Imani Perry should now be considered one of the true expert commentators on Black America. She has books on Lorraine Hansbury, the Black National Anthem, hip-hop, and recently won the National Book Award for “South to America,” her examination of how the rest of the country is not so very different, in a variety of negative ways, from the American South. She has also received a MacArthur Grant and in 2023, the Clarence Cason Award here at the University of Alabama.
This volume, a study of the relationship between the color blue and the idea of Blackness, has a superficial resemblance to whole volumes discussing salt or codfish, but it is much more complicated and contentious. Blue is, naturally, the world’s favorite color. We live on a blue planet and humans have always been in awe of the heavens and fascinated and frightened by the mysteries of the sea.
In this book, roaming over several continents and millennia, Perry examines the interplay between the color blue, with its joy, and its relation to Blackness and race and injustice and pain: the “blues.” So there is a lot about music. W. C. Handy with “Memphis Blues” may have named the form, but Perry also writes of Nina Simone, Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, and many others who made beautiful music from pain. What did they do, to be so “Black and Blue”?
Perry acknowledges the expertise of Albert Murray here, but is unhappy with Murray’s insistence that “Blacks were bound to this country whether they wanted to be or not.” He and Ralph Ellison, the argument goes, were not Afro-centric enough, in the way of W.E.B. Dubois, Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael and others. There are chapters on the cruelties of colonialism, especially in the Congo, and the difficulties faced by the newly independent African nations.
Several novelists of course are discussed, especially Jean Toomer, Toni Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston. William Faulkner is acknowledged—“that brilliantly confusing Mississippian”—because his “deep familiarity with Black people coexisted with his moral ambivalence and sometimes viciousness regarding their lives.”
Blue may be everywhere, but is especially present in Black life: she discusses “blue gum Blacks,” “blue-eyed Blacks” and the arbitrariness, absurdity, of the color line, blue in hoodoo, in bottle trees, on doors and beads and adornment of every kind including, in Africa and America, items to be taken into the afterlife.
Perry acknowledges that a book of Black history and culture might be a litany of past horrors, mitigated by courage and perseverance, but admits that when asked, by a white man usually, whether it’s better now, she is tempted to reply as her father taught her: “If you stab a man in the back, and then pull the knife out halfway, do you ask if things are better?”
