cotton curtain
n.— «From behind the “cotton curtain” of the Mississippi Delta last week came Dr. Theodore R. (for Roosevelt) Mason Howard.…Rated as Mississippi’s “most hated” Negro leader because of his refusal to buckle under pressure applied by anti-desegregationists, Dr. Howard is described “as a man who lets the chips fall where they may.”» —“Dr. Howard Gives 3-Point Program To Alpha Confab” by George Daniels Chicago Defender (Illinois) Jan. 14, 1956. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
Rosalind from Montgomery, Alabama, says her mother used to scold her for acting like a starnadle fool. The more common version of this term is starnated fool, a term that appears particular to Black English, and appears in the work of such writers...
Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts: Stories and Recipes from Five Generations of Black Country Cooks (Bookshop|Amazon) is about the foodways and folkways passed down through five generations of a Black Appalachian family. The book, by novelist and...