Entry · catalog no. 1209
righteous moss
/ /ˈraɪtʃəs ˈmɔs/ /RY-chuss MAWSS
noun · Harlem and the Black urban North, carried up from the Black South in the Great Migration · 1920s
✓ Verified
1.
Hair that falls straight or in loose waves rather than tight coils. In Black American slang of the 1920s and 1930s, righteous carried the sense of first-rate, and moss was ordinary slang for hair, so the compound named the grade of hair that a color-caste ranking placed at the top. What that ranking measured against was white hair, and the phrase does not hide it. Hurston used it both for hair a woman was born with and, later, for hair a man produced with grease and an overnight stocking cap.
“She come down them steps with all that righteous moss hanging to her waist, and every man on the block forgot his own name.”
2.
By extension, hair that has been greased, pressed, or worked overnight until it lies down and waves like the prized grade. Hurston's 1942 story turns on this second sense: her character was born with rough-dried hair and manufactured the rest under a stocking cap. Used this way the phrase is not quite a compliment, because it names the labor and the imitation in the same breath.
“He laid the grease on and tied the stocking cap down tight, and by morning he had himself some righteous moss.”
Origin & Attribution
The phrase is Black American, first documented in print by Zora Neale Hurston, an anthropologist trained under Franz Boas who was writing down the speech of Black Southern migrants in Harlem. Her story Muttsy carries the earliest known appearance, in Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life in August 1926, and the Oxford English Dictionary gives that same 1926 Hurston text as its earliest evidence for the phrase; she used it again in Story in Harlem Slang in the American Mercury of July 1942. Moss for hair was circulating in general American slang by 1908, while righteous as a term of praise is documented in Black print from the 1930s. The mainstream memory of righteous as a surfer or stoner intensifier of the 1970s runs downstream of Black usage, not alongside it. The phrase was never a neutral compliment: the grade of hair it named was defined by nearness to white hair, and that is the color-caste arithmetic it carries.
1926
Earliest known print appearance, in Hurston's story Muttsy in Opportunity
1942
Used again in Story in Harlem Slang, for hair pressed overnight to imitate the prized grade
1996
Recorded as live campus slang, glossed as nonkinky hair, in Connie Eble's Slang and Sociability
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The Northeast
Harlem and the Black urban North, carried up from the Black South in the Great Migration · 1920s
Spoken by
Black Americans, especially in Harlem and other Northern cities, 1920s through the 1940s; still recorded in Black campus speech in the 1990s
$RIGHTEThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Historical100 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
20/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1926
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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The Bronx, NY
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Philadelphia, PA
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Citations & Sources
■
Zora Neale Hurston, Muttsy, in Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life, vol. IV, August 1926, p. 248
magazine · printed
■
Zora Neale Hurston, Story in Harlem Slang, The American Mercury, July 1942; reprinted in Zora Neale Hurston: Novels and Stories, ed. Cheryl A. Wall, Library of America, New York, 1995, pp. 1001–1010
magazine · printed
■
Connie Eble, Slang and Sociability: In-Group Language Among College Students, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1996, p. 83
book · printed
■
+ Cite a sourceOxford English Dictionary, entry righteous, adj., sense righteous moss, earliest evidence 1926 (Hurston)
reference · online
See also