Edited by Azizi Powell
This pancocojams post presents information about the United States Gullah Geechie culture (a sub-set of African American culture.)
This post alsopresents an excerpt from the introduction to the 1972 book Step It Down: Games, Plays, Songs, Stories from Afro-American Heritage (University of Georgia Press, originally published in 1972). That book was co-written by Bessie Jones, a Gullah African American woman, and Bess Lomax Hawes, a White American woman.
The chant entitled "All Hid?" that is showcases in this pancocojams post was included in that Step It Down book. Bessie Jones remembers "All Hid?" being chanted as a prelude to the chasing portion of "Hide & Seek" games by a designated child during her childhood in the early 20th century.
This content is provided for folkloric and recreational purposes.
All copyrights remain with their owners.
Thanks to Bessie Jones and Bess Lomax Hawes for preserving and sharing songs, games, and chants from the Gullah culture in their 1972 book "Step It Down" and elsewhere. Thanks also to Kate Rinzler for including this chant in the children's 1978 album "Old Mother Hippletoe".
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A version of this post was published with a similar title on November 2014 with a similar title on pancocojams' sister blog https://cocojams2.blogspot.com. That cocojams2 post doesn't have any visitors' comments.
Click https://pancocojams.blogspot.com/2025/10/gullah-gullah-island-gullah-gullah.html for the related pancocojams post " "Gullah Gullah Island" ("Gullah Gullah" Children's Television Series Theme Song).
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INFORMATION ABOUT THE UNITED STATES GULLAH GEECHIE CULTURE
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gullah
"The Gullah (/ˈɡʌlə/) are a subgroup of the African American
ethnic group, who predominantly live in the Lowcountry region of the U.S.
states of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida within the
coastal plain and the Sea Islands. Their language and culture have preserved a
significant influence of Africanisms as a result of their historical geographic
isolation and the community's relation to its shared history and identity.[2]
Historically, the Gullah region extended from the Cape Fear area on North Carolina's coast south to the vicinity of Jacksonville on Florida's coast. The Gullah people and their language are also called Geechee, which may be derived from the name of the Ogeechee River near Savannah, Georgia.[3] Gullah is a term that was originally used to designate the creole dialect of English spoken by Gullah and Geechee people. Over time, its speakers have used this term to formally refer to their creole language and distinctive ethnic identity as a people. The Georgia communities are distinguished by identifying as either "Freshwater Geechee" or "Saltwater Geechee", depending on whether they live on the mainland or the Sea Islands.[4][5][6][7]
Because of a period of relative isolation from whites while working on large plantations in rural areas, the Africans, enslaved from a variety of Central and West African ethnic groups, developed a creole culture that has preserved much of their African linguistic and cultural heritage from various peoples; in addition, they absorbed new influences from the region. According to the Gullah/Geechee Nation website, many Gullah/Geechees also have some native American or indigenous American ancestry.[8] The Gullah people speak an English-based creole language containing many African loanwords and influenced by African languages in grammar and sentence structure. Sometimes referred to as "Sea Island Creole" by linguists and scholars, the Gullah language is sometimes considered as being similar to Bahamian Creole, Barbadian Creole, Guyanese Creole, Belizean Creole, Jamaican Patois, Trinidadian Creole, Tobagonian Creole, and the Sierra Leone Krio language of West Africa. Gullah crafts, farming and fishing traditions, folk beliefs, music, rice-based cuisine and story-telling traditions all exhibit strong influences from Central and West African cultures.[9][10][11][12]"...
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INFORMATION ABOUT BESSIE JONES FROM THE INTRODUCTION TO "STEP IT DOWN"
[This introduction was written by Bess Lomax Hawes, a White American woman who was the author of that 1972 book along with Bessie Jones.(February 8, 1902 – July 17, 1984)
" [page] xi
This book is really about one of the ways of growing up in the United States. In part it is a memoir-the long rememberings of a Negro woman born in the Southern poverty belt around the turn of the century, a detailing of the mind and body and heart skills she learned in her "days coming up"...
Mrs. Bessie Jones, one of the authors of this book, was born sixty-five years ago in Dawson, Georgia-a small black farming community-and grew up like thousands of other girls of her time in the rural South. She started to work when she was still a child, helping out her big family: she chopped cotton, planted potatoes, watched out for the littler children, took her schooling when her family could spare her and as it was offered. Her formal education ended when she was ten.
Balanced on the edge of real poverty almost all of her life, she learned how to amuse and entertain herself and others. Music-especially singing-is not only one of the least expensive art forms; it is
[page] xii
also one in which you can participate while you are doing something else. There was a great deal of singing in Mrs. Jones's family: it didn't cost a cent or take any time away from the job to be done. Her maternal and paternal grandparent's had sung while they worked in the fields during slavery times; some of the songs their little granddaughter learned from them were then well over a hundred years old. Mrs. Jones's mother was a fine singer and dancer; though her father never sang, "he could play any instrument you gave him."
Dawson itself must have been a musical community during Mrs. Jones' childhood; She speaks lovingly of the beautiful singing of "old people" in the little community church on Sundays, of weekday mornings in the same small building, turned schoolhouse until the next Sunday, when the schoolteacher would lead the children in morning hymn and school songs. She tells of the long Southern twilights when the grownups would be busy with their own affairs and the children would run outside to their games and mock dances.
[...]
[page] xvi
All her life she has taken care of children-her little brothers and sisters, neighborhood children, her own babies and grandbabies, the sons and daughters of her white employers, for whom she was both housekeeper and nurse. She speaks of the games she knows and has taught children so many times with the expertise of an educator and the joy of a participant. She declares forthrightly that her games are "good for children" and she knows just how: which help develop rhythmic coordination or big muscle skills, which promote responsiveness or sharing. She has sifted through her memories of her own childhood the activities that meant-and still mean-most to her; she has added others to them from her more recent experience, "collecting" as do all great folk singers, new games and plays that especially appealed to her. Today she is a carrier of the finest of that huge repertoire of children's games, family pastimes, and infant amusements of the Southern Negro family of yesterday and today.....
[page] xvii
She was not documenting anything; she was teaching. And as a teacher she was passing on that part of her knowledge she considered to be "good" for children."...
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TEXT OF THE "ALL HID" CHANT AND BESSIE JONES' COMMENTS
From Step It Down (pp. 182-184)
"Children these day don't play like they used to play-nowhere-mine and no one else's. In "Hide and Go Seek" the children nowadays play it right quick and angry - I say angry, because if the one that's counting ask them, "Is all hid? sometimes they'll holler, "Not yet!" and sometimes they'll just throw off and give a kind of a "No!" and all that way...
But in my time coming up, when the person says, "Is all hid? he said it in a tone and the children answered him a tone. And those tones would combine together, which would make a beautiful play. And the children don't count now-well, they really does count-nothing but counting. They says "Onetwothreefourfivesixseveneightnineten!" But in those days, we had a rhyme that we called counting. Such as, one would go to the base and lean up against a tree and not peeping, because it's not fair, you know, they would hide their eyes and lean against the base and he would say,
Honey, honey, bee ball,
I can't see y'all. All hid?
And those children would holler back.
“No-o-o!”
And the counter would say,
Is all hid?
And the children would say
“No-o-o!”
And sometimes those children be right close to there-but not too close,you know, not too close for the law of the base, ten feet-but they don't be too far and they put their hands up to their mouth or put their heads down and say "No-o-o!" real soft. You see, that make him think they're way off! They sound like a panther!...And then it go on like this (singing):
I went to the river, I couldn't get across.
I paid five dollars for an old blind horse.
One leg broke, the other leg cracked,
And great Godamighty how the horse did rack.
Is all hid?
“No-o-o!”
Is all hid?
“No-o-o!”
I went down the road,
The road was muddy.
Stubbed my toe
And made it bloody.
Is all hid?
“No-o-o!”
Is all hid?
“No-o-o!”
Me and my wife and a bobtail dog,
We crossed that river on a hickory log.
She fell in,
And I fell off,
And left nobody but the bobtail dog.
Is all hid?
“No-o-o!”
Is all hid?
“No-o-o!”
One, two,
I don't know what to do.
Three, four,
I don't know where to go.
Five, six,
I'm in a terrible fix.
Seven, eight,
I made a mistake.
Nine, ten
My eyes open, I'm a looking!
And they know he's looking. In other words, he could stop right there at "one, two", and when he stop there, they know they better lay close because he maybe done left the base then because he say "One, two, I don't know what to do"! He's looking around then, see, let you know he'a about to leave the base. "Three, four, I don't know where to go", because they are all hid, see? "Five, six, I'm in a terrible fix"; see, he's looking someplace. "Seven, eight"-he didn't find nobody there-"I made a mistake!-see? Then he say, "Nine, ten, my eyes [are] open, I'm a-looking!" and he's going everywhere then, see?
But these children now don't have that kind of counting...and they won't leave the base! It worries me. I look at them and they won't leave the base, and when the others come, they expect to get their hundred-we called it a "hundred". The call it a base, but in my day, we called it "my hundred". If you make it to the base, if you outrun thee counter and get to the base, we called "my hundred". And you know, when they ask if all is hid, they ask, "All hid?" and they holler back "No!" and all that ....You know, it's no play. It's justa snap all the way through. It's no play in it....But we played."
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INTRODUCTORY COMMENTS WRITTEN BY BESS LOMAX HAWES, THE CO-AUTHOR OF THE BOOK STEP IT DOWN
These comments written by Bess Lomax Hawes in the introduction to Step It Down explain what Bessie Jones meant when she used the word "play":
Using this second definition as a starting point, the special quality of fun the [Georgia] Sea Islanders were having became clearer. When they "played", they were constructing over and over again small life dramas; they were taking on new personalities for identification or caricature. They were acting." [Step It Down, pp xiv-xv]
Bessie Jones' "All Hid?" chant is also included in Old Mother Hippletoe: Rural and Urban Children’s Songs New World NW 291 (1978). The text is almost exactly the same as that found in Step It Down except that record gives the line as "I paid five dollars for an old gray horse" instead of "old blind horse".
That record's text also doesn't include Bessie Jones' comments about that chant. However, the Old Miss Hippletoe album includes the following album notes written by Kate Rinzler about "All Hid?":
"Hide-and-seek is one of the most widely played hiding games in this country and is known in a multitude of variations around the world. A nineteenth-century English count out for hide-and-seek is chanted:
One a bin, two a bin, three a bin, four,
Five a bin, six a bin, seven gie o'er:
A bunch of pins, come prick my shins,
A loaf of brown bread, come knock me down. I'm coming.
(Gomme, p.211: see Bibliography)
Black children playing hide and- seek in the South borrowed and revised such verses to sing as the seeker waited for the other children to hide.
The words of “All Hid” derive from three sources. The variations of the query “All hid?,” the responses from hiding children, and the counting out by ones, twos, and so on are commonplaces in hide-and-seek as played in England and America; the count out formula (“One, two...”) is a counting rhyme like the well-known “One, two, buckle my shoe”; and the verses about acquiring a lame horse to cross a river are borrowed from humorous songs of black tradition".
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ADDENDUM - GULLAH PLAY ACTIVITIES
AI Overview [retrieved October 2, 2025]
"Gullah children engage in play activities such as songs,
dances, ring games, and crafting, often incorporating traditional African
rhythms and storytelling into their games. Activities include singing
Gullah-African songs like "Green Sally," playing jump rope with
associated chants, participating in ring games, and creating crafts such as
quilting and basket weaving. These forms of play serve as meaningful cultural
rituals, connecting children to their heritage and fostering community.
Songs and Music
Singing and Call-and-Response: Children participate in songs
with African roots, often in a call-and-response format, which has influenced
American music.
Ring Games: Traditional ring games, such as those associated
with songs like "Green Sally" and "Johnny Cuckoo," are
played, involving singing, clapping, and movement.
Rhythm and Percussion: Children can learn and create
traditional Gullah rhythms and melodies, sometimes constructing and playing
Gullah-inspired instruments.
Crafts and Art
Quilting: Children engage in Gullah quilting, a significant
craft that incorporates storytelling and tradition.
Basket Weaving: Sweetgrass basket weaving is a traditional
Gullah craft that children may learn and participate in.
Other Crafts: Other hands-on activities can include pottery
and various arts and crafts.
Other Traditional Activities
Storytelling: Storytelling is a core part of Gullah culture,
and children participate in this activity to learn about their history and
traditions.
Cooking and Cuisine: Children may also engage in Gullah
cooking, learning about the region's unique cuisine.
Dance and Ring Shouts: The "Ring Shout" is a
traditional Gullah dance and song form that is a part of cultural events.
Educational Programs and Resources
After-School Programs: Programs like the Marshview Community
Organic Farm, Inc.'s "De Gullah Way Tutorial" provide a safe
environment for children to learn, play, and connect with Gullah culture
through various hands-on activities.
Cultural Resources: Websites and resources like
Knowitall.org and Smithsonian Folkways Recordings offer digital resources,
songs, and lesson plans about Gullah culture, music, and games for both
children and educators".
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