head rag

• headrag

From 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, 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.

• Hardage, raghead, rhagade