What The Color Blue Tells About Black History
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This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. You know, sometimes there are ideas that make you reconsider the way you look at the world around you. My guest today, scholar Imani Perry, does that with her new book, Black and Blues, How a Color Tells the Story of My People. Perry weaves the gravitational pull of blue in black life, both literally and metaphorically, in sound and in color. From the creation of dyed indigo cloths and West Africa that were traded for human life in the 16th century to the American art form of blues music and sartorial choices. Coretta Scott King wore blue on her wedding day. Fannie Lou Hamer wore a blue dress to testify before Congress. These examples could be seen as mere coincidences, but in this book, Perry weaves a compelling argument for why they are not. Imani Perry is the Henry A. Morris Jr. and Elizabeth W. Morris Professor of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University.
She's also the author of several books and has published numerous articles on law, cultural studies, and African American studies, including Looking for Lorraine, which is a biography of of the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, and Breathe, a letter to my sons. Imani Perry, welcome back to Fresh Air, and thank you so much for this fascinating book. Oh, thank you for having me. Can I have you read a passage, page 21, last paragraph?
The truth is this. Black as such began in nobly through conquering eyes. Writing that makes me wince because I hold my black tightly, proudly even. Honesty requires a great deal of discomfort. But here's the truth. We didn't start out black. Nor did we choose it first. Black was a hard-earned love. But through it all, the blue blues, the certainty of the brilliant sky, deep water, and melancholy, have never left us. I can attest. You might be thinking by now that this blue thing I'm talking about is mere device, a literary trick to move through historic events. And if blue weren't a conjure color, that might have been true. But for real, the blue in black is nothing less than truth before trope. Everybody loves blue. It is human as can be. But everybody doesn't love black. Many have hated it, and that is inhumane. If you don't already, I will make you love it with my blues song.
Thank you so much for that, Amani. I also want to say that this book is, I know you don't think of yourself as a poet, but it's very lyrical. It's really poetry. Thank you. How did meditating on the color blue help you come to a deeper understanding about the use of the word black to articulate what we are?
So, I mean, I have sort of roundabout answer to that question. It's a beautiful question. And it may have more than anything to do with the blues. So it's the genre of music that is sort of the foundation of African-American music, certainly, and the foundation of American music generally. And it is, as I say, sort of a sound of the world's favorite color, meaning that it captures both the joy and the melancholy. You know, having the blues, when you have the blues, rather, playing the blues can act as a means of kind of curing the blues. You know, it has this movement through the spectrum of emotions, this deeply human sensibility to it. And so there was something about the universality of the color blue and the power of the sound of the blues, the way the sound of my people coming out of the Deep South, coming out of a history of enslavement, coming out of having this identity cast upon them and making something beautiful, creating beauty at the very sight of wound. There was something about...
the way in which those two senses of blue coincided so profoundly that actually for me became a pathway to thinking about blackness and in some ways the absolute tragedy of the failure to recognize its beauty.
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