When I was living in West Philadelphia during graduate school, I noticed that my neighborhood abounded with ornately decorated Victorian-style porches, many of which featured ceilings painted in a calm shade of blue, somewhere between periwinkle and a light teal. When I asked a neighbor about what I took to be a trend, she regaled me with the history of a color she called “haint blue”—a story about the violence of indigo production in the South Carolina Low Country, and the never-ending Black quest for safety and protection.
I remembered this experience vividly as I read Imani Perry’s new book, Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People, which collects personal anecdotes, local and regional vignettes, and snippets of global Black history since the 15th century. Perry, an Atlantic contributing writer and a National Book Award–winning author, fills her latest work with accounts of ingenuity and Black resilience that are held together, loosely but intentionally, with threads of cerulean, sapphire, and azure. What might, on the surface, look like an arbitrary correlation coheres into a revelatory entry point for contemplating the Black experience.
Perry’s wide-ranging study seems to take inspiration from blues music, a genre that melds Black suffering with Black pride. And as I read the book, the origin story of haint blue kept flitting across my memory because it, too, evokes that duality. The color’s prevalence on porch ceilings can be traced back to the spiritual practices of the Gullah Geechee people—descendants of Africans trafficked to the southeastern United States in the 1700s who believed that hues resembling the ocean or the sky could confuse evil spirits and keep them away. At the time, haint blue could be made only by cultivating and processing indigo plants, which was a labor-intensive, often dangerous endeavor undertaken by enslaved workers in antebellum America. Crops had to be cut, stacked, and heated in vats that attracted vermin and were a breeding ground for viruses. The stench that arose from the putrefying indigo plants could be unbearable. Livestock and humans alike became sick.
Though the color was a product of enslavement, it was a “source of pleasure” too. As Perry writes, those who found comfort in this particular shade knew that “they were not mere chattel, and their lives would not be only joyless burden.” Even within the labor that degraded them, enslaved people found splendor and self-regard, something to admire in the products of their dehumanization.
Wherever she looked in historical archives, Perry encountered vibrant tones of blue woven into the history of Black lives. She found indigo on the knife of the woman who trained Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the first Haitian emperor, in combat. Hunters and riflewomen in the West African kingdom of Dahomey wore blue shorts and sometimes blue blouses as part of their uniforms. Nat King Cole’s cool emanated, at least in part, from the “turquoise-hued Newports” and “brilliant blue Kools” that he regularly smoked.
Though each chapter of Black in Blues locates the color somewhere in the story it tells—the pale blue of jasperware pots; the dark blue in the gums of those most “murderous” of Black people, according to both Black and white folklore; the cobalt blue of bottles hung on crepe-myrtle trees in the Deep South, also meant to ward off evil—the color itself often feels ancillary to the real subject of Perry’s book.
While working on it, Perry realized that she “didn’t want to write an exegesis on blue.” Instead, the form of her project more closely resembles a blues composition; reading it calls to mind one of Ma Rainey’s songs of anguish and exuberance or Miles Davis’s mercurial trumpet solos. Blues music captures the stunning complexity of navigating a freedom forever tied to a history of enslavement. As the music critic Albert Murray once argued, “Blues music is an aesthetic device of confrontation and improvisation, an existential device or vehicle for coping with the ever-changing fortunes of human existence.”
Perry arranges her exploration of Black history in a way that may seem formless but could be described as a meticulously arranged series of “blue notes”—those tones in blues music that are played or sung slightly below what one might expect. As Perry explains, the blue note refuses stability or cohesion: “It is a flexible relation to the scale, and the most African of interventions into Western music … A blued note is so distinctive that someone who knows nothing about music, formally speaking, can hear it is special.” Perry suggests that the everyday improvisations of the enslaved could be described as “blue note living”: the dances that expressed bodily autonomy, the laughter that overtook immense pain, the projections of curiosity and tenderness in the face of brutality. Over the course of the book, Perry builds her case for how Black people have always functioned as blue notes—often seen as out of place or deviant but also known to wrest mellifluousness from cacophony and escape the binds that have been violently placed upon them.
Take George Washington Carver, the eccentric Black scientist who, in the early 20th century, helped popularize peanut butter and discovered many other uses for peanuts, both industrial and cosmetic. His work with the legume might be his claim to fame, but Perry chooses to pay attention to lesser-known aspects of his persona and life: his surprisingly high voice; his keen interest in the natural healing properties of various plants; the gossip he endured about his sexuality. He was also a talented craftsman who wove and embroidered intricate patterns that Perry describes as “living fractals.” He made paint from sweet-potato skins and tomato vines, and even resurrected Egyptian blue, a striking shade that had been invented in Ancient Egypt, by oxidizing Alabama clay. Born into slavery, Carver lived a simple life with global implications; he found magnificence in the ordinary.
Black in Blues begins and ends with intimate histories of some of the people Perry admires most—her family, and those she has encountered through her academic work. One of the last chapters features a man known as Brother Blue—a performer, educator, and family friend who was a semipermanent figure in and around Harvard Square until his death in 2009. Brother Blue frequently walked the streets sharing folk wisdom with the residents of Boston and Cambridge while donning “a soft blue denim shirt and pants, a blue tam on his head, with streamers of all colors hanging off his clothes.” He pinned blue and rainbow-colored butterflies to his clothes and wore no shoes in order to be one with the earth, what he would call sacred ground.
For Perry, Brother Blue embodied “blue note living.” He served in World War II, overcame a stutter as an actor, and defended his doctoral dissertation by performing with a 25-piece jazz orchestra at a Boston prison—before being interrupted by an inmate revolt. Throughout his remarkable life, he insisted that authentic storytelling was crucial to Black life. As Perry reminisces, “He taught me that all stories are ours—meaning Black folks’—even when they came from the very people who mean to keep us down and out. What matters is the telling, meaning the integrity of our voices.”
Perry’s memory of Brother Blue’s teachings resonates with the end of Langston Hughes’s 1926 essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” in which the poet writes that Black people must be willing to “express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame.” Hughes, too, saw the blues as integral to that endeavor, calling for “the bellowing voice of Bessie Smith singing the blues” to express both the beauty and suffering of Black life. Perry’s book does just that: It is attuned to the high, the low, and the blue notes that compose Blackness—and we would all do well to listen.
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