Review by Kevin Brown
As the title conveys, Imani Perry’s latest book uses the color blue to explore the history of Black Americans. Many of the historical figures and events in the collection of essays are well-known, such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Toni Morrison, Louis Armstrong, George Washington Carver, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, and Nina Simone. However, Perry also draws from the lives and stories of lesser-known artists, musicians, and historical figures to give a fuller view of the story of African Americans.
It’s the use of the color blue, though, that helps her reshape and refashion the histories she tells, digging deeper than the traditional stories even a well-educated reader might know about the famous and less so. For example, she draws on the ninth chapter of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man to explore the history of architectural blueprints, which then leads to a meditation on improvisation for when ideas don’t go according to plan, moving to a concluding paragraph on Thelonious Monk’s “In Walked Bud,” which Irving Berlin’s “Blue Skies” inspired. She ends the brief essay by writing, “[Monk] dismantled every blueprint. He showed how it felt to be rescued. The exercise is clear in retrospect: act and build with love — when faced with the prospect of death. That’s how we live.” It is this associative style of writing that gives each essay its power, as Perry ties together seemingly disparate ideas to convey undercurrents throughout Black history.
The culminating effect of the essays is not one of a linear history where one can trace a supposed progress toward more rights or freedom. Instead, Black in Blues reveals how African Americans have moved through and around the dominant white culture, creating their own stories and art and history, a culture that most white people remain ignorant of beyond the names of a select few. She celebrates the life that has thrived within that world, as she writes in the final essay: “Death comes fast, frequent, and unfair. And we’re still here. We know how to breathe underwater. Living after death. It is a universe in blue.” Perry reminds readers of ways in which that universe is simultaneously awful and beautiful.
Black in Blues: How Color Tells the Story of My People by Imani Perry. Ecco, January 2025.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. IG, Threads, and BlueSky: @kevinbrownwrites