Plus Ça Change – July 7, 2026
You may have played with this toy. You have a wooden cup attached to a handle. There is a ball attached to the handle by a string. You swing the ball up and try to catch it in the cup.
I’m crafting the scene, it’s near Christmas, and uncle Joseph wants to make toys for all the orphans at the Laveaux residence. And there are a lot, because of cholera. They are boys and girls or various ages, less than 14 for boys, 12 for girls (age of majority in 1832 New Orleans).This is mere background, but writer-boy says to himself, what would he do? My darling co-conspirator has an idea. I like, it could be perfect. We both played with this toy as kids.
What’s the name of this toy? Would it be present in New Orleans in 1832? Research!
The first answer I come up with is “kendama.” That’s a traditional Japanese toy. New Orleans has global trade, but Japan… that’s pretty remote. Dig a bit, and I discover the toy showed up in Japan in the 18th century, probably brought by western ships. Scratch Japan.
I grew up in New England, it was just a toy. My co-conspirator remembers it as a Mexican toy. That got me into the right spot. Turns out, people have been playing with this in Europe since medieval times.
France: bilboquet
England: bilbo catcher
Spain: boliche
Hispanic America: balero <— we have a winner.
The connections between New Orleans and Mexico are significant. There are other names for this toy/game in the Iberian diaspora throughout the Americas, but this one works.
With significant age variation among the orphans, Joseph would want to create different difficulty levels. You can change the relative sizes of cup and ball to make it more difficult. A variant of the game is a spindle, rather than a bowl at the end of the handle. You swing up the ball, which is designed to fit on the spindle, and try to catch it. That’s a lot harder.
I might use a variant with rings, rather than a ball. There are several rings attached to the string, and the idea is to catch as many as you can on a spindle. This is similar to another game I have the kids play in an earlier chapter.
This will all make perhaps one or two sentences in the scene, but I have huge fun doing this sort of thing. The music, songs, dance steps, toys, food… it’s all real.
