BLACK IN BLUES

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’ albums Blue Period and Kind of Blue, Nina Simone’s Little Girl Blue, Roberta Flack’s Blue Lights in the Basement, Duke Ellington’s composition “Crescendo in Blue,” and Mongo Santamaría’s song “Afro Blue” are among many of Perry’s musical references. Literary references abound as well: Amiri Baraka’s Blues People, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and Ntozake Shange’s novel Sassafras, 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.