Black in Blues

Starred review from November 1, 2024
National Book Award-winner Perry (South to America, 2022) offers an impressionistic cultural history of the African diaspora through its connections to the color blue, from the Congo to Haiti, Jamaica, and the American South, in music, dance, folklore, art, and literature. As enslaved Black people in the U.S. fought to affirm their humanity, the color blue was key: "Blue porches, planted blue flowers, written blue scriptures, blue attire, trees festooned with blue bottles: these became the cultivated habits and rituals of people denied civil society and legal recognition." In Black bodies, blue evoked "two distinct forms of power," for "the least degraded among Black people were the ones who had the bluest veins beneath the palest skin," while a "blue-gummed woman . . . held the power of conjure and deep ways of knowing." Enslaved Blacks were freed by the Union "boys in blue," yet those uniforms would morph into the blue of "'Blue Lives Matter," the police clapback to "Black Lives Matter." Perry suggests an implied choice "between Black life and police survival . . . And that is a blues song indeed." Packed with cultural references to Nina Simone, Zora Neale Hurston, Miles Davis, and Picasso's African-inspired Blue Period, this is a fascinating and creative work of popular anthropology.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: With each trailblazing book, Perry extends her readership, and this original and affecting improvisation has tremendous appeal.

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Starred review from November 15, 2024
The power of a color. National Book Award winner Perry offers surprising revelations about the connection between the color blue and Black identity as she explores myth and literature, art and music, folklore and film. "Blues are our sensibility," she writes. She begins her wide-ranging history with the production of indigo in the 16th century. Coveted throughout Africa, Asia, and Europe, the dye was so valuable that a block of indigo could be traded for an enslaved person. Imported from West Africa to America, the planting and processing of indigo became tasks for the enslaved. Although the work was arduous, the color, Perry notes, "remained a source of pleasure," and enslaved people used the dye for their own walls, doors, porches, and clothing. The color also became associated with mourning, with blue periwinkles marking the graves of the enslaved and cobalt blue bottles hung from myrtle trees to mark people's passing. The melancholy sound of "a blued note" infused Black music with a quality "so distinctive that someone who knows nothing about music, formally speaking, can hear it is special." Miles Davis' albumsBlue Period andKind of Blue, Nina Simone'sLittle Girl Blue, Roberta Flack'sBlue Lights in the Basement, Duke Ellington's composition "Crescendo in Blue," and Mongo Santamar�a's song "Afro Blue" are among many of Perry's musical references. Literary references abound as well: Amiri Baraka'sBlues People, Toni Morrison'sThe Bluest Eye, and Ntozake Shange's novelSassafras, Cypress and Indigo. The "precocious girl-child Indigo," Perry writes, "was me." If blue has signaled Black agency--Haitian rebels wore blue uniforms--it also conveys oppression: "The blue uniform is a metonym for the enforcement arm of the state," Perry notes, and has become shorthand for police power. An innovative cultural history.

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Starred review from November 11, 2024
National Book Award winner Perry (South to America) offers a lyrical meditation on “the mystery of blue and its alchemy in the lives of Black folk.” Her account reaches back “before Black was a race” to the indigo trade. Early modern Europeans were fascinated by (and covetous of) the blue dye that “doesn’t just compel the eye” but “attacks multiple senses” with its aromatic scent and strong texture, Perry writes, while for many Africans “indigo had a spiritual significance” and was employed to induce “balance and harmony.” With the coming of the slave trade, “a block of indigo dye could be traded for a ‘hand,’ ” or human being—a convergence of sacred and profane that Perry uses as a launch point for her ruminations on Blackness and modernity. She points out that even as Black human beings began to be traded for the dye and forced into its cultivation in the Americas, Europeans’ medieval description for Africans as “Blew,” or blue, fell out of use, as if to erase the connection between Black people and value. Meanwhile, enslaved Africans in the Americas continued to rely on blue’s spiritual strength—Perry cites examples such as the folk practice of hanging “cobalt blue” bottles from myrtle trees and the ritual use of bluestone, or copper sulphate, in hoodoo rituals. In direct and intimate prose, Perry synthesizes an impressive range of research into a sinewy, pulsing narrative that positions the past as an active, living force in the present. Readers will be swept up.