The Tignon: When They Tried to Cover What They Could Not Stop Seeing

Diary of Pepper Saint Clair
New Orleans, Louisiana
Still late August, before the storms chase me north

Dear Diary,

I always find myself in a bit of a quandary when I discover that my own head has been participating in history without my permission.

Here I am, still on this veranda — though I do mean still, as if the humidity has glued me to this wrought-iron chair like a fly to molasses — when I decide to take one last constitutional down Royal Street before I skedaddle out of this city. I have my cream headscarf tied in a rather fetching bow, my cat-eye frames perched just so, and my fan at the ready, for the heat today is what I can only describe as persnickety. It simply will not behave.

A woman stops me. A Creole woman of a certain age, the kind who wears her years like a string of pearls — each one earned, none of them apologized for. She admires my headscarf. We get to chitchatting, as one does, and to my utter discombobulation, she informs me that I am wearing — quite accidentally, quite ignorantly, quite willy-nilly — a descendant of what the Spanish colonial government once tried to use as a mark of shame.

A tignon, dahling. Pronounced tee-yon. A word I had never heard in all my highfalutin education, which I suppose tells you everything about what they choose to teach and what they choose to bury.

She was polite, mind you. Never raised her voice. But she looked at me the way one looks at a child who has been wearing her grandmother's heirloom brooch upside down. And then she told me the tale.

In 1786 — the same year some people were busy being "elite" elsewhere — Spanish Governor Don Estevan Miró decided that free women of color in Louisiana were becoming entirely too much to bear. Too elegant. Too light-skinned. Too visible. White men were pursuing them, white women were in a tizzy, and the social order was going all cattywampus. So Miró issued his little bando de buen gobierno — his "proclamation of good government," which is, I assure you, the first sign that whatever follows will be pure, unadulterated malarkey.

The edict declared that women of African descent — whether enslaved, free, mulatto, or quadroon — could no longer adorn their hair with feathers, jewels, or any of the finery that made them stand out. They had to wear their hair llanos — plain — or cover it with a pañuelo, a handkerchief, the same sort of head covering worn by enslaved women. The intention, you see, was to mark them as inferior. To make them disappear. To turn their glory into a badge of servitude.

[She pauses. The fan slows. One eyebrow arches.]

But here is where the story turns delicious. For you cannot tell a Black woman to cover her crown and expect her to emerge looking like a sack of potatoes. That is not how we are built. That is not how we have ever been built.

These women — these free women of color, these gens de couleur — took that very handkerchief, that very tignon meant to humble them, and turned it into a fashion statement. They wrapped those scarves in knots so elaborate they would make a sailor weep. They used Madras fabrics in bright reds, blues, and yellows. They pinned them with jewels and ribbons and all manner of finery. They followed the letter of the law while flipping the spirit of it into a pretzel.

Historian Carolyn Long put it rather neatly: "Instead of being considered a badge of dishonor, the tignon became a fashion statement."
And the bright fabrics, the imaginative wrapping techniques? They are said to have enhanced the beauty of the women of color.

So the very thing designed to make them unappealing — to make white men stop looking — made them more alluring. More distinctive. More unmissable. The law backfired so spectacularly that eventually even white women wanted in on the action. Empress Joséphine of France and First Lady Dolley Madison were soon sporting similar wraps, because Black women had made the tignon so fashionable that the elite had to appropriate it.

 [She leans back. The fan resumes, slow and judgmental.]

Let us sit with the arithmetic of this, shall we?

They called us inferior. They called us disgusting. They called us a threat to the social order. And their solution — their brilliant, highfalutin, hoity-toity solution — was to cover us up. Because they could not stop looking. Because our hair, adorned and free, was so powerful that it required legislation. Because the sight of a confident Creole woman walking down Chartres Street was enough to unravel their entire mythology of supremacy.

They did not pass laws to cover ugly things. You do not legislate against what does not move you. You legislate against what you fear. What you desire. What you cannot control.

And when they tried to smother that desire with a handkerchief, we turned the handkerchief into a crown.

[She touches her own scarf, adjusting the bow with deliberate care.]

I was gobsmacked, I tell you. Flummoxed. All sixes and sevens. Here I had been, prancing about New Orleans in my little headscarf, thinking myself merely festive, when in fact I was wearing a receipt. A receipt for 1786. A receipt that says: You tried to erase us, and we made your erasure the most fashionable thing in the room.

The woman who stopped me? She tied my scarf properly before she let me go. A Creole knot, she called it. Tight at the nape, bow at the crown, fabric draped like a queen's coronation. She did not charge me for the lesson. She simply said, "Now you know, chère. Now you know."

And I do. I know that when they tell us we are nothing, they are trembling. I know that when they try to cover us, it is because they have already seen too much. I know that every tignon ever tied was a revolution wrapped in silk.

I must pack now. The storms are coming, and my eyebrows have filed a formal complaint. But I depart this city with my head covered in history, my scarf tied in defiance, and my heart full of the knowledge that we have never, not once, allowed their laws to out-dress our dignity.

They execrate us, but they had to cover us because they could not stop looking.
Isn't that just the most tragic little arrangement?

— P.S.C. 


P.S. — This entry was written while wearing The Creole Tignon, a silk headwrap in deep Madras red, tied in the traditional style of the free women of 1786 who understood that a law is merely a suggestion if you have enough imagination. Available in the shop for those who wish to wear their receipts.