat in the dirt and did the slow, unglamorous work. "Kings send horses," my grandmother said, pressing her thumb to my forehead like a seal. "Girls bring glue."
The old woman who lived in a shoe, who had so many children she didn't know what to do? In our house, she knew exactly what to do. She taught the older ones to cook, opened a small tailoring business out of the shoe's heel, and bought a second shoe by the end of the rhyme. My grandmother delivered the last line like a stock market report, with immense satisfaction.
I did not know these were revisions. Why would I? A rhyme is scripture when you are five. I assumed every child in the world knew that the mouse ran up the clock to see the view.
Then came the second grade recitation competition.
I stood on stage in a pressed uniform and performed Jack and Jill with full actions, including Jill's brisk, sensible walk to fetch the doctor. The judges exchanged a look I now recognize as the official expression of adults deciding whether a child is creative or troubled. My teacher corrected me in front of everyone. "Jill comes tumbling after," she said. "That is how it goes."
I remember saying, with the total confidence of a seven-year-old carrying her grandmother's canon, "Why would she fall too? She saw him fall. She was standing right there."
I did not win the recitation competition... I did win a certain reputation.
At home I reported the scandal, expecting outrage. My grandmother just snorted and went on shelling peas. "They have their book," she said. "We have ours."
Here is the part I did not understand until I was twenty-three, home from college, sitting with her on the same rooftop during the same kind of power cut, both of us older and one of us pretending not to be.
I had brought her a gift: a big illustrated collection of nursery rhymes, the fancy kind with a ribbon bookmark. I wanted her to read her old rivals, the official versions, so we could laugh at their timid endings together. I put it in her hands and she held it the way you hold someone else's baby, carefully and at a slight distance.
She turned the pages too evenly... She admired an illustration of the cow jumping over the moon and called it a nice horse.
My grandmother could not read.
Not a word, not in any of the three languages she cooked, argued, and prayed in. Married at fifteen, school ended at eleven, a whole life spent nodding at documents her sons would summarize for her.
All those years, the rhyme book she kept on her shelf had been a prop. She had heard the originals once or twice from neighbors' radios and school-going grandchildren, kept the tunes, and built new houses on them, room by room, girl by girl.
She was not rewriting the rhymes. She was writing them.
There is a difference, and the difference was her entire hidden self.
She could not change one line of the life she was handed, so she changed every story she handed on.
I sat on that rooftop and quietly rearranged my whole childhood. The braver girls, the better endings, the businesswoman in the shoe. Jill walking for help.
None of it was mischief... It was testimony.
Every revision was a small, singable protest from a woman whose own story had been edited by everyone except her.
I never told her I knew. It felt like the one gift I could give back: letting her keep the book as a prop and the authorship as a secret. But I started writing her versions down that summer, in a notebook I still have, because I had read about writers nobody had heard yet, and it struck me that I had grown up in the lap of one.
She died on a Tuesday in March, four years ago, with the illustrated rhyme book still on her shelf, ribbon bookmark parked forever at the nice horse.
For a long time afterward I could not sing anything. Grief does strange, specific things... it took the tunes first. Then last year my niece was born, and this spring she reached the age where a lap is a country and a rhyme is its law.
The first time I babysat her alone, I panicked at bedtime and reached for the official book. I got two lines into the standard Jack and Jill and stopped... It felt like reading someone else's mail.
So I did it our way. Jill put the pail down. Jill went for help.
My niece did not know the difference, exactly the way I never knew the difference, and that not-knowing felt like the point of everything. Somewhere between the spider getting a name and the shoe becoming a small business, she fell asleep with her whole hand wrapped around one of my fingers, the way babies do, as if a finger were a rope and sleep were a river.
I have started writing again since then, mostly small things about childhood and memory, trying to get her cadence on paper before my own memory starts revising me. Some of it works. Most of it is glue and a full afternoon.
People talk about a grandmother's storytelling like it is a soft thing, lavender and lullabies. Hers was soft the way river stones are soft: shaped by force, over years, into something a child could hold.
Last week my niece grabbed the fancy illustrated book off my shelf and slapped it, delighted, demanding a performance. I opened it to Humpty Dumpty and read her the version that is not printed there.
All the king's horses went home for dinner.
The girl stayed. The girl had glue.
And when the wall was mended and the moon came up over the rooftop where I first heard it, I did what my grandmother always did at the end: closed the book she never needed, pressed a thumb to the small warm forehead, and let the better ending stand.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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