← All Of It with Alison Stewart
All Of It with Alison Stewart
Get Lit: Imani Perry on 'Black in Blues'
00:21:30
Imani Perry discusses her new book, 'Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People.'
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Alison Stewart
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Imani Perry
Listener supported WNYC Studios.
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You are listening to all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. The latest book from scholar Imani Perry is all about the color blue. It's titled Black in How a Color Tells the Story of My People. It's a historical exploration of black history through the lens of this one color. And as Imani notes in her book, blue is unique because it can represent both happiness and despair. It's called the blues for a reason. In a wide ranging conversation, Imani and I discuss a harmful myth about black people with blue gums, the power of the blue note and more. Imani Perry joined us at our February get lit with all of it book club event in front of a sold out crowd. And thanks to our partners at the New York Public Library, 1,489 of you were able to check out a copy of Black and Blues to read along with us in February. I began our conversation by asking Imani how she got the idea to focus on a color in her latest book.
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So you know, in some ways the book chose me as opposed to me choosing it. I began noticing how frequently contemporary black artists were using the color blue and blue toned skin and large swaths of blue and it and then that sort of took me on a journey. I often say that my grandmother's bedroom where the book begins was in some ways a portal for the way that I understood the world. And that room was painted blue. And at the beginning of the book I tell a story about my baby cousin who also loves blue and Ian and I and I asked him which was his favorite color blue and he pointed to the ceiling, a place where a tile had been from when the ceiling had been dropped, a tile had been removed and you could look through to see the original color of the ceiling. And it was this brilliant sky blue. And he said that one. And so it was just this, so that sense of it being a portal and being surrounded in blue. And I in that space with her, with my family, we experienced incredible beauty, but we also experienced the blues. It was an intimate space where you confronted the moments of anguish and suffering as well as joy. And so it just, it just beckoned me. And then everywhere I looked through the History, blue was there, you know.
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Why did you think it would be a useful lens to look at history?
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Well, I think that we have been in a season for. Where we've been telling. Making these arguments for the meaning of history and his arguments for the significance of African American culture. And I wanted to write a book that wasn't an argument, but that was instead a journey. And that that journey allowed to use something that engages multiple senses. Because of course, blues, blue and the blues means that you're engaging both the visual and the sonic landscape. And we have such an extraordinary musical trad and that journey. I wanted to ask questions like, okay, what real hard questions? What was it like to be a person who was a thinking person who had a position in society and then to be sold? What was it like to cross the Middle Passage? What was it like to work in the fields? And what was it like to, you know, to stare down dogs in Jim Crow, Alabama? Like my family did all of those things. And each time I ask that kind of question and try to engage it in terms of my senses, there's blue there. Whether we're talking about the skies and the ocean and the blue green sharks that are falling behind slave ships because they're hoping that the people who are tossed overboard, they might consume them, or we're talking about the blue of police officers uniforms, blue is ever present. And so I said, well, if I'm going to tell these stories, I'm going to engage people's senses fully. And not just engage people senses fully, but tell both the heartbreak and the devastation, but also the incredible beauty. How do people keep getting back up? How they keep imagining? How do they keep creating such that we can go on. It just was there, you know, it just to. To allow the story to unfold as opposed to try to make an argument, actually enabled me to use color. And, you know, we only, as Toni Morrison said, you know, the writers are. We're. We only have these 26 letters and we have to sort of flip them around and try to find a way to make all those senses come alive? It always just. But that is what I think is necessary to tell the story true, is to try to make those senses come alive.
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So what did the research project process look like for this book?
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It was wild, you know, because there's lots, you know, there's, you know, there's like. For people who haven't seen, you know, it's like there's. There's dental journals in the book and there's archeological digs and there's you know, and there's color theory and, you know, it's all these things. So was. It was lots of pieces of paper and lots of files and lots of rabbit holes and then sorting and pruning and trying to get the pieces right in relation to each other. So lots of sort of heartbreaking moments where I was like, ah, I can't tell this story right. So it's like the research process was one thing and it was just like vast quantities of material and then I'd get obsessed with something and then just then I would be collecting materials on that particular thing.
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Okay, tell me about one rabbit hole you went down.
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Okay, well, this, the dental journal part, right. So there was this, this lore that if a black person had blue gums and they bit you, they would kill you. It's old fat, right? And it's, it's a tricky one. And I write about because it's, you know, it's like it, it hinges on this idea of black people as dangerous and threatening. But it also has an element, and black people shared it of a kind of power, right. That like, you know, if you think, if you imagine in the context of the Deep south, black people are in very close proximity to wealthy white people. So you can imagine this with this lore. Someone could just like, you know, turn around and bite you and kill you, the person who is oppressing you, right?
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Yes.
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So it's this sort of constructed, this mystical power. So I was like, oh, this is really. So I knew this lore and I'm. And I'm looking for it and I find it in Faulkner's writing. It hadn't seen anybody write about it before. I found it in all kinds of folktales. I found it in the Atlantic archives. I found it also and certainly in like sort of the lore that came from black people. But I also found it in dental journals where people there were dentists who were saying, we've heard this story that like blue gummed black people can kill you if they bite you. And we are looking for evidence. And you know, it's just, and it's sort of fascinating for me, it's also important. It was an important little detail because we tend to sort of treat like the heart, science and medicine is just subjectively true. But so much of what I, when I was doing research in medical journals in various ways in this period, so much of it is still experimental. So it's just, it's bizarre as a formulation now, of course, just to like, sort of clean this story up a little bit. We know now that human beings. Bites are dangerous because of bacteria. So anybody's bite can potentially kill you. Right. But it was, you know, to think about what was that. What was that lore about?
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So, yeah, I was so moved by the idea that blue flowers were where black people had been buried. I never knew that before.
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Alison Stewart
Yeah.
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Imani Perry
It's amazing that, you know, enslaved people did not have headstones, as we know. And for the most part, there's some. Some few exceptions to that. I'm thinking of one. There's a couple exceptions, but for the most part, did not have headstones and also could not have their traditional burial rituals. And so people would, you know, have to have those in some ways that were like, under the COVID of night or to sort of craft new ways of having burial rituals. But one of the things that people did. Enslaved people did in the upper was. Was to plant periwinkle where. Where their people had been buried. And it was a way. It's just such a gorgeous way to remember because they're hardy flowers, you know, they. And you can. And now, like. I mean, it's. Knowing this now and having written about it, when I encounter it, I'm so deeply moved because I know, okay, there's ancestors underfoot in that location. Yeah. And so it's a way, you know, one of the things I say in the book is home is where your dead are buried, and it was a way of making home in this place. Yeah.
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It's so interesting because blue can be used for sad, it can be used for hopefulness, it can be used for happiness.
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Contrapuntal.
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Yes. Why do you think blue represents so many different kinds of emotions?
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I mean, I think part of it. There's probably some science behind it that is beyond my pay grade, but I think part of it. I do think there's something about the water in the skies, and I think that's why it's had such important spiritual symbolism in so many faith traditions. There's something about that power of the kind of, you know, that the sublime landscape against which we feel so small and vulnerable, but also sort of gives us a sense of wonder and possibility. And so all of these emotions can sort of find their way into that encounter with nature, but it's. It, you know, I think that there's a way in which it's also. It's beauty. That is why we want to. Like. I. You know, and I. I'm a fan of blue, obviously, but it's. But that there's something about the pleasure it gives us that makes us want to hold Onto it in the wide variety of moments of human experience.
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I wanted to ask you about blue jays.
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Yes.
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You mentioned that blue jays, in some folklore, that blue jays would visit hell to report on the misdeeds of white people.
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Yes. You couldn't find one on a Friday, they would say, because that's the day they went. Yeah.
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Do you know what. The origins of this story and why blue jays?
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I do not. I do not. But here's another little detail about blue jays. I love that they are not actually blue, but they have melanin. They're melanated, and they look blue because of the structure of their feathers. So it's just this. I don't. You know, it's just. It's one of those stories that is powerful to me because it's a reminder that these. The people who were telling the story had a sense of ethics and decency that was in deep contrast to the society in which they live. So the blue jays know better, even if these people in power don't know better. Right. And so that. Like that answering back. I'm always interested in that. Answering back to injustice in the way that it appears, not just in political organizing and, you know, in sort of formal writing, but in everyday wisdom. Yeah.
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I want to talk about some of the objects that you discuss in the book. You discuss Ingo a lot.
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Yes.
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The color, the creation of the dye, the role of the die, the role of it in the slave trade. But you begin with the myth about the origin of indigo.
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What is it? Yeah. So I tell this story that came from a secondhand source. In the mid 20th century, there was a Liberian folktale about the origin of indigo. And I. And essentially it's a folktale that describes a person who is assi, who is a woman who is a seer, who is essentially supposed to eat. You can eat bits of the sky in this period in this folklore, human beings can eat bits of the sky, but you're only supposed to do it in a very particular way. And she does it in a way that is contrary to what is appropriate and winds up eating so much and getting sort of drunk on the. Eating the beauty of the sky, that she neglects her infant child who then dies and then her. And then the folklore is that in exchange, it's a gift. In exchange for her tears and anguish, indigo is granted to humanity. And so I reinterpreted this and I told the story. I retold the story. But what I wanted to do in telling the story is to say this desire for blue Objects like this desire to possess blue, which is what it symbolized, is something that has always. That can cut two ways as any kind of desire can. It can be something that is beautiful, but it can also be something that leads to destruction. That's before race. That story predates race and racialization. But then when we see what actually happens in the indigo trade, we, we see the desire for indigo, for something beautiful actually being a justification for the deepest kinds of violences and injustice. Right. So I, you know, so I enter this, the book with that story because I want to cue up this fact that race and racism are not natural. Right. Cruelty to other human beings is not natural. It's something though, that is, that is produced by greed and certain kinds of drives for possession that have led to devastating consequences in human history. And so it was a way to sort of lead to that.
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Alison Stewart
Yeah.
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Imani Perry
Let's talk about appearances. Black people, blue eyes. You talk about how blackness is defined and what role you should play in that definition. You write as a black American of a certain age, about the same age, I must admit that the thought of abandoning the one drop rule feels like a dissolution of some of who we are. I want to keep the blue eyed as well as the blue black in our numbers. You discussed throughout history how the presence of blue eyed black people, some people have considered it a threat. How so?
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Well, part of it is because of the proximity, the perceived proximity to whiteness and that they could slip into whiteness without being detected. So there are these, you know, I hesitate to use the word, wonderful, fascinating lawsuits, criminal cases where you have this sort of alarm about someone who's engaged in some kind of criminal behavior and it's a blue eyed Negro who's slipping in undetected into various spaces. And I think that's, it's important because I think particularly now when we're having different kinds of conversations about race, but to think about a people who are made by this relatively arbitrary rule, but then do make something of themselves. It's not as though the definition is only one that's imposed, it's one that's actually created from the inside out as well. So that was a kind of a sign of the terror of any form of blackness potentially intruding. And of course we have fears, and I talk about this of, of blue black people as well. But in that spectrum is where you actually find the creation of all this culture and art. That is what I'm also concerned about.
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You spend a couple of chapters writing about the history of the Democratic Republic of Congo from colonial times to modern day. Why was this a part of the world that you wanted to spend so much extra time talking about?
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Yeah, so there's a couple of reasons. One is that Congo, the culture of the Congo Kingdom, is so central to the formation of African American culture and something that we don't talk about that much, but there's signs of it in so many places, particularly in places along the Gulf coast and on the sea islands, the Low country as well. And so, you know, so that's an origin point. And I wanted to talk also about the history of the betrayal that the Congo Kingdom experienced in its negotiations with Portugal as part of the way race is created. So they thought they were just negotiating as two kingdoms. And then they experienced racialization through the transatlantic slave trade. But then there are these echoes. Right. So there's culture, there's repetition, there's an echo between the story and I won't give it away, but for folks who haven't read it, but Andre Bluein, who was an anti colonial activist, and W.E.B. du Bois have similar stories of encounters with. Encounters with the violence of racist medical systems. And then Patrice Lumumba and how important he was a figure for black American activists and how his story intersects with ours. There are these sort of moment, and I do sort of arterial connections. You know, I'm a scholar who has been rooted in the United States, but I always know that if you're doing black studies and if you're doing African American studies, there's always these arterial connections to other parts of the globe and other peoples. And so I tried to attend to those, several of those arteries. There's also a chapter on Haiti and, you know, in South America and the bookends in the Caribbean. And so it's important for me to name that as part of the connection and also part of how people create themselves even in the modern period. Right. You don't get. You can't really tell the story of the freedom movement without also talking about anti colonialism as much as people try to decolonization. Yeah.
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We're going to hear some great music in just a few minutes. And you write about the concept of the blue note. What's the blue note?
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So the blue note is the heart of black music and the heart of American music too. The bent note, the worried note, the note between notes, often flat. And it is conceived of as a note that is the language that is often used and I think is a mischaracterization, is that it's not a natural note, but it's that if we think about it in the context of Western music, it's the outlier. But in the context of our music, it's what makes the music what it is, right? And it gives it its fullness and its emotional complexity. And I think for me it's the essence of what makes the music a language. And so I sit in the blues, but also in the blue note and try to think about what this means in terms of how do we think about blackness itself that it's not. We start not just think about it as the outlier that actually frames the project, but actually think about it on its own terms. And there's just something about the fact that it makes the entire world has been captivated by, by the music that relies upon this tradition. So even though, you know, we can, you know, obviously we there's lots of evidence that many people in the world don't love black people. People love what black people create. And there's something in that, you know, saying that, that you don't get that creation without an extraordinary people.
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That was my conversation with author Imani Perry from our February Get Lit with all of It Book Club event. We spent the month reading her book Black in How a Color Tells the Story of My People. This month's Get Lit Book Club selection is the novel Mothers and Sons by Adam Hayslett. For details and to borrow your E copy, head to wnyc.org getlit For 140.
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Alison Stewart
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