Accessorizing the Body: Habits of Being I

11. Black Hattitude

11 BLACK HATTITUDE Jeffrey C. Stewart A hat heightens the body, but it also elevates the soul. Especially elevating is a cocked hat on a man or woman with attitude. You have seen them: Black men with a swagger in their step, a hat broke at an outrageous angle, tilted like a landscape of a world about to fall oƒ its axis, ambling down the street like they own it, even if they haven’t a quarter in their pockets. Yes, it is a performance, but it is also a tightrope act, balancing deficits and demerits of the economies of past slavery against the hypocritical world that replaced it. A man’s hat cocked to the side makes him more than he is—a knight in helmeted armor, ax on his head, cutting through an unforgiving world that has already dismissed him. Already discarded her. I say “her” because it was Zora Neale Hurston who first articulated the politics of hatdom as a methodology of emancipation from the discourses of oppression that Alain Locke tried but failed to exorcize from African-American studies with The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925).1 During the 1930s and 1940s, Hurston penned a series of novels and memoirs in which she oƒered some ways to pry the Negro’s response away from the typical reflex of victimhood. When facing down racial ignorance, Hurston sought to elude the racial reactivity that almost always ensnarled the unsuspecting Black humanist. In contrast to verbal retaliation, she developed a technology of dress that allowed a subtler, more nimble reflexivity whereby the Negro subject answered the blow to her ego by dismissing the adversary wordlessly. Or, to put it in a Hurston-like epigram, when the grip of race is tight, make sure your hat is right. Zora Hurston discussed the temptation to get caught in race failure when she recalled a painful encounter at a doctor’s o~ce in “My Most Humiliating Jim Crow Experience.”2 Ironically, but tellingly, her “most humiliating Jim Crow experience came in New York instead of the South as one would have expected.” Hurston had been sent by her patron, Mrs. Charlotte Mason, to “a certain White specialist at her expense.” Here is where the well-meaning White ally can cause the Negro friend the most trouble. The ally sees racism as epiphenomenal, a quirk, or an anachronism a‰icting those ignorant people “over there,” not the social formation of identities “right here.” As Hurston quickly discovered , the New York doctor was not happy to find a brown Zora sitting in the reception room of his very white o~ce. “He did not approach me at all, but told one of his nurses to take me into a private examination room. The room was private all right, but I would not rate it highly as an examination room. Under any other circumstances, I would have sworn it was a closet where the soiled towels and uniforms were tossed.” When the doctor entered, he asked a couple of questions “desultorily” about what ailed Hurston and then wrote a prescription to get her out of his o~ce pronto. For most human beings such an experience wounds, and it wounded Hurston. But she would not give him, his nurse, or herself the satisfaction of being publicly hurt—or angry. “I did not get up and sweep out angrily as I was first disposed to do.” Once the doctor finished going through the motions of an examination, “I got up, set my hat at a reckless angle and walked out, telling him that I would send him a check, which I never did. I went away feeling the pathos of the Anglo-Saxon civilization . . . for I know that anything with such a false foundation cannot last.”3 Here is the key insight about the hat set at a “reckless angle” on a Black head—it signifies Hurston’s impunity, functioning as a shield against the brainwashing that attempts to inculcate in its would-be victims the idea of their inferiority, that somehow they deserve the rude treatment segregationists dish out to them. Just when the emotion connected to such abuse began its assault on her psyche, she reached for her hat, cocked 1 7 3 / B L A C K H A T T I T U D E it at an angle that says “kiss this,” and...