head rag

== English == === Alternative forms === headrag === Etymology === From head +‎ rag. === Noun === 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. 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 […] 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 === Hardage, raghead, rhagade