Reflections on Blue: Imani Perry's Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People

 Black in Blues: How Color Tells the Story of My People by Imani Perry

Black in Blues book cover

Author Imani Perry at The Anthology of Rap CC BY NC-2.0 by 92YTribeca

Thelonious Monk, at the piano. He is briefly featured in one chapter

“Wonder is a near universal response to deep rivers and vast oceans. But for some, the water also evokes terror. In it, I see God and slave ships both.”

A big thank you to Ecco Publishers, Harper Collins, and NetGalley for providing me with an advanced copy of Imani Perry’s new book Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People. Perry’s book explores the color and significance of blue from multiple perspectives, examining its tranquility, as well as its violence, its beauty as well as its decadence. Although to say that this book simply examines different shades of blue is a severe underrepresentation, the book considers how blue is interwoven into the lives of Africans and African Americans throughout different cultures and historical eras. To do this, Perry examines different shades of blue in many different contexts and themes. Several books I’ve recently read have been touching on some of these same recurring themes, and Perry’s book was one of the more inventive that aligned with these. For one, Toni Morrison features prominently in these books, and I really loved how Perry framed part of her inquiry into the color blue by discussing Baby Suggs from Beloved. She refers to Baby Suggs’s desire to take some time and think about colors, noting how Blue “never hurt no body,” yet Perry notes “but it surely did. The word even denotes ‘hurt.’ ‘Blue’ has been a word for melancholy in English for centuries.” Perry’s book looks at all of the different ways that blue has played a role in African American life, examining different areas including art, clothing, jewelry, music, and literature. One of the other themes was books written by interdisciplinary artists—those whose work encompasses different areas, yet finds commonalities and intersections among different fields. Perry’s work was so interesting because the focus on blue would seem so limited, but she expands the topic by exploring history, literature, art, and culture. And while the focus is primarily on African American history, Perry traces preferences to blue and its various shades all over the diaspora, traveling to Liberia, the Kongo, Haiti, and other regions where people were enslaved.

Perry spends time discussing the different shades of blue, and I didn’t realize how indigo was made, nor how precious it was in earlier times. Finding the stories about how these shades were developed and used for clothing was fascinating, yet also sad to see how labor and processes were often exploited to generate wealth that was never shared. She also discusses the idea of Blue Black, and revisiting Curtis Mayfield’s famous proclamation of “We the People Who Are Darker Than Blue,” and its significance in culture and history. I think that my favorite parts of the book were those that dealt with literature and music. One chapter focuses on Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, one of my all-time favorite books, and how the use of Blue features in Hurston’s work. She also discusses the dancer Katherine Dunham, who studied traditional dancing in Haiti around the same time Hurston was there for ethnography for Tell My Horse. It was interesting to see the parallels and differences between these two artists, who were navigating different social and class circles due to the nature of their work and possibly their skin tones as well. Hurston appears in other chapters that focused on Hoodoo and root work, which are often related to the Blues. I was amazed at Perry’s ability to draw all of these topics and artists together under the rubric of blue. It was fascinating to see her analysis and understanding of how blue impacted lives and cultures in different ways. Another section focused on Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, looking at their works and how blue features in them. For the chapter about Richard Wright, it focused on Mississippi Blues, and Perry brought up a great quote that I wasn’t really familiar with “The most astonishing aspect of the blues is that, though replete with a sense of defeat and down-heartedness, they are not intrinsically pessimistic: their burden of woe and melancholy is dialectically redeemed through the sheer force of sensuality….” It was interesting because I didn’t remember Wright as being kind of musical in his writing, but I can see this kind of resiliency in Black Boy. The following chapter focuses on Ellison’s Invisible Man, another book that I used to teach and was always a favorite. There are so many interesting characters, many of whom are musical, and Perry focuses on the character with the blueprints, who asks the narrator if he’s “got the dog”. I always thought this was such an interesting part, where the chiasmus elicits a kind of reflective questioning—about whether the dog has us, or if we have the dog. Perry then goes on to link this section focusing on the idea of blueprints to Thelonious Monk and his composition of the song “In Walked Bud.” It was so cool how Perry brought these ideas together—blueprints as a map of intention, and as Ellison notes, the need to always improvise and adapt to the situation, which is what Monk experienced in his composition, based on a Berlin tune, that he adapted to a situation with police brutality. You have to read these connections. Other chapters focused on both DuBois and Booker T Washington’s Tuskegee Institute. One of my favorite chapters was focused on George Washington Carver, who studied and did research at Tuskegee. I didn’t realize that he was a painter who used peanuts to create colors, especially blues. Again, just fascinating scholarship and analysis to bring all of these different aspects of African American history, culture, and art into the various shades of blue. I’m looking forward to re-reading different sections, and I think that this would be a great book to either supplement some of the main texts discussed in it (Morrison, Ellison, Wright), or to use as a springboard for further discussion on topics related to race, identity, culture, and art. This is a remarkable book, filled with accessible complexities and considerations, yet solely focused on blue. Truly an amazing book, and I can’t wait to read more of Imani Perry’s work.