It is safe to say that neither I nor Imani Perry, author of more than half a dozen books, including the National Book Award-winning South to America, knew what kind of morning we would awaken to when we scheduled our interview for November 6, 2024. Nevertheless, we both showed up, and Perry began our conversation with a declaration that speaks to the current moment as well as to what makes her new book such a powerful, rigorous read: “Generations of people—of our people—were born, lived and died in slavery. And they still loved, and they laughed and found moments of joy. There’s a lesson in that . . . for all of humanity. It’s not complacency. It’s not an acceptance of the condition. It’s the thing that allows you to endure so you can transform.”
It is a gentle yet defiant reminder of all the ways in which Black folks throughout the African diaspora found the means to survive in the depths of their bondage. In Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People, Perry’s focus on a single color allows her to take on this subject in fascinating new ways.
Like most epic journeys, Black in Blues begins with a question: Why blue? Perry asks this while gazing at her grandmother’s azure ceiling in their family home in Alabama. What follows is an exploration of the many iterations of blue that exist in Black history and culture, including the deep blue sea of the tortuous Middle Passage, the navy night sky in which the North Star shone as a beacon of hope for enslaved people escaping bondage, and the musical genre that bears the color’s name. Early chapters move from Liberia to Europe and back to the mother continent, tracing Europeans’ and West Africans’ insatiable thirst for blue dyes, which ultimately played a role in the transatlantic slave trade when white enslavers began trading dye for human beings.
“Black folks gave a sound to the world’s favorite color, but also to its deepest sorrow.”
In any other set of hands, this circuitous route might feel like whiplash, but the Harvard University professor and MacArthur fellow crafts a series of short chapters that read like vignettes, flowing seamlessly from African fables about the origins of the color to historical accounts of textile dyeing in Nigeria, and then to oral accounts of how enslaved people brought those techniques to plantations in the United States and used the color in their personal wardrobes and religious practices. When I ask her about the structure of Black in Blues, which reads like both a well-researched history lesson and an aerial portrait of Afro-Diasporic culture in which the narrator’s lens scans a wide terrain, Perry’s answer is simple yet, unsurprisingly, profound: “The ways we like to categorize what we do—writer, scientist, this, that—[are] not wholly consistent with our traditions and how we actually live in the world,” she explains, highlighting several examples of Black artists—including Katherine Dunham, George Washington Carver, Ntozake Shange and Lorraine Hansberry—who are united in ways that transcend category. “Once I started thinking that way, it became clear . . . all of them [were] intellectuals. That’s what the tradition is: It’s an art, a craft exercise. Writing is at least a craft and at best an art. That’s how we do.”
Subsequent chapters of Black in Blues bear out that declaration well. After Perry traces the importance of blue right up to Union soldiers’ uniforms during the Civil War, she turns to the fiction of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, closely reading works by Charles W. Chesnutt and George Washington Cable (who was white but wrote extensively about mixed-race Creoles in Louisiana), and later, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison. For each writer, argues Perry, blue serves as a motif, from the Blue Vein Society in Chesnutt’s “The Wife of His Youth,” where a biracial Black man must choose between his fair-skinned fiancée and his long-lost, darker skinned wife, to the ink made on the plantation where Sethe in Morrison’s Beloved is enslaved. At the onset of her literary analyses, Perry writes, “Fiction reveals fears.” During our interview, she explains, “The [literary] tradition is filled with these reckonings with the reality that we might be broken.” In essence, Black literature reveals some of racism’s deepest wounds, like the colorism Chesnutt tackles in his story. However, Perry notes, “creativity is a tool of survival. It is a response to the conditions of the world. It’s this constant response to not be[ing] completely defeated. But you have to confront the fears in the midst of it.”
Perhaps one of the most powerful sections delves into the many ways Black people—and Black Americans in particular—have refused to be broken, neither by the conditions of slavery nor by what came after it. Perry’s discussion of hoodoo, a set of spiritual practices that evolved among enslaved Black people in the American South, and that has its counterparts in Santeria in Cuba, vodou in Haiti and voodoo in Louisiana, makes the compelling argument that African religious practices in the New World took the very mechanisms of bondage and created a faith that was defiantly hopeful. Indigo plantations required the back-breaking work of enslaved people from dawn to dusk, but practitioners of hoodoo prized the color in charms, and incorporated blue dyes and flowers in recipes for tinctures and protection spells. Sometimes, front doors or entire houses were painted in the color to ward off evil and welcome good luck, and trees were festooned with blue bottles for similar reasons, as well as to create beauty in the small ways that were afforded to the enslaved and the newly free. “Blue is everywhere in hoodoo. It is such a powerful color,” Perry tells me. “More than that, it is an acquired body of knowledge. It’s a system to try to manage a world that is unfair. But it’s also putting together pieces of knowledge and rituals, any kind of knowledge you can acquire, and then sharing it and having a community that practices it. There’s something organic and beautiful about that.”
To some, hoodoo is seen as a regional (and at times, provincial) practice, but it is also a way of life that is emblematic of Black survival, Black resilience and Black art-making. In the case of George Washington Carver, whose scientific interests included creating rich dyes from Alabaman flora, Perry points out that Carver’s wide range of interests and multifaceted genius is in and of itself akin to the tenets of hoodoo. “There are figures [like him] who we think of as one thing, but that are actually dozens of things, in ways that are consistent with hoodoo. It’s like a hoodoo aesthetic of living.”
Of course, no treatise about Blackness and blue would be complete without a discussion of the blues, a musical genre that is a synthesis of African folk music and classical spirituals, and the parent of many genres that came after it, including country, rock ’n’ roll and hip-hop. In Black in Blues, Perry argues that while the blues may have been named for a color whose association with sadness is a European construct, its ineffable sound has its roots in Black enslavement. “When people took to the road, leaving behind plantations, seeking fortune, they brought their guitars, harmonicas and memories of song with them,” she writes. “Singing and playing was testimony in the convict camp, as well as in the church, of both forsakenness and God’s grace.” Perry reiterates this dichotomy during our interview, saying that with the blues, “Black folks gave a sound to the world’s favorite color, but also to its deepest sorrow. Part of what has drawn the entire world to our blues is because it tells the truth of both the very heights of what it means to be a human, and also its depths.”
This constant grappling with hope and despair is present in evocative Black art in many forms, Perry writes, including the work of artists such as photographer Lorna Simpson, interdisciplinary artists Ashon Crawley and vanessa german, and Firelei Báez, a New York City-based Dominican artist whose materials have included the blue tarp seen in the aftermaths of natural disasters in New Orleans and Báez’s native Caribbean. During our interview, Perry adds that Black dance is another site where beauty and disaster exist at a crossroads. “If you think about Black dance always being on the verge of falling, or always in the space of instability, and [the] mastery [of] that being part of what the aesthetic is, that’s not incidental. Whether it’s literary or movement art, we keep doing that over and over again: the confrontation with the fear. But even that becomes a way that our particular story is instructive and illuminating to what it means to be a human being.”
“Creativity is a tool of survival. It is a response to the conditions of the world. It’s this constant response to not be[ing] completely defeated.”
Black in Blues is indeed a grappling with the many elements that constitute the history of Black suffering, Black art and, ultimately, Black joy and resistance. From the West African shores of the 16th century to the cutting edge of contemporary art, Perry shows how Black people have forged a path in spite of the odds, and have often used the odds to enrich our way of living, to deepen our understanding of the world around us and to strengthen our ties to one another. As we ended our call and returned to the uncertainty of the current political moment, Perry reminded me of the importance of the cultural work she’s been doing for more than two decades, and of the art all Black people continue to make, come what may.
“We need lives where we are in community with people who are doing different kinds of culture-bearing work . . . because it bears a family resemblance,” she says. “I want to draw attention to [blueness], not as a legitimation or justification of our tradition, but for us to be clear about who we are, and what our tradition is, to state it plainly. I write for everybody, but I think it is important, especially now, to assert who and whose we are.”
Author photo of Imani Perry by Kevin Peragine.
Beginning in 2014, she spent long hours in the Maryland State Archives combing through Crownsville’s files, woefully incomplete thanks to shoddy record keeping and the destruction of decades of documents by the state. The paucity of documents would have been far worse had it not been for the efforts of Paul Lurz, a longtime Crownsville staff member who served as an unofficial preservationist. Hylton acknowledges feeling “really angry” that “no one had thought to dignify or track this information in the first place.”
