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

National Book Award winner Perry (South to America) offers a lyrical meditation on “the mystery of blue and its alchemy in the lives of Black folk.” Her account reaches back “before Black was a race” to the indigo trade. Early modern Europeans were fascinated by (and covetous of) the blue dye that “doesn’t just compel the eye” but “attacks multiple senses” with its aromatic scent and strong texture, Perry writes, while for many Africans “indigo had a spiritual significance” and was employed to induce “balance and harmony.” With the coming of the slave trade, “a block of indigo dye could be traded for a ‘hand,’ ” or human being—a convergence of sacred and profane that Perry uses as a launch point for her ruminations on Blackness and modernity. She points out that even as Black human beings began to be traded for the dye and forced into its cultivation in the Americas, Europeans’ medieval description for Africans as “Blew,” or blue, fell out of use, as if to erase the connection between Black people and value. Meanwhile, enslaved Africans in the Americas continued to rely on blue’s spiritual strength—Perry cites examples such as the folk practice of hanging “cobalt blue” bottles from myrtle trees and the ritual use of bluestone, or copper sulphate, in hoodoo rituals. In direct and intimate prose, Perry synthesizes an impressive range of research into a sinewy, pulsing narrative that positions the past as an active, living force in the present. Readers will be swept up. (Jan.)