How blues (the colors and the sounds) tell the story of African America

Imani Perry’s “Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People” is one of those books that slips the boundaries, or disregards them altogether in its way. A meditation, or a series of linked meditations, on the matter of blueness, it is neither memoir nor narrative exactly, although it contains elements of both. Rather, “Black in Blues” offers riffs and recapitulations, reinventions, reveries. It exists in a territory, as Perry writes, that “standard English words fail to describe.”

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The color blue has long provoked such investigations. I think of Maggie Nelson’s “Bluets,” which gathers 240 short associative fragments. (The author calls them “propositions.”) Or “On Being Blue” by William H. Gass, a book-length essay that opens with a magnificent list of blueness: “Blue pencils, blue noses, blue movies, laws, blue legs and stockings, the language of birds, bees and flowers as sung by longshoremen, that lead-like look the skin has when affected by cold, contusion, sickness, fear.” I think of Joni Mitchell’s legendary album, so spare and stripped down it feels as if the songs themselves might take flight.

Perry understands all this, but she is working in a different register. She is peering through a different lens. “Black people sing the blues,” she writes, recalling her grandmother. “She did. I do. Our children too.” This is not to say “Black in Blues” is about music, although that’s part of it. But more to the point, it is a book of questions. “Still, I wondered,” Perry muses, “why so much blue? And what makes it matter? What makes it mournful and hopeful and Black? How did the ones who Curtis Mayfield called ‘we the people who are darker than blue’ come to be?”

Perry, of course, is too astute to expect the answers will be anything other than conditional, if they are answers at all. Winner of a 2022 National Book Award for “South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation,” she is a professor at Harvard and the recipient of MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships. Her work walks a line between ethnography and history, although that’s too simple to describe what she is doing; let’s just call it inquiry instead. In that spirit, she ranges widely, beginning with indigo — the plant and the color — before sharing the story of Eliza Lucas, a white woman who in the 1730s began to cultivate the crop “at her father’s low-country Wappoo plantation just three miles outside of Charleston,” and in the process created an industry.

That this industry was run on slave labor is part of the treacherous heritage Perry means to explore here; “Brown arms,” she writes, “were dyed blue, sometimes permanently, like a tattoo of bondage.” Still, in “Black in Blues,” such a legacy can’t help but be elusive, difficult to pin down. “Something fascinating happened,” she notes. “Although the market for blue was part of the suffering of the enslaved, the color also remained a source of pleasure for them, and that too is an important detail in this story.”

That’s a key turn, and it opens the book, giving Perry room to improvise, to think on the page in what feels like real time. “One of the remedies we who study Black life have pursued,” she avers, “is diligent recovery in the face of being forgotten, obscured, or submerged. We piece together clues and uncover hidden stories. This work is important because the work of remembering is also the work of asserting value to what and who is remembered.”

For Perry, the recovery cuts both ways. Only so much, after all, remains to be gathered, which leaves her to rely on inference and intuition, to feel her way through what can no longer be documented to any definitive degree. The paradox is that in the act of interpretation, she finds her own connective fiber, a double vision, if you will. Citing Albert Murray, the jazz and blues critic, Perry writes that he “made the important distinction between having the blues and playing the blues. The latter could be cathartic or playful. The latter could cure the former.”

The source of sorrow, in other words, may also be the source of salvation. It is not denial but acceptance. It is not a capitulation but a resistance in the most fundamental sense. “What I mean when I say that my people gave a sound to the work’s favorite color,” Perry elaborates, “is this: In the blue above, flight is possible. In the blue over the edge of the ship, one plummets to death. Hell was the bottom of the ocean floor until it became salvation. You had to swing mighty low to bring them up to the blue sky, weightless to memory and suffering.”

Such a duality (or even more, a multiplicity) finds expression in the blue note, which “slurs and shifts. It is bent. It is ‘worried’ — that is to say the sound is made to tremor with technique.”

Tremor with technique … and isn’t this a beautiful way to put it, all the slipperiness of tone and history contained within that phrase? This is what I admire most about Perry’s writing, its breadth and movement, the way that it, too, stretches and sings. “Though a formal term,” she writes, “‘blue note’ is a contingent one. … It can be a single slurred sound or one made across several different notes, a shimmer or shimmying or even a vibration.”

And vibration is what Perry is after. Vibration sits at the center of her inquiry. “Ask the right questions,” she insists, “and you’ll move toward virtue and truth.” Words to live by, especially in a nation where a large swath of the population seems intent on disavowing the better angels of our nature. And yet, for Perry, that is not an option. The only recourse is to write from where she is. “An admission,” she declares late in the book: “I am very much an American, and that is an uneasy title for me. I have a culture and an identity tied to this land; I am without apology who and what I am. The unease is about the relationship between my citizenship and the rest of the world.”

What she’s describing is another sort of double vision, in which our eyes must remain open all the time. “I come from inside the territory but outside the gates,” Perry acknowledges, “so I know better. But I have one take; there are many others. We are no monolith. This is my blues.”

David L. Ulin is a contributing writer to Opinion. He is the former books editor and book critic of The Times.