head rag

See also: headrag

English edit

Alternative forms edit

headrag

Etymology edit

head +‎ rag

African American woman wearing a head rag

Noun edit

head rag (plural head rags)

(US) A head covering comprising a piece of cloth wound around the head and knotted in the front, often associated with African American women.
- 1937, Zora Neale Hurston, chapter 6, in Their Eyes Were Watching God‎^[1], University of Illinois Press, published 1978, page 86:
  This business of the head-rag irked her endlessly. But Jody was set on it. Her hair was NOT going to show in the store.
- 1941, Sallie Carder (interviewee) in Federal Writers’ Project, Slave Narratives, Volume 13, Oklahoma Narratives, p. 27,^[2]
  During my wedding I wore a blue calico dress, a man's shirt tail as a head rag, and a pair of brogan shoes.
- 1981, Toni Morrison, interview with Charles Ruas in Danille Taylor-Guthrie (ed.), Conversations with Toni Morrison, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994, p. 114,
  […] black women slaves in this country were not, by and large, domestics in the house, with the headrag. They worked out in the fields […]
- 2007, Linda A. Morris, chapter 3, in Gender Play in Mark Twain: Cross-Dressing and Transgression‎^[3], Columbia: University of Missouri Press, page 73:
  Twain chooses here one of the most powerful and persistent racial markers with which to identify Roxana—her head rag. From this moment on, Roxana is “black”—her race does “show.”
- 2014, Nikky Finney, Introduction to Jimmy’s Blues and Other Poems by James Baldwin, Boston: Beacon Press,
  Hansberry died from cancer at the age of thirty-four, soon after her great work, A Raisin in the Sun, yanked the apron and head rag off the institution of the American theater, Broadway, 1959.

Anagrams edit

Hardage, raghead, rhagade