In her new book, Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People (Ecco/HarperCollins, Jan. 28), Imani Perry pulls on the threads of the color blue woven into Black lives. Make that colors—and tonalities and moods. She plumbs the oceanic depths of the Middle Passage and soars on the riffs of jazz and blues musicians in search of meanings. Toni Morrison haunts the book. Miles Davis makes an appearance. So, too, do Tuskegee founder Booker T. Washington and his most brilliant of hires, George Washington Carver.

During a recent interview on Zoom, the National Book Award–winning author of South to America and Looking for Lorraine often ended a sentence with “right?” There was nothing insistent or uncertain in the interjection; it didn’t require confirmation or rebuke. Instead, it seemed to weave us into the tapestry of her thoughts, into the quilting work of shared consideration. Kirkus’ starred review deems the deeply poetic, searingly knowledgeable book an “innovative cultural history.” Indeed.

Perry opened our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, with an unexpected declaration: “This book is actually shifting my emotions around.”

What an intriguing way to start. Why?

I think it’s creatively vulnerable. I don’t want it to have failed the Ancestors is the only way that I can say it.

That seems impossible. But yeah, if we hew to narrow notions of what we think of as history, as scholarship, then this book challenges them.

There’s this piece I love that [critic] Albert Murray wrote about artist Romare Bearden where he basically says, “You know what Romy does?” (He called him that because they were friends.) “He’s making a picture, but he’s cutting out these different pieces of paper to make that picture. And the way that he’s cutting them out and putting them together is a jazz aesthetic. There’s a likeness, and the likeness is in conversation with the history of art, but the composition is in conversation with Black music.” And for me that’s the ideal.

So how did this book come together?

When I first proposed this book, it was more like a series of essays. Straightforward. Not disconnected, but the thing that was going to connect them was just the color. But I realized I needed a narrative component—not a strict narrative, but one where people would have a sense of how we got here. I really was trying to copy Bearden’s style. It was like a collage or like quilting, which for me makes sense because one of the primary ways that you encounter blue—particularly in the Black South—is through quilts. So it’s a quilting aesthetic with a narrative component.

In the past, you’ve spoken about sharing stories of trauma and speaking the unspeakable and how these acts pertain to craft and to ethics. Can you say a bit more about what you mean?

In some ways, that was me following so many people whose work has shaped my own. There’s that moment toward the end of Toni Morrison’s Beloved where there’s this repetition, “This was not a story to pass on.…” But she is passing it on, right? Part of her brilliance, her genius, is finding a way to tell the horror. Not so that it’s digestible, but so that it doesn’t destroy us. Because we need to know. It’s awful to know sometimes, but we need to know because there are some strategies for survival. There’s ancestral wisdom. It’s not just knowing what happened but, to borrow from Mahalia Jackson, knowing how we got over.

Yes—what we need to know to survive the moment and to go forward.

And ethics feels like the most intimate register, the very level of what we choose day to day.

Speaking of ethics: How have you managed since the election?

 I’m in conversation with lots of people about how to be healthy—adequate sleep, trying to get [proper] nutrition. That could sound self-involved, but I really don’t think it is. We’re about to enter into a new phase of arduous living. And I think we have to be as well as possible—as opposed to being hysterical and histrionic—in order to be in community with people, in order to figure out how we’re going to take care of people.

How do we argue for the arts in these moments?

Basic safety, food, shelter, proximity to violence, vulnerability, that’s important. I do think we all have a responsibility to figure out how we’re going to be involved in that. But—and we know this from the gifts of Black folks—in those most dire of moments, art becomes even more essential. What the blues teaches us, it’s not transcendence. It’s not evasion. It’s a survival tactic. You create beauty at the very site of the wound. It allows you to endure. It allows you to imagine. It allows you to feel some tenderness and softness. Imagine what Sunday nights were like on the plantation. People, exhausted, decide to play the fiddle and dance and sing and even do their hair, right? There’s all this adornment and beauty and art in what we imagine as the very worst possible scenario. There’s something instructive in that.

There’s a word you don’t use that one might assume would appear repeatedly: resilience. Do you have an allergy to that word right now?

I don’t know if I have an allergy to it as much as what I’m looking for is something more, to identify something that’s much bigger than resilience. Also, I often think of resilience as something private and personal and individuated, and that what we have is collective.

Reading and writing—that call and response—how do they work for you?

I’m more of a reader than I am a writer, in the sense that I write most days, but I read every single day. Things have to be really, really bad for me not to be reading. It’s my lifestyle. It’s not just for information. It is pleasure, it is joy, it is insight, it is spiritual.

Did you have a This is going to break my brain moment during the writing of this book?

They all feel like they’re going to break my brain.

I’d like to thank you. I’m now in love with George Washington Carver.

I’m so frustrated by the way we get his story. You know, the McDonald’s Black History Month version of George Washington Carver. Like, He made the peanut great! We don’t get the story that he was a queer man. We don’t get the story that he was an artist. We don’t get the story that he was wandering around in the forest. We don’t get the story that he was oftentimes at odds with Booker T. He’s this magical person.

He’s a model of how to live. You don’t have to be one thing. You can be all of the many things that you are. He’s one of these people who, like [playwright and activist] Lorraine Hansberry, is a beacon. But why do we need these models? We need them not because they were famous, but because they exemplified being full and complicated.

Is there any blue you left out?

There’s so much blue that didn’t make it in. And at times, it got frustrating. Because I’d be like, Oh, but I need to talk about Mario Moore. Oh, but I need to talk about Norman Lewis. Oh, but I need to talk about “Mood Indigo.” I always say this about my books, but I have to remind myself every time: This is an invitation. It is not an end.

Lisa Kennedy writes for the New York Times, Variety, the Denver Post, and other publications.