Miss Mary Mack

Miss Mary Mack is dressed in black, with silver buttons down her back. The speaker says she loves coffee and tea, and that she loves the boys and the boys love her. Then comes a threat to tell mother when she gets home, because the boys won't leave the girls alone. It is more about rhythm and teasing than about a story.

Two children face each other. They clap their own hands, then each other's right hands, left hands and both hands, in a repeating pattern, keeping time with the words. Go a little faster each time round.

Miss Mary Mack is one of the best-known hand-clapping games in the English-speaking world, and the scholar Kyra Gaunt has written about it as part of Black girls' play culture in the United States. The oldest print we found is not specifically African American, though: it is a short rhyme sent from West Chester, Pennsylvania, and printed in 1888 by the collector Henry Carrington Bolton, who does not say who the children were. The longer versions sung today, with many added verses, came later, and we do not show them. Stories that the rhyme began with a circus performer or with the warship Merrimack are unproven theories.