Black in Blues

Black in Blues: How A Color Tells the Story of My People 

By Imani Perry 

Ecco, 2025 

Hardcover: $18.73, Paperback: $17.99 

Genre: Nonfiction, Essays 

Reviewed by Cynthia Tucker 

The natural world is full of blue — blue skies, blue seas, blue flowers, blue birds. Black life is full of the color blue, too, as Imani Perry brilliantly illustrates in her newest book, Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People. Perry, a Harvard University professor, award-winning author, and Birmingham native, uses the color blue to weave an elegant historical tapestry — a paean to the resilience of people of African descent. 

 “As far back as I can remember, I was aware of belonging to a group for whom the word ‘color’ was potent. ‘The color of your skin,’ ‘colored people,’ ‘colorful people,’ and ‘people of color’ are all phrases that are associated with us Black Americans,” Perry writes. Why the color blue? As she notes, the blues is a musical genre associated, historically, with Black Southerners, a music born of suffering, fortitude and resistance.  

But Perry’s interest in the color blue goes far beyond music. She ranges through nature, art, and culture, and her lyrical prose enlivens her writing, even when, occasionally, she stretches her blue thread thin to weave together disparate subjects.  

Perry sweeps through centuries, going as far back as the Medieval era, when the English called Africans “blew” (blue). She takes readers from the slave trade to the civil rights movement to her memories of her grandmother’s house, the “home house,” with a ceiling originally painted a bright blue. She travels through the Americas and Africa, where she notes that the word “black” began to be used by European explorers and enslavers to describe various peoples who had not considered themselves part of the same ethnic or racial group.  

When they arrived in the Americas as property, the enslaved kept what rituals and practices they could, even as they adopted — and adapted — new ones in brutal conditions. Perry reminds the reader that before cotton was king in the Deep South, enslavers were enthralled with the indigo plant, which West Africans had grown for centuries to make a dye that colors fabrics a vibrant blue. Ever looking for ways to humiliate and denigrate their “property,” plantation masters frequently forbade the enslaved from dying their clothing with the beautiful blue colors, even as they labored in horrid conditions to create those blues. 

While Perry meticulously recounts the ongoing cruelties heaped upon those identified as “black” by those who call themselves “white,” she also points out the many ways in which folk of African heritage have been cruel to each other. That includes a colorism which allocated a higher status to those who, through sexual liaisons that were often forced, came into the world with lighter skin and straighter hair. Still, appearance notwithstanding, white supremacy designated blue-eyed Black folk as unworthy of equal treatment. 

Perry also masterfully links the struggles of Black Americans with those of Africans, who were subjected, during colonialism, to conditions akin to slavery. When European explorers entered the interior of Africa, some of them noted its exquisite natural beauty, the lush countryside that vibrated with the blues of flora and fauna. Ultimately, however, European rulers were most interested in the wealth they could derive from the forced labor of the native population. And they extracted that labor through violence. What had once been the Kingdom of Kongo was laid low by both Portuguese and Belgian rulers, who were determined to grow rich from human trafficking and from the rubber plant. 

Weaving an impressionistic history, Black in Blues illuminates the lives of both well-known and more obscure figures. Perry notes that the brilliant scientist George Washington Carver not only found numerous uses for peanuts but was also a talented painter who made his own dyes, including a recreation of Egyptian blue. She writes of a little-known 19th-century Black potter named Thomas Commeraw, whose “pieces were often covered with freehand clamshells, half-moons, and curlicues, painted in deep blue.” (Though I had never heard of Commeraw, wealthy collectors have. Perry says his pottery now runs upward of $100,000.) She writes of blue paints to ward off “haints,” blue flowers and dyes in spiritual rituals, blue beads covering the graves of the enslaved.  The color blue likely brought a bit of joy into the lives of those who suffered unimaginable misery. 

Perry brings a similar alchemy. Even as it evokes the blues, Black in Blues is a joyous celebration of Black life. 

Cynthia Tucker is the 2022 Harper Lee Award Winner and won a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2007 for her work with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. A native of Monroeville, she is a coauthor of The Southernization of America: A Story of Democracy in the Balance.