海角大神

It is clear from reading Imani Perry鈥檚 鈥淏lack in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People鈥� why she is adept at chronicling the history of the Black diaspora: She weaves stories like a village griot or a grandparent sitting on the porch recalling the past. Her latest offering is a series of essays that takes readers from coastal western sub-Saharan Africa to the American South to demonstrate why the colors black and blue can鈥檛 be separated when describing the experience of Black people.

Perry effortlessly mixes memory with social commentary to unravel blue鈥檚 significance. The color can describe blue-black skin complexion, indigo fields in Africa where it was cultivated, and the blue-dyed clothing that signaled wealth and style.

Enslaved people brought their knowledge of growing indigo to America, where their labor produced a valuable export product for South Carolina. 鈥淎lthough the market for blue was part of the suffering of the enslaved, the color also remained a source of pleasure for them, and that too is an important detail in this story,鈥� Perry writes in the essay 鈥淎ntigua, South Carolina and Montserrat.鈥�

In the West African spiritual tradition of Vodou, one of its deities, Erzulie Dantor, wears blue clothes. In South Carolina, unused blue paint was used by enslaved people on their doors and porches. Perry notes that historians and archaeologists have found that enslaved people in the upper South were not given headstones, but instead their graves were adorned with blue periwinkle flowers.

The book isn鈥檛 all praise and positive social commentary. The atrocities of slavery and apartheid are present. The brutality of hatred based on the same black-and-blue skin tone that Perry celebrates lies within these pages, but she makes a powerful case for the resilience, triumph, and beauty that those colors represent in Black bodies.

The color blue shows up too many times in history to be a coincidence. True Blue was the name of a slave ship out of Liverpool, England, that took enslaved people from Africa to the Caribbean islands and the United States. Blue is prominent in the flag of Haiti, the first Black independent republic. Blues music is a sound created by Black people to describe the melancholy of lives lived in the margins. Blue was even described, as part of bigoted beliefs, as the color of the gums of deep-brown-complexioned Black people.

Not only is Perry well read in history, but she is also an appreciator of literature, music, and art. Perry gains insight from writers like Zora Neal Hurston, James Baldwin, and Amiri Baraka. She riffs on everything from Toni Morrison鈥檚 celebrated novels 鈥淭he Bluest Eye鈥� and 鈥淏eloved鈥� to Thelonious Monk鈥檚 song 鈥淚n Walked Bud鈥� and Nina Simone鈥檚 1959 debut album 鈥淟ittle Girl Blue.鈥� Perry touches on the Duke Ellington Orchestra鈥檚 1956 Newport Jazz Festival performance in front of a multiracial crowd in Newport, Rhode Island. The saxophonist Paul Gonsalves鈥� extended solo on 鈥淒iminuendo and Crescendo in Blue鈥� brought people to their feet, swaying and dancing, and police, fearing a riot, came onstage. Ellington calmed the situation by slowing the tempo.

The cover of her book features a piece of art called 鈥淪eeing Through Time,鈥� by Titus Kaphar, which shows images of Black women in pose and in supplication, mixed with backgrounds of glorious blues.

The inspiration for this book comes full circle for Perry. She informs readers that the color blue has personal meaning to her, as it relates to her Blackness and her family. Bright sky blue was the color on the walls of a room in her grandmother鈥檚 Alabama home, where she and her family spent countless hours and where her grandmother made a home during the Jim Crow era. The color blue is significant in Perry鈥檚 final essay, 鈥淕od鈥檚 Will Undone, the Creek Did Rise.鈥� She fortifies blue鈥檚 significance through grief. Her cousin Durrel died while she was completing the book, and her family wore blue, his favorite color, to celebrate his life at the memorial service.

From Africans dressed in blue as if it were ceremonial garb to a tiny house in Alabama and a cloth of remembrance for a loved one, black and blue are brilliant and so is 鈥淏lack in Blues.鈥� Perry delivers on her promise to tell stories about history and about how blue is more than just a color. Its association with Black people is worth thinking about.