Color Lines

Imani Perry’s new book, Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People, begins with a memory of blue: a missing dropped-ceiling tile in her grandmother’s bedroom reveals a glimpse of the room’s original sky-blue paint. “My blue begins here,” she writes, “inside her-our-my home.”

Perry’s grandmother, “a nurturer and a stalwart,” made that house a refuge of love and laughter in Jim Crow Alabama and thereafter. Perry writes that her grandmother taught her to love blue and the blues and “that we who have the blues also have beauty.”

The opening essay sets up the book’s premise: that woven throughout the story of Black life, history, and culture, you’ll find blue — the color itself, the “blues” as an expression for melancholy, and its namesake sound, the Black-born music of heartache and hope. For a fleeting moment, I wondered whether blue was too fragile a foundation to underpin such wide-ranging stories and ideas. But by the fifth essay, titled “True Blue,” I’d forgotten my own question and was wholly absorbed by Perry’s storytelling.

The essay traces the Middle Passage, “a terrible journey through a blue netherworld,” and the voyages of a slave ship called the True Blue. The idiom “true blue,” evoking trustworthiness, was first recorded in the 17th century and may hail from Coventry, England, and its woad-dyeing technique. Woad dye was considered “true blue” — it produced the most colorfast blues in Europe. But it could not compete with indigo, a truer-blue dye made from several species of the Indigofera genus native to the tropics. In several essays, Perry returns to the story of indigo: how European empire-builders and slave traders were captivated by West African indigo and carried it to South Carolina, where enslaved laborers cultivated the plants, steeped them in stinking vats, and skimmed off the noxious liquid to cure blue blocks of dye: “Brown arms were dyed blue, sometimes permanently, like a tattoo of bondage.” Perry reconnects these deep-blue threads to the True Blue, which delivered its human cargo to colonial plantations across the Atlantic, and thus “a ship with a name that came from the old dye was a vehicle for the new one and other lucrative crops of the New World.”

As I sank deeper into these essays, I followed Perry’s circuitous threads with anticipation, excited to see where blue would turn up next. I particularly enjoyed an essay about the great agricultural innovator George Washington Carver, who made it his mission to heal Alabama’s cotton-ravaged soil and help freed people grow more and better food for themselves. The delightful blue Easter egg of this story is that Carver loved painting and made his own pigments using sweet potato skins, tomato vines, and peanuts. He discovered an oxidation process to re-create Egyptian blue, the earliest known synthetic pigment, highly prized in the ancient world.

Two more stories of blue lodged in my memory, both from a section about the Haitian slave revolt and the racial caste system that emerged in America when many free mixed-race people from Haiti emigrated to Louisiana: a captivating aside about West Africa’s blue-clad Dahomey women warriors, one of whom trained the former slave and Haitian revolutionary leader Jean-Jacques Dessalines; and a mention of the Blue Book, a guide to New Orleans’ red-light district that indexed sex workers on a scale from “White” to “Quadroon” to “Negro.” Again and again, Perry links shades of blue to a system that “at once made Black people a group and separated them through a hierarchy of color.”

Throughout, I loved how Perry conjures vivid blue images so common in the Southern landscape that I never wondered about their provenance: periwinkle planted over the unmarked graves of the enslaved, Southern porch ceilings painted “haint blue,” cobalt blue bottles decorating crepe myrtles. Those “bottle trees,” Perry writes, originated in “the Kongo,” where shiny objects were “used to deflect the bad and attract the good.” These ordinary but mysterious artifacts are, to Perry, visual evidence of enslaved people’s interior lives, which were so rarely documented in written accounts.

Perry, a prolific scholar whose South to America won the National Book Award in 2022, has made a life’s work of collecting such ephemera. She writes of a “common calling” among artists, historians, and storytellers “to transform and transpose the world our ancestors faced, to reclaim the beauty of the sky, and the water, and the indigo … without ever forgetting the disaster.” In the acknowledgments, she invites readers to continue as time travelers, following their own curiosity along the threads she has uncovered. I did exactly that, Googling articles about Carver and Indigofera, all while listening to Roberta Flack, Nina Simone, and Mississippi John Hurt, artists who embody Perry’s line about beauty and the blues, bending notes into shapes that transform pain into extraordinary, gorgeous artistry — the ultimate survival strategy.

“This blue-black living and doing is a bittersweet virtue, mastery in heartbreak, and raw laughter from the underside,” she writes. “We people who created a sound for the world’s favorite color — the blues — offer a testimony.”