On Hats

CLOTHES ARE NOT my strong suit, but I do know this: public hanging ended in England because of the hat.

According to Richard D. Altick, in Victorian Studies in Scarlet, a German named Müller murdered an elderly man on a North London Railway train in 1864 and was convicted because he accidentally exchanged hats with the victim after a struggle. His own hat was found in the compartment, and he was presently discovered wearing the victim’s—only with the crown cut down so as to eliminate the victim’s name on the inside. Forthwith there sprang up a stylish hat, like a topper only half as tall, called the “Muller-cut-down.” The crowd that gathered during the night before Muller’s hanging was unruly. Several well-dressed congregants were “bonneted” (that is, had their hats pulled down over their faces), garroted, and robbed. Parliament was at last provoked to forbid public executions.

The hat. Our most resonant garment. According to Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro, by Newbell Niles Puckett, American slaves (who had to believe in something other than America) believed: That if you put on another person’s hat you’ll get a headache unless you blow into the hat first; that it is bad luck to put your hat on inside out; that the bad luck promised by a rabbit’s crossing the road ahead of you may be averted by putting your hat on backward; that if you desire eggs to hatch into roosters you should carry them to the nest in a man’s hat; that a group of people was once crossing the fields at noon when they suddenly saw a whole house coming after them, which passed so close that it knocked off their hats, and neither hats nor house was seen again; that if you eat with your hat on you will not get enough.

And yet it seems to me that people these days wear hats lightly. People have somehow gotten hold of the notion that a hat is a fun topping. Nothing in this world makes a person who is not a cowboy look less like a cowboy than wearing a cowboy hat, and yet we have recently passed through a period when every third non-punk person in New York and Los Angeles was in for the full ten gallons.

Hey! You can’t just walk around wearing a cowboy hat. I don’t walk around wearing one, and I have herded cows. Somehow years ago I lost the tan felt cowboy hat I got (with the card inside that says “Like Hell It’s Yours”) at the White Front Store in Fort Worth. I wore it on working visits to a Texas cattle ranch to which I was then related by marriage. That hat and I were rained on twice, and the trained eye could discern traces of horse slobber on its brim and a touch of cow paddy (it can happen) on its crown. That hat fit me so well that— well, I’ll tell you how well it fit me.

One evening a bunch of us were in the back of a pickup truck, hurtling through the night toward a mudhole to pull out a mired heifer. It was too dark for abandoned driving, but the driver, Herman Posey, got caught up in the holiday spirit pervading us visitors, and before we knew it he had us jouncing and plummeting, off the ground more than on it, over creek beds, armadillos, and cactus.

Bob Crittendon, the foreman, was with us in the back. He weighed a good deal more than 200 pounds and didn’t find any charm in being jounced. He was busy yelling, “HERMAN, DAMN YOU, SLOW DOWN!”

And yet he took the time to mention, “Old Roy’s the only one don’t have to hold on to his hat.”

And. Yet. I wouldn’t wear that hat around town.

When I’m around town I don’t want to be always backing up a hat. You might think it would back up that hat for me to tell that story about what Bob Crittendon said. But it wouldn’t be the same as hearing Bob say it. To back up a cowboy hat you have to think of a remark of your own, like the one a man I know named Jimmy Crafton, in Nashville, thought of when a man picked his cowboy hat up off a bar and tried it on.

Crafton gave him a look.

The man thought better of what he had clone, and apologized.

“That’s all right,” said Grafton. “That’s why I wear a $50 hat. If it was a $200 hat,” he explained, “I’da had to kill you.”

I’ll say another thing: Nobody ought to wear a Greek fisherman’s cap who doesn’t meet two qualifications:

(1) He is Greek.

(2) He is a fisherman.

What I am getting at is, a hat ought not to be on a head for a whim. Yeats once said that when a poem is finished it “comes right with a click like a closing box.” That’s what a hat ought to do for a person. Quite often today, though the person may think it does, it doesn’t.

I LIKE TO WEAR a hat around home and driving, because it obviates haircombing and it helps keep the bugs off. (There is no hat that keeps you warm in serious winter. Among the silliest pieces of clothes I know of is one of those big furry Russian hats that sit up on top of your head like a beehive. If they ever invented a hat that kept your ears and neck warm it would be a hood and it might as well be attached to your coat.) What I usually wear is some kind of billed, adjustable cap.

And these days those caps all, just about, have something written on them. I stay away from the ones that say “I’m a Real Dilly,” or “Texas Turkey” (with a picture of an armadillo). For some time I wore one that said “Shakespeare” for Shakespeare brand fishing equipment, because those folks make good fishing equipment and I wasn’t averse to paying indirect tribute to the author of KingLear. And I had been given that hat free. And it fit my head. You’d be surprised how many people walk around in hats that don’t fit their heads, and also how many “One Size Fits All” adjustable hats don’t fit all. But that one fit me. But I left it hanging in a Howard Johnson’s on the Interstate and couldn’t go back for it.

Then for a while I had a cap that said “MF,” for Massey-Ferguson farm and industrial equipment, and that cap brought home to me that a hat is language.

I was wearing that cap out on the road and one of my tires went flat and wouldn’t hold air longer than twenty miles and nobody could seem to patch it, and I didn’t have a spare. I had to go to a place that sold tires, and the man was just closing up, but he was kind enough to turn his lights back on and chain his dog back up and sell me a tire and put it on.

And he took my cap at face value. Assumed I was a Massey-Ferguson representative. Plunged into a series of questions about what kind of tractor would be best for working the little piece of land he had at home, and could I maybe get him some kind of deal on one.

And I had to tell him I didn’t represent Massey-Ferguson. And he took it the wrong way. Here he was staying open late to help me out, and either I was fraudulent or else I didn’t want to admit that I could get him a deal. He kept shooting looks over at my cap (so did his dog) while he worked, and I thought he was going to tell me to take it off. And I could see how he felt. But I didn’t want to think that I was going to let somebody tell me to take my hat off, you know. I got out of there all right except I think he charged me an extra ten dollars for my cap. Then a couple of weeks later I had the same cap on and a friend from New York looked at it and said, “Oh, a football coach’s cap.”

“A what?” I said.

“A football coach’s cap,” she said. “That’s what you call them. They’re very big now in the gay community.”

Now, a gay person has every bit as much right to wear a Massey-Ferguson cap as I have; more right if he’s a Massey-Ferguson representative. Or owns a tractor that the cap came with. But I didn’t like it that my cap all of a sudden had a term for it, among the fashion-conscious.

But that’s the way a hat is, it’s like a word: you have to keep up with all its shifting connotations if you’re going to employ it. And you have to avoid assuming too quickly that you do know them. There is a telling hat scene in the movie Deliverance. The city guys stop at a gas station up in the hills. Bobby, the chubby character played by Ned Beatty, espies a toothless-looking, shuffling mountain man with an old felt hat pulled down over his ears. “Hey, we got a live one here,” Bobby says. The man begins to fill their tank. “I love the way you wear that hat,” Bobby tells him. The man takes off the hat, turns it around in his hands, looks at it, jams it back on his head.

“Mister,” he says, “you don’t know nuthin’.”

If you saw the movie, you remember what happens to Bobby.