“I wanted to write toward the mystery of blue and its alchemy in the lives of Black folk,” writes Imani Perry in Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People. This impressive read traces a complex history between Black people and the titular color that begins with textile dyers and traders in 17th-century West Africa, when indigo-dyed goods became an integral part of the transatlantic slave trade. When Black folks reached distant shores in chains, the importance of blue persisted. Enslaved people brought with them traditions like cloth dyeing, grave marking and charms, all of which featured the favored color. Other religious practices, like hoodoo, also incorporated blue, and freedom fighters from the Haitian Revolution to the American Civil War went into battle with the color on their bodies and flags.
Read our interview with Imani Perry, author of ‘Black in Blues.’
Perry won the 2022 National Book Award for South to America, in which she meditates on the history of racism in the South and how it reveals the very character of the nation. In the short, propulsive chapters of Black in Blues, Perry brings us from the days of colonialism right up to the present, highlighting the work of contemporary artists like vanessa german, Lorna Simpson and Firelei Báez, who all use blue dye and blue objects in their work. And, of course, there is a discussion of the blues, as both a musical genre and an ineffable sound that resurfaces again and again in Black music. Perry weaves an exquisite tapestry of Black life across five centuries, moving seamlessly among historical records and the diaries of white explorers to enslaved peoples’ testimonies, close readings of African American fiction and vignettes from Perry’s own family’s relationship with the color.
The sheer breadth and depth of this mosaic telling speaks to the power of Perry’s craft as both scholar and storyteller, illustrating the beauty of the very culture about which she writes. “Loose threads and frayed patches are as important as seamless compositions and straight-stitched stories,” writes Perry. Indeed, it is her deft gathering of the loose threads of history and social commentary, of cultural treatise and narrative, that makes Black in Blues truly sing.
