Imani Perry ’90 Weaves Color, Culture, and Narrative in New Book
On January 28, Harvard Book Store hosted a special event honoring Imani Perry ’90 at The Brattle Theater in Cambridge, Mass. The Harvard professor, Concord Academy trustee, and National Book Award winner discussed the creative process behind her new book Black in Blues in conversation with WBUR Senior Arts and Culture Reporter Cristela Guerra.
The book dissects the significance of blue in Black culture, fusing stories from Perry’s life with historical research. She said her relationship with the color has been lifelong. The challenge was how to find the story.
Her journey toward this book began with research into the cultivation of indigo by enslaved people in South Carolina. Perry recounted how Eliza Lucas Pinckney, a white plantation owner, initially failed at indigo cultivation until an enslaved Black man, whose name was lost to history, taught her. “That is what the condition of enslavement actually was,” Perry said. “It meant being a resource of knowledge, and yet being written out of the story.”
Perry explained that when researching she “treat[s] folklore like documents.” While such stories are not literal, she believes the lessons they offer are just as significant. She discussed the myth of Ibo Landing, the story of a group of Ibo people who, facing enslavement, drowned themselves in Dunbar Creek, Ga., in 1803. In the story, the blue of the water becomes a powerful symbol of freedom and resistance.
Perry also touched on burial traditions, noting how archaeologists discovered that periwinkle flowers were often used to mark the graves of enslaved people, offering a form of remembrance. In her book, she connects this tradition back to her own life, recalling how she leaves blue flowers on the grave of a loved one gone too soon.
Though her work delves into heavy themes, Perry infuses her writing with both humanity and joy. In the book’s celebration of the arts, she emphasizes that “blues are the foundation of all American music.” Originating in the Deep South around the 1860s, the vibrant genre draws from African American spirituals, work songs, and rhymed narrative ballads. In the jazz and pop music of today, the blues form is deeply embedded.
Jazz inspired Romare Bearden, a Harlem Renaissance artist who was known for his rhythmic collages interspersed with bold splashes of black and blue. His intricate pieces were meticulously composed from small pieces of paper. Perry named Bearden as a major influence for her work: “That’s what I’m trying to do too—I’m trying to tell a story by taking pieces, riffs, vignettes, and pulling from various sources to make the whole.”
Beyond the U.S., Perry’s book explores the significance of the color blue in global Black history, including its role in the Haitian Revolution. “I am a scholar whose work is focused on the U.S., but there are arteries throughout the work to the Black world because we are mutually constituted,” she said. She highlighted Haiti’s shift from the French flag to its own blue-and-red banner, whose blue symbolizes liberty, unity, and the strength of the Haitian people.
She closed the event by reading from her book: “Consider this becoming Black, then, both a parable and a process—one within which people assorted in every way gather. It is interesting that the color that best teaches this lesson is not black or brown or yellow or milky—all the colors Black people come in—it is blue, with its hues of both melancholy and wonder.”
