Entry · catalog no. 4322
coal scuttle blonde
/ /koʊl ˈskʌtəl blɒnd/ /kohl SKUT-uhl blond
noun · US South and Harlem · 1930s
✓ Verified
1.
A Black woman, specifically a dark-skinned one. Built on ironic contrast: blonde attached to the darkest thing in the house, the scuttle the coal is kept in. Depending on the mouth it comes out of, it is affectionate, admiring, or a dig — it belongs to the community's own complexion vocabulary, which ran the full range from praise to injury.
“She was one of them coal scuttle blondes with hair just as close to her head as ninety-nine is to a hundred.”
Origin & Attribution
African American speech, US South and the urban North, in circulation by the 1930s and certainly older in the mouth. The first print is not Harlem: N. E. Eliason, collecting Black speech in North Carolina, published it in American Speech in April 1938 — coal-scuttle blonde, a dark Negro girl. Zora Neale Hurston used it four years later in the body of Story in Harlem Slang, not only in her appended glossary, which is the difference between a lexicographer's note and a writer's sentence. It sits inside a whole working metaphor — deal in coal, burn coal, coal bin — attested across decades. It belongs to the colorism lexicon Hurston catalogued alongside high yaller, peola, and eight-rock: a scale Black people built to describe each other, under a racial order that made the scale matter.
1938
N. E. Eliason prints it in American Speech from North Carolina fieldwork
1942
Hurston uses it in the narrative of Story in Harlem Slang
1995
Reprinted in the Library of America Hurston edition
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The South
US South and Harlem · 1930s
Spoken by
Black speakers, US South and Harlem
$COALSCThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Faded88 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
30/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1938
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
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Citations & Sources
■
"Some Negro Terms," N. E. Eliason, American Speech XIII:2, p. 151 — scholarship · April 1938
published
■
"Story in Harlem Slang," Zora Neale Hurston, The American Mercury — magazine · July 1942
published
■
+ Cite a sourceZora Neale Hurston: Novels & Stories, Library of America, p. 1003 — book · 1995
book
See also