Hanif Abdurraqib
In Imani Perry’s latest book, a gift of information and interconnectedness.
Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People, by Imani Perry, Ecco, 243 pages, $28.99
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In the Sunday comics section when I was a child, there was a different magic-eye image every week. A page with a pattern, a series of colors that, on their own, signaled nothing extraordinary. The trick was, one would place the page at the tip of their nose and slowly move it away, and in the moving away, from within the pattern, a concrete image would emerge. A small animal, a tree, a diamond. And once it was seen, it couldn’t be unseen. That is the part of the trick that would fascinate me as a kid. The pattern, having served its purpose as a vessel, would become secondary to a new understanding.
This is the miracle—and sometimes mercy—of close attention. The reveal is the miracle. I believed one thing for a moment, or a month, a year or a lifetime. And now, I’ve seen another revelation within that one thing. The mercy, depending on what has been witnessed, is walking away and never being able to look at the once-familiar thing the same way again.
Imani Perry is a writer who is gifted in offering a type of secondhand witnessing. In her writing, the familiar transforms into the unfamiliar, or the supposedly quotidian gains new depth, and because she commits to the reshaping of the familiar, her work insists upon you, the reader, joining in on that commitment. This strength is at its height in Black in Blues, an exploration not necessarily of the color blue itself, but the color blue as it appears in concert and contrast with black (black people, black history, the color black).
Perry’s books (her latest prior to this one was South to America, though the work of hers I have returned to the most is the 2018 Lorraine Hansberry biography Looking for Lorraine) have often been buoyed by points of interconnectedness. A thought or an image appears and then fades into the background, or at least the reader may imagine the thought or image has faded into the background, when it actually has become the background, or the canvas, or a pattern that holds a clearer image that might later appear. Black in Blues relies mightily on this, because there is much ground to cover: water, and birds, blue and the blues, black feminist thought. Where another writer might find themselves rushed, throwing a series of strings up on a corkboard and forcing connection instead of letting connections organically emerge, Perry’s strength of pace and information delivery balances out the text’s massive ambition (upon completing the project, I was surprised to check the page count and notice the relative brevity compared to what I felt like I had just consumed).
This gift of information delivery serves her approach well—the majority of the book unfolds in compact chapters, each opening with a different meditation on a different kind of blue item or being. Once a rhythm builds, it feels like you, as reader, are being beckoned close for a magic trick, where someone leaves you with something they have placed in your hands, and then keeps returning to add to what is there until what is there doesn’t resemble what you began with. At the beginning of the chapter “Jaybirds Sing,” Perry shares that the blue jay is actually born black, and only turns blue when it matures. Oh, but also, blue jays are actually brown, their feathers pigmented by melanin. Oh, and also, the blue jay is prominent in black folk songs and folktales, like the blue-tail horsefly, which is called blue but is actually black, and it showed up in folktales also like the blue-roan horses ridden by black jockeys in the 1700s. And at the end of it all, which only covers about four pages, Perry is recounting a folktale of a star blue-roan horse, losing a bet in 1770 to a small race pony ridden by an old fifty-pound enslaved man. The moral of the folktale is one of faith, a small thing becoming something different, sometimes better. You begin with a black feather in your palms, and then it becomes blue, and then it becomes something beyond a feather entirely.
I especially found delight in this approach when Perry invokes music, or musicians. Yes, there is a chapter titled “The Blues,” where she starts a thread with folklorist Alan Lomax and expands into an analysis of blues songs and singers, but I most enjoyed “Afro Blue,” a chapter that opens with an examination of Nina Simone’s 1957 album Little Girl Blue and the tone of melancholy. Melancholy which, when toned with other emotions within social movements, can lead to fierce action. The heart breaks sometimes under the weight of rage, for example, and that pain moves people to something beyond their blues. That message anchors the chapter, but it is encased in musical observations that center the logic of movement. Perry unravels Miles Davis’s 1959 Kind of Blue, not only its cover, the artist drowning in the color itself, but the musical experimentation of it, the long, drawn-out harmonies in place of standard scales. The audible breath of Davis, and the sustained, looping breaths that afforded the long arcs of sound. This, too, is movement, which, Perry writes, “is a divine word.”
But an even greater delight, or perhaps the delight from which all other delights emerge for me when reading Imani Perry, is, simply, the writing on a sentence level. Black in Blues, possibly because its structure requires beauty and succinctness in equal measure, is the best Perry has ever been, for me, on a sentence level. She sometimes seems immersed in a kind of call-and-response to herself, like she is pondering and then coming to a conclusion that leads to more pondering. Take the opening page of the aforementioned blue jay chapter, where Perry first writes of the bird: “And I suspect the devil was his master, because the folklore of blue jays in the American South has everything to do with the handiwork of Satan.”
And then, less than a paragraph later: “Maybe the blue jays weren’t the devil’s companions but Black familiars, testifying to the obscene magic that whiteness could be.”
And even this self-argument, or the performance of self-argument, serves the initial image, or the initial metaphor. The blue jay was black once, it is brown actually, the blue jay is one of ours more than it is anything else, ain’t no way it’s any companion of the devil.
Or, to put it another way, one that adequately frames the entire approach of the book, on a sentence level, Perry seems in awe of the movements and motions of her own revelations, even as she offers them to us. Yes, there’s more, and can you believe it?
Hanif Abdurraqib is from the east side of Columbus, Ohio.