head rag

head +‎ rag

African American woman wearing a head rag

head rag (plural head rags)

1. (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, Their Eyes Were Watching God, University of Illinois Press, 1978, Chapter 6, p. 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,

     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, Gender Play in Mark Twain: Cross-Dressing and Transgression, Columbia: University of Missouri Press, Chapter 3, p. 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.

• Hardage, raghead, rhagade