Imani Perry Traces Black History Through the Colour Blue

One colour roosts in another in the title of Imani Perry’s new book, Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People (2025). Now, run the first two words together: blacken blues. Black modulates blue, hatching a new hue; several subtle variations ray out from this specific tint. Think of William H. Gass’s On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry (1975), which opens with a gregarious list of blue objects and entities. There’s also the painter protagonist of Percival Everett’s novel So Much Blue (2017), who swirls together ‘phthalo blue, Prussian mixed with indigo,’ and ‘cerulean blending into cobalt’ to make a large abstract painting.

Yet blue is not simply a colour; it is a vibration, a mood and a history that clings to skin, fabric and sound. Perry explores ‘the mystery… and… alchemy’ of blue in the lives of Black people; the essays move in an associative fashion, inching along by implication. She starts with a question posed to a cousin’s young child: ‘Which is your favourite color blue?’ They are in Perry’s grandmother’s house, and the boy indicates a gap in the ceiling, through which ‘the original blue of the room was visible… bright, like the sky in August.’ We later learn that during the Haitian Revolution, French soldiers sent aloft prayers of victory to the same azure sky. 

In other chapters, Perry follows indigo across continents, from Africa, where the colourant was imbued with spiritual significance, to the plantations of the Americas, where enslaved workers stained their hands in the service of a global market’s insatiable hunger for colour. She lingers on the Middle Passage – that vast ‘blue netherworld’ of dispossession. She unearths blue in the periwinkle beds of the American South, carefully tended by enslaved people, and the fragile beads that some of the enslaved managed to carry with them across the ocean. Examples abound of the ways that the disenfranchised ‘fashioned themselves with care, even as their lives were considered fungible and not their own.’ She also considers the blue uniforms of the Union Army during the American Civil War – the colour of liberation – and the coats of police officers, ‘metonym[s] for the enforcement arm of the state.’    

Perry’s inquiry is not confined to material culture. Scouring slave narratives and other documents, she examines how in the Americas, ‘blue-black’ became a fraught designation – a mark of undeniable African ancestry and, at times, a source of both admiration and derision. ‘For some, it is the grief of being close to but not quite white, or of carrying a strangeness within Blackness that makes other Black people sceptical or resentful. For others, it is the grief of being considered too Black even for Black people, [of] having a body that is marked as a kind of shame, as though blue-black flesh is a disaster,’ she writes. 

Perry’s insights zig and zag, accumulate, overlap and even argue with one another.

But blue – the most contrapuntal of colours – also possesses the power to enchant. In Hoodoo tradition, blue candles are burned for legal victories, bluestones carried for luck in love and cobalt bottles hung from trees to ward off spirits. Perry traces this apotropaic thread, showing how blue retained its charge, even in its most commodified forms. One section considers the blue that sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois saw in his late son’s eyes – a pale, betraying hue that revealed America’s tangled genealogies. Others reflect on the ‘slow-grind dancing’ called the blues, the blue-black speller that taught abolitionist Frederick Douglass how to write, and the weight of blue in the artist Lorna Simpson’s 2019 show ‘Darkening’ at Hauser and Wirth, New York. Perry is especially affecting when writing about the blues as a musical form, describing its ‘tremor’ and its ‘worried’ tone, the way it bends without breaking. It’s in the ‘animated swing’ of Miles Davis’s album Kind of Blue (1959) and the sandpaper timber of Louis Armstrong intoning the titular question of his song ‘(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue?’ (1951).

Conventional historiography, in Perry’s words, often asserts itself as ‘document-based imperial storytelling’. In its place, she works in a mode closer to oral history and Hoodoo, ‘a knowledge system born of disruption and cosmopolitanism.’ Her insights zig and zag, accumulate, overlap and even argue with one another. In this respect, she’s in league with the playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, who has envisioned her plays as a rebuke to ‘the Great Hole of History,’ which leaves swathes of African American history ‘unrecorded, dismembered, washed out.’ Parks aims, she wrote in The America Play and Other Works (1994), to find ‘the ancestral burial ground’ and ‘hear the bones sing.’ 

Perry appears to have set herself a similar challenge: re-membering aspects of Black history largely ignored or forgotten. A reader can quibble with the elisions entailed in an elliptical style. Perry’s discussion of blue as a leitmotif in works of African literature feels glancing and suggestive rather than fully explored. Then again, suggestion is the modus operandi of this brilliant book. The alternative – conclusions that operate as a kind of curfew on ideas – feels immeasurably worse. That’s not the case here: the blue notes and bones sing on even after closing the book. 

Imani Perry’s Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People is out now from Ecco Press, New York 

^{Titus Kaphar, Seeing Through Time (detail), 2018, oil on panel, 1.2 x 1.5 m, from the cover of Imani Perry’s Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People, 2025. Courtesy: the artist and Ecco Press}