Abstract: This essay is a close feminist reading of “The Song of the Stitches,” what appears to be a silly rhyme that was tucked away in the private papers of anthropologist Rosalie Hankey Wax. Its bizarre and playful imagery, created while Hankey was conducting fieldwork at the Japanese American internment camp at Tule Lake, can be read as a coded statement about Hankey’s struggles against racism in wartime America and against sexism in the academy, struggles that were impossible to articulate in the moment. By reconstructing the context in which “Song of the Stitches” was written, this essay allows a serious statement about the ways in which the politics of the nation and the politics of the academy endangered Hankey’s work, relationships, and perhaps even her life while she was at Tule Lake to emerge from this not‐so‐playful text.