Harvard professor and Birmingham, Alabama, native Imani Perry won the 2022 National Book Award for nonfiction for “South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation.” Perry’s award-winning opus follows her journey through 10 Southern states to magnify the region’s far-reaching impact on America’s long-term success.
In her latest work, Perry takes the same principle she used in “South to America” — exploring how a microcosm influences the larger community — and applies it to the color blue and African people. She argues that blue appears with such intensity, relevance and frequency in both ancient and modern African culture, the shade serves as a tether to the homeland for the diaspora displaced by the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Collectively, her compilation of essays, “Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People,” delivers a meditative and healing introspection on Black history presented through a fresh and innovative lens.
Despite her intellect and scholarly accomplishments (the author holds degrees from Harvard, Yale and Georgetown), Perry establishes in the second essay, “Writing in Color,” that she struggled to describe what it means “to be Black.” She couldn’t encapsulate something that transcends politics, economics, ideology and academics in a dissertation or scholarly debate.
Instead, she started collecting stories about “the mystery of blue and its alchemy in the lives of Black folks.” By compiling hundreds of instances where blue items or concepts have intersected with African culture, Perry hoped to present a living history with a “heartbeat.” The result is expansive in scope and — although sometimes dizzying from the sheer breadth of information — ultimately provides a compelling answer to her argument: There does indeed seem to be an uncanny amount of blue embedded in the Black experience.
Perry’s collection begins with “Our Blue Interior,” a visual explosion of childhood memories that establishes a thematic connection to the natural world she returns to throughout these essays. Vibrant Alabama wildflowers, “crisp and divine” sky and gurgling baptismal waters form the cornerstone of these reminiscences.
Plants, the sky and water make frequent appearances in these essays. “The Land Where the Blues Began” details how enslaved Africans held the knowledge and performed the labor to extract blue dye from the indigo plant. Exporting indigo dye contributed significantly to building America’s wealth in the 18th century. In “A Sign Which Will Not Be Cut Off,” Perry explains how archaeologists found the periwinkle patches growing wild throughout the South were planted as clandestine grave markers for enslaved people.
Credit: Ecco
Credit: Ecco
Perry does not present these 35 essays in a linear march through time. Instead, she wraps her personal theories and reflections around a revolving cadre of history and popular culture as they pertain to the color blue. Sometimes the blue connection seems like a stretch, yet the visit to the past always remains relevant.
In “Blue Goes Down,” Perry retells a Liberian folktale about a woman who grows weary of her responsibilities and gorges herself on the blue sky until her baby dies. Labeling it a cautionary tale, Perry relays the history of how a colony of freed slaves repatriated to Liberia in the 19th century. Believing they were superior, they colonized and dominated the native Liberians — doling out the same treatment they had recently endured.
Folklore and superstition play a recurring role in Perry’s examination. “Blue Gums and Blue-Black” is one of a few essays in which Perry explores colorism within the Black community by analyzing the references to blue veins, blue-black skin and blue gums peppered throughout folktales, literature and music.
Perry’s love of learning shines bright in the vast number of literary references she cites while making her blue connections, from Herman Melville’s ocean voyage in “Moby Dick” to William Faulkner’s blue gums in “The Sound and the Fury.” There are rousing essays dedicated to Nobel Prize-winner Toni Morrison and American icon Zora Neale Hurston.
In “Blue-Eyed Negroes,” Perry digs into the life and work of prolific author and activist W.E.B. Du Bois. His seminal work, “The Souls of Black Folk,” provides the springboard for her examination of being mixed-race and “passing” as white. Music factors heavily into these meditations as well, with the blues musical genre justifiably warranting its own chapter.
As the collection gives voice to a multitude of connections between the color blue and Black culture, Perry does not always streamline the material for the reader. Some of these essays leave a lot to unpack, such as “Overall Movement,” a series of rapid-fire sketches of the Civil Rights era illustrating how many important events occurred over a short time frame. Perry references more than 40 activists, artists, politicians, leaders and survivors by name in the nine-page essay. She achieves her objective; The tension on the page is palpable. But the reader is faced with a daunting amount of information to absorb in a compact space.
But don’t let Imani Perry’s intelligence intimidate. These essays collectively deliver an accessible historical accounting that brings a fresh perspective to the past. By the time the book is concluded, it’s hard not to look around and see how much culture exists in blue things. Innovative, melancholic and expansive, “Black in Blues” achieves its goal to bring Black history to life.
NONFICTION
“Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People”
by Imani Perry
Ecco
256 pages, $28.99
AUTHOR EVENT
Imani Perry. A Cappella Books presents Perry in Conversation with Rose Scott. 7 p.m., Feb. 6. $32, including book. The Carter Center, 453 John Lewis Freedom Parkway NE, Atlanta. 404- 681-5128, www.acappellabooks.com
About the Author
