coon

1. (Southern US, colloquial) To hunt raccoons.Southern-UScolloquial

2. (climbing) To traverse by crawling, as a ledge.

3. (Southern US, colloquial) To crawl while straddling, especially in crossing a creek.Examples: "There is a little ledge low on the face of the cliff, and by this with careful “cooning” one may reach a recession in the rock which makes a lovely arm chair."; "2 o'clock we float up to Duvall's landing—high bluff, store house, and a few dwelling houses. Here the fleet stops. Now for a canter through the woods, cooning logs, and waiding sloughs. Slosh across a small prairie."; "“Advertising” was one problem for frontier women. Another was having to “coon” across a fallen tree that had been felled and limbed to bridge a canyon or gully."Southern-UScolloquial

4. (Georgia, colloquial) To fish by noodling, by feeling for large fish in underwater holes.Georgiacolloquial

5. (African-American Vernacular, of an African-American) To play the dated stereotype of a black fool for an audience, particularly including Caucasians.Examples: "Rather than cooning or tomming it up to please whites...the black comic characters joked or laughed or acted the fool with one another. Or sometimes they used humor combatively to outwit the white characters."; "If any other forties figure paralleled this humorous, graceful man in appeal it was the dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, who, like the Trotter, funneled his extraordinary physical gifts into mass entertainment for whites yet remarkably, considering the time, avoided cooning."; "From the classic toasts to the dirty dozens to the early blues⁵⁰ and now to gangsta rap lyrics—why not consider it all just a bunch of niggers cooning for the white man’s delight and dollars?"

6. (Southern US, colloquial, dated) To steal.Examples: "Cooning water-melons [sic.] was a common custom, and young people would go out at night on such parties. To prevent any raids on our melon patch Grandfather set a trap alarm—which brought disaster."; "He kept on buying and selling horses, he said, sometimes paying for them in bogus, and sometimes cooning them. It was true he helped Malcolm Burnham break into Fred Able’s store"; "In the summertime, at night, in addition to all the other things we did, some of us boys would slip out down the road, or across the pastures and go “cooning” watermelons."Southern-UScolloquialdated