How the colour blue tells the story of Black history, from racism to joy

CBC

20 hours ago

"Blackness, no matter how specific the experience, organically reaches across borders. And I followed it," writes Imani Perry in her latest book, Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People.
"I have heard and seen blue ringing through Black life at every corner of the world, from Malian music and Yoruba cosmology to the testimonies of rural Colombians. In my blue notebooks, I steadily collected blue blues."
To Perry, the colour blue is more than a colour, a mood, or genre of music. She sees a metaphor, a sound, a birthright, a sensibility, a respite and a mode of living with the cruelty of the world.
The Harvard professor argues that Black people's love of the colour blue and pursuit of beauty were an assertion of their humanity in a world that dehumanized and objectified them.
From birth, Perry became enveloped by the colour blue. She spent much of her childhood in a blue room in her grandmother's home.
"The walls were blue, the drapes were blue, the bedding was blue. She had prayer cards with blue writing in the corners of her vanity," Perry said.
That room became a portal for her, "the safest space in the world."
Imani Perry continued to talk about her book, Black in Blues with IDEAS host Nahlah Ayed.
Here is an excerpt from their conversation.
You chose the colour blue and as you say, it's not accidental, but it also is a colour that becomes important to Black people. And I know there are a hundred answers to this because that's why you wrote a book about it. But how did that happen?
Certainly, the indigo trade is a piece of it. Indigo is this colour that captivates the whole world. There's this talk, and this is why I use the phrase, 'my people gave sound to the world's favourite colour.' There is something about blue that captivates the imagination. And so you have this history of indigo cultivation.
For me, there's an inception point to be found when people, West Africans, who have been creating blue items, have been cultivating indigo and using blue dye, experience what had to have been a sort of profound horror and disorientation by finding themselves no longer just cultivators of indigo, but traded for indigo — to imagine what it meant to be someone who crafted and then seeing oneself literally traded for a block of dye. There's something at the heart of that relationship to be found in that encounter.
Then, of course, there's indigo plantations, and it's a very difficult crop to cultivate during enslavement. And yet, the people still love the colour blue and still want to wear blue. Even in these devastating circumstances, there's still this appeal and a sense of beauty and delight.
And that, to me, is the fundamentally human part that was not destroyed, no matter the brutality. So there's some historical elements to why blue matters.
In the book you refer to the writer Amiri Baraka — [and his] term for Black Americans, blues people. What does it mean to be a blues people?
Baraka's description of blues people is, he pays particular attention to the way that black Americans stood apart from the American project, sort of sitting on the underside and therefore witnessing its limitations in reaching for a deeper kind of humanity, and expressing that musically, being a part of a world that was much bigger than the particulars of that nation state.
I'm so interested in Baraka's conception of blues people on the one hand, and then Albert Murray's on the other, who is another one of my favourite writers who talked a great deal about how Black Americans were so fundamentally American. And so the blue note is actually a variation on this fundamentally American thing that actually is part of what creates Americana itself.
Here are two brilliant thinkers who have, in some sense, opposing conceptions of what it means to be a blues people, that there is a spectrum of relationships, a vexed relation to the nation.
The American project is also directly connected, for me, to why it was so important to have a sense of the international landscape of Blackness and blueness in the book because there are all these arteries of connection across the globe. Echoes, repetitions, and even intimacies, and mutual inspiration, so it's a sort of both-and. There's a particular relationship of blueness in connection with the American project, but then there's also this global sense of a blues people in the context of modernity, generally speaking.
You point out more than once, very articulately that, "race is a messy and exacting business. It pretends to be precise, but it never has been and can't be." You argue, in fact, that, Black people — you point out the obvious, which is they span a huge range of colour from a creamy colour to all shades of brown to blue-black. So they're really not one colour at all. But the colour that connects them all and speaks to their sensibility and experience and way in the world is blue?
It's beauty and the blues. The way I often think of it is a blues sensibility is one where people are creating beauty at the very site of wounding. And so it's not an evasion of the wounding, it's not an avoidance, but it is actually sitting in that and building a life.
I think about this in particular with the history of slavery in the Americas. People were born, lived, and died enslaved over multiple generations, which means that they also loved and they also created art and they also laughed. And we have this history in intellectual work in my field in Black studies. We want to focus on the struggles for liberation, which we should, but that can lead us to forget how much people's self-creation took place in this position of deep constraint.
And that actually is part of the story of who they were and how we became. So that blues, bluesiness, that blue note in the musical scale, the blues, blues people, blues sensibility, is a way to tell that story. For me, it's essential.
Black Americans looked to nature for another blue to remember their dead — planting periwinkles on graves.
Yeah, it's one of those pieces of history that makes me emotional every time I think about it. So for enslaved people, there were no headstones. And traditional West and Central African burial rituals were not available, although people found ways of creating new rituals, but often that was even under the cover of night.
One of the ways that gravesites were marked in the Upper South, in particular, was through the planting of periwinkle because it is a hardy flower — it'll come up every year. And it's a wonderful combination of the ways history and science and documents all work together because archeological work is actually part of how we know this to be true, that so often under these beds of periwinkle flower, there are graves, there are bodies of enslaved Africans.
I go places and I see it, and it creates its own sense of solemnity, but also power. I went to visit with a group of women on a trip that was called a sojourn for Harriet Jacobs, the site of the woman who wrote the first major slave narrative, Harriet Jacobs, where she was born in Edenton, North Carolina. We went to the graveyard of her grandmother. She was buried in Massachusetts because she escaped slavery. Close to the graveyard, there are patches of periwinkle. So at a certain point, this became a graveyard for Black people.
I have different definitions of home that I'm working with in the book, but one of them is: a home is where you're dead or buried. It's a way of claiming a home there by marking the site.