Ideas - Black history, vividly told through the colour blue

Episode Date: June 12, 2025

From planting periwinkles on the graves of slaves, to the blues itself, the colour blue has been core to Black Americans’ pursuit of joy in the face of being dehumanized by slavery, argues Harvard professor Imani Perry. In her latest book, Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of my People, she unpacks the deep, centuries-long connection between Black people and the colour blue, from the complex history of indigo dye to how the blues became a crowning achievement of Black American culture.

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Black American scholar and author Imani Perry and I were sitting in our studio before our interview listening to music by Louis Armstrong and Nina Simone and this John Coltrane's version of Afro Blue. We could do a whole episode just talking about those three pieces. But we started out with John Coltrane, Afro Blue. And you said it made you emotional. Why? Oh, for a couple of reasons. One is that he plays it with such sensitivity and grace, but also knowing that this song began with Mongo Santamaria, the Cuban musician who was a composer and that almost immediately after you

know he records it then you have Abbey Lincoln and Oscar Brown Jr. recording it. It's this wonderful moment in the mid 1950s where this growing awareness of black people in various locations across the world of kind of yearning to be free and being aware of each other and finding mutual inspiration, whether it's the civil rights movement in Montgomery, Alabama or independence in Ghana. And so there's this, the song actually is this like echo of repetition, a celebration of and an affirmation of blackness. And so I just find that so deeply moving, historically speaking, and just also for it to happen on the register of the music, right?

And that song too, it is such an intimate feeling song. Of course, it's political, but it has a tenderness too. All of that and more is part of the blueness of Afro-Blue, a color, Perry explains, that's in a long and intimate relationship with Black people and Black history and culture. Blackness, no matter how specific the experience, organically reaches across borders. And I followed it. I have heard and seen blue ringing through Black life at every corner of the world,

from Malian music and Yoruba cosmology to the testimonies of rural Colombians. In my blue notebooks, I steadily collected blue blues. [♪ Piano Music Playing in the Background, with a light piano and piano music playing in the background. Imani Perry is a professor of studies of women, gender, and sexuality, and of African-American studies at Harvard University. She's the author of eight books, including the National Book Award winner, South to America.

Her latest book is Black in Blues, How a Color Tells the Story of My People. We people who created a sound for the world's favorite color, the blues, offer a testimony. We have looked to the blue expanses of even our most treacherous of landscapes as places of possibility. The North Star in the midnight sky, which led the enslaved to free territories, the celestial morning

blue, which somewhere out of sight housed the gates of heaven and relief from endless labor. We have even believed, leaping from slave ships, that the deep ocean waters would return us to freedom by traveling back to the past before the vicious trade in flesh. In the successive waves of reckonings through the steady meanness of life, we have relied upon a blues-soaked sensibility, sustaining, being, and becoming ourselves." Imani Perry argues that Black people's love of the color blue and the pursuit of beauty were an assertion of their humanity in a world that dehumanized and objectified them.

Blue, blueness, and the blues are more than a color, a mood, or a genre of music. They're a metaphor, a sound, a birthright, an aesthetic, a sensibility, a respite, a mode of living with the cruelty of the world, a way of processing and expressing a painful, gritty reality and making something beautiful from it. I asked Imani when she first became enchanted with blue.

Really, I think from birth, the book begins in my grandmother's bedroom, which was, in some sense, the center of my world. The walls were blue. The drapes were blue. The bedding was blue. She had prayer cards with blue writing in the corners of my world. The walls were blue, the drapes were blue, the bedding was blue. She had prayer cards with blue writing in the corners of her vanity. And I talk about that room as a portal, but it also was the safest space in the world. And so blue has always been precious to me for that reason.

Precious, and yet it's the world in which you came to. It was the world. It was the world. And one of the ways I sometimes anchor myself when trying to describe what it meant to emerge into the world when I did is that I was born nine years later and several miles away

from the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing. You know, we're four little girls and then later on two boys the same day died years later and several miles away from the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing. You know, we're four little girls and then later on two boys the same day died or murdered or martyred depending on how you want to think about it. And so it was this time of transformation and freedom fighting, but also of a space of danger and deep adversity. And so having that cocoon that my grandmother created was incredibly important,

but it was also a space for interpretation. It's not as though we were fully protected from the world, but that that was a place where we actually could be with each other and experience the blues and grapple with all of it, learn through it. Yeah. Near the start of your book, you write the following, academic descriptions of blackness fail to explain how at the heart of being black is a testimony about the universal power

of existence. I, meaning you, wanted to offer truth with a heartbeat. And so I steadily collect black stories of blue and the blues, both literal and figurative. How did you come to see blue as kind of the heartbeat of the truth of black life? You know, I mean, there's a sense in which it was beckoned to blue. So it's noticing the repetition, the patterns, the meaning making, whether it was of course the blues themselves, right? But also, you know, thinking about the waters and the sky, and there's so much reference to them and black culture globally, and of course related to the history of the transatlantic slave trade, but then blue has all this meaning in hoodoo and various spiritual practices. And so it was sort of this process

of unfolding and observation. For me, part of the point was figuring out why this color was so effective at communicating a complex set of experiences. You know, you talk about blue as contrapuntal, right? communicating a complex set of experiences. You know, I talk about blue as contrapuntal, right? It's both sweet and bitter, hot and cold. And so maybe that's part of what blue does.

It allows you to both experience the exultation and the beauty and the joy on the one hand, but also the grief and the devastation. And so it's very human. And so blue's very human. And so Blue became a vehicle for talking about the story of a people, but it also then was a space through which people

told their story themselves, right? So it had this sort of one part organic and the other part trying to like sort of put the pieces together, yeah. Yeah, you talk about wanting to write toward the mystery of Blue and its alchemy in the lives of black folk. Is there something intrinsic about the color blue?

We talk about green connected with envy, but also of nature and the environment. And we talk about red being passion and love, but also associated with the devil. Is there something about blue, do you think, that makes it such a symbolic color for black people in particular? Yeah, it's such a good question, because sometimes people say, well, you could have chosen any color, and I keep saying, no, that's not true.

It's a combination of elements. I mean, I think one, it literally does have to do with the environment and the way in which the transatlantic slave trade actually constructed blackness. And this is part of what I write about. People weren't black as such before that history. People were all the other things that they were, Akon, Igbo, etc., Cosa, all the...

And so being gathered under the signifier through the history of the transatlantic slave trade and colonialism has everything to do with the slave ship where you encounter the waters and the sky and these sort of vast expanses that are both, that are horrifying and sublime, right? A place where people look for hope and possibility in the midst of devastation. So there's something about blue in that sense. And then there's also all of the spirituality, the way in which theological figures, whether they're Orisha in the Yoruba tradition or even sort of the symbolism of Mary, the way

in which water and blueness and maternality and all those things operating at once. Yeah, so I think that that's the why. But I had this great question from a high school student who said to me, but I always thought red, black and green were the colors for black people. And I was like, they are. But that's a political history. And this is what I'm trying to do is much more on the kind of spiritual plane.

Yeah. You chose the color blue and as you say, it's not accidental, but it also is a color that becomes important to black people. Yes. And I know there are a hundred answers to this, because that's why you wrote a book about it. But how did that happen? Well, there's various elements. I mean, certainly the indigo trade is a piece of it.

Indigo is this color that captivates the whole world. And this is why I use the phrase, you know, my people gave sound to the world's favorite color. There is something about blue that captivates the imagination. The indigo trade is an early and clear example of a global desire to harness blue beauty into personal possession.

Indigo blue bound up the world's taste, and traders crisscross the earth on merchant pathways to satisfy the yearning for it. European explorers in West Africa, agents of the transatlantic slave trade, often notice the predilection for and production of indigo along the African coast. According to traditional Europe cosmology, blue affects balance and harmony. But with the slave trade, a harrowing change came. Blue became a tool of global imbalance. Imagine being a craftsperson, fulfilling a divine purpose,

exchanging your blue for other goods in a bustling market. And then one day you find your meanings turned upside down. You no longer sell or trade the blue. You yourself are sold. For me, there's an inception point to be found when people, West Africans who have been creating blue, or items have been cultivating indigo, have been using blue dye,

experience what had to have been a sort of profound horror and disorientation by finding themselves no longer just cultivators of indigo, but traded for indigo. To imagine what it meant to be someone who crafted and then seeing oneself literally traded for a block of dye. That moment, and of course it's not one moment, it's multiple moments, there's something at the heart of that relationship to be found in that encounter.

And then of course there's indigo plantations and it's a very difficult crop to cultivate in during enslavement. And yet, the people still love the color blue and still want to wear blue. And so that too, even in this devastating circumstances, there's still this appeal and a sense of beauty and delight. And that to me is the fundamentally human part that was not destroyed no matter the brutality. So there's some historical, you know, elements to why blue matters. But to your point about indigo, in a sense, is indigo kind of the

bluest of blue? Oh, that's a good question. I don't know because I, yes, but then I think about the Langston Hughes poem about daybreak in Alabama, the way the blue, the blue of the sky in the deep south in the summer months, right? It's a different blue, but it's really important. So there's a number of them.

In the book, you refer to the the writer Amiri Baraka. Yes. The term for Black Americans, blues people. What does it mean to be a blues people? So it's such a good question because Baraka's description of blues people is he pays particular attention to the way that Black Americans, in a sense, stood apart from the American project, sort of sitting on the underside and therefore witnessing its limitations and reaching for a deeper kind of humanity, right, and expressing that musically and being a part of a world that was much bigger than the particular, it's a Vat Nation state. I'm so interested in, you know, Baraka's conception of blues people on the one hand,

and then Albert Murray's on the other, another one of my favorite writers who talked a great deal about how black Americans were so fundamentally American. The blue note is actually sort of the variation on this fundamentally American thing that actually is part of what creates Americana itself, right? So there's a spectrum of relationships, a vexed relation.

And the vexation is about the American project is also directly connected for me to why it was so important to have a sense of the international landscape of blackness and blueness in the book because there are all these arteries of connection across the globe, echoes, repetitions, and even intimacies and mutual inspiration. So it's a sort of both and. There's a particular relationship of blueness in connection with the American project, but then there's also this global sense of a blues people in the context of modernity, generally speaking.

You also write that, quote, there was a time before black, but not before blues. And there seems to be kind of a dialectic at work between blue and black. How you suggest that black people were blue before they were black and they became more blue through becoming black. Can you explain that? Yeah, I mean, and that is about the melancholy in some of blueness. It was really important for me to be clear that I wasn't making a case that there's something essential about blackness, right?

It's not inherent. It's a social creation. Even though I'm talking about a lot of spiritual aspects, right, but this is something that is made by history. But even before the category of blackness, you have the sort of devastation of the cruelty of human beings to one another. And also you have a desire for beauty that turns cruel,

that means people will be cruel to one another. So I wanted to both attend to the power of the particulars of this history, but to do so in a way that made clear that this is a consequence of some human choices, which I think we always have to be aware of because, you know, when we tell the past with that awareness and we actually then become cognizant of how important it is for us to make different kinds of choices today. So blueness in the sense of melancholy but also blueness in the sense of being captivated by the beauty of the color blue. Those both precede the sort of construct of blackness but then blackness gets bound up very deeply with both of them.

This massive, many-language landmass, with more genetic diversity than any other continent, Africa, is where humanity and civilization began. Its people and their descendants call themselves and are called by enough names to fill ten books and we have held on to our specificity, despite the pervasiveness of single signifiers like African and Black. Over millennia, some of our internal distinctions have seemed incommensurable. Nevertheless, sometimes common feeling persists because history, that term of art for document-based imperial

storytelling, has collected us. Even when we don't care for each other, we know we have something to do with one another. The truth is this. Black as such began ignobly through conquering eyes. Saying that makes me wince because I hold my Black tightly, proudly even. Honesty requires a great deal of discomfort. But here's the truth. We didn't start out Black, nor did we choose it first. Black was a hard-earned love.

Maybe we should take a step back and talk about this concept of having been created by other humans to describe other humans, which is this category of blackness. Can you explain how it was produced and what was the point? Sure. I mean, the point is a justification for the colonial empire, for conquest, for enslavement is the sort of creation of this category, a category that was intended as a kind of degradation. I'm interested in that because I think it's really important how people transformed the category of degradation and turned it into something beautiful. So I don't want to sit there. And it's hard for me to say that in

some ways because I hold my blackness so dearly, right? But to be very clear, it wasn't something black people chose, right? And similar to the word African, right? Not something that people of that continent chose or even necessarily consider themselves to belong to some mutual category, but history made it so. And then people make meaning out of the circumstances of history. And I want to really sort of sit there because that is actually where you find, I think, this incredible spiritual witness and virtuosity of human existence, this kind of spiritual grandeur and say, okay, we have been put on the bottom,

but we're going to make that place beautiful, this existence beautiful. Yeah. And you make a point that in this definition, this categorization that lumps together many different people from many different traditions and cultures, you know, it requires some mental and legal leaps that are- Did that make sense? That don't make sense. Yeah. How can we make sense or can we make sense of those leaps that were required to do that?

Yeah. I mean, the human imagination is both a beautiful and a terrible thing, right? So people will stretch the imagination to do great harm in ways that are completely incoherent. So I'm a 52-year-old black woman from Birmingham, Alabama. So I grew up believing the one-drop rule is how I think of the categorization of my people, which means that people who are, historically, who were seven-eighths of European descent, that one-eighth made them a black person, right? And so this conception of the people to whom I belong, which is really expansive,

which is why I talk about the range from blue-black people to blue-eyed black people. It's not rational, but race itself isn't rational. It is what it is, right? And I think that there's something to be said though about people who construct themselves, not based on then phenotype. It was a category that was imposed, but then there's a meaning making even within that. Well, you say you point out more than once, but very articulately you say race is a messy and exacting business. It pretends to be precise, but it never has been and can't be.

It can't. You argue in fact that black people, you point out the obvious, which is, you know, they span a huge range of color from a creamy color to all shades of brown to blue-black. So they're really not one color at all. But the color that connects them all and speaks to their sensibility and experience and way in the world is blue. Yes. Yeah, I mean, again, I think it's beauty and the blues. The way I often think of it is a blues sensibility is one where people are creating beauty at the very site of wounding.

And so it's not an evasion of the wounding. It's not an avoidance, but it is actually sitting in that and building a life. I think about this in particularly with the history of slavery in the Americas, right? So people were born, lived, and died enslaved over multiple generations, which means that they also loved, and they also created art art and they also laughed. And we have this history, I think,

in intellectual work in my field and Black Studies, of we want to focus on the struggles for liberation, which we should, but that can lead us to forget how much people's self-creation took place in this position of deep constraint. And that actually is part of the story of who they were and how we became. So that blues bluesiness, the blue note in the musical scale, blues people, blues sensibility is a way to tell that story. And for me, it's essential, right? I'm not just saying, okay, a way to tell that story. And for me it's

essential, right? I'm not just saying, okay we need to look over here, like that's the tradition, that's where it is. And so to evade it is to miss something huge about the story. It's more than an evasion, it's an erasure. Yeah, I think so. That you're trying to undo. Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's a big job. Yeah, well I mean, you know, I got all this training for a reason and had my, you know, sat at my grandmother's knee for a reason, right? This is an effort to follow in a tradition that made me.

["The Star-Spangled Banner"] Imani Perry is the author of Black in Blues, How a Color Tells the Story of My People. I'm Nala Ayed, host of Ideas, and I'm inviting you to a birthday party. Ours, in the fall of 2025, will be turning 60. Six decades of thought-provoking and award-winning documentaries, interviews and discussions that crack open an idea to see how it's played out over place and time.

And we'd like to know your story. So if you've ever been touched by an episode of Ideas in a way that changed the way you look at the world or affected your life in some deep way, we'd love to know about it. To get in touch, email us at ideas at cbc.ca with a brief outline of your story. That's ideas at cbc.ca. At Desjardins Insurance, we put the care in taking care of business. Your business, to be exact.

Our agents take the time to understand your company so you get the right coverage at the right price. Whether you rent out your building, represent a condo corporation, or own a cleaning company, we make insurance easy to understand so you can focus on the big stuff like your small business. Get insurance that's really big on care. Find an agent today at Desjardins.com slash business coverage. I'm Joshua Jackson and I'm returning for the Audible Original Series Oracle coverage. on the case, and you know when Nate's killer instincts are required, anything's possible. This world's gonna eat you alive. Listen to Oracle Season 3, Murder at the Grandview, now on Audible. In Imani Perry's telling, the story of Black people is one of how people with a wide range

of skin colors and wildly varying histories, languages, and cultures were pressed into a single race, invented in the service of colonialism and slavery. But it's also the story of how Black people have continually remade themselves and their relationship to the world, in no small part, through blueness. George Washington Carver, for one, was a brilliant botanist at the Tuskegee Institute, renowned for the science of crop rotation and convincing farmers that peanuts would be a valuable crop. He was also an avid painter who formulated a way to create a beloved color, Egyptian blue. He called it Oxidation Number 9.

It caused an immediate sensation. Carver showed the world how to replicate a color that had been cherished 2,000 plus years prior. Representatives from paint companies excitedly trekked to Tuskegee, Alabama to purchase his formula for Egyptian blue, along with his other paints, including a striking version of Prussian blue. And as is common in such stories,

Carver does not appear to have been fairly compensated for his innovation. But that didn't dissuade his constant innovation. He was driven by beauty and care rather than accumulation. Carver understood the utter generosity of nature, which was in stark contrast to the greed of civilization. Black Americans looked to nature for another bloop to remember their dead, planting periwinkles on graves. Yeah, it's one of those pieces of history that make me emotional every time I think about it.

So for enslaved people, there were no headstones and traditional West and Central African burial rituals were not available, although people found ways of sort of creating new rituals, but often that was even under the cover of night. But one of the ways that grave sites were marked in the upper south in particular was through the planting of periwinkle, because it is a hardy flower, right? It'll come up every year. And it's a wonderful sort of combination of the ways now history and science and documents all work together, because archaeological work is actually part of how we know this

to be true that so often under these beds of periwinkle flowers there are graves, there are bodies of enslaved Africans. And so, you know, and then I go places and I see it and it creates its own sense of solemnity but also power. It's lay and claim. You know, I have different definitions of home that I'm working with in the book, but one of them is that home is where your dead are buried. It's a way of claiming a home there by marking the site.

We often think, and reasonably so, that the condition of the enslaved is one of indistinction and disregard. But taste and even idiosyncrasy show both collective and personal self-regard. The enslaved fashioned themselves with care, even as their lives were considered fungible and not their own. This sense of self that existed, even when wholly dispossessed and literally being the legal property of another, became a feature of what it was to be Black in the New World. You don't spare anybody or anything in your descriptions of the inhuman brutality visited upon Black people, not just in the US, but around the world, especially in colonial Africa. But you also put, as you said, equal emphasis on Black people's creative culture and pursuit

of beauty and joy. Could you talk about why you felt this was important to reflect? Yeah. I mean, it's a recurring theme in my work. I think it's important to tell the story true. And if you only tell the story in terms of how black people suffered or what was done to black people, that may allow for a particular kind of argument.

But it doesn't tell you nearly enough about black people. I think so much about the ways in which generations passed something on so that subsequent generations might live. And that lesson entailed a way of being human, and a way, as I said, of love and joy and a sense of play and imagination, even in the face of ugliness, that made life worth living.

It's important to me because I think that that is what the ancestors expect and what the children require, right? For me, it's not enough to just make the argument about the injustice, right? It's also always essential to also tell the story of the humanity. I was really struck by the way you described it in the book, where you say that, you know, one of the remedies that we, you who study black life have pursued is diligent recovery in the face of being forgotten, obscured, or submerged,

that you piece together clues and uncover hidden stories. And that the work is important because the work of remembering is also the work of asserting value to what and who is remembered. Yes, absolutely. There's something about being in locations where you're in close proximity to the worst violence. You can't forget it. You know, you can't, you know, be from where I'm from in Birmingham, Alabama.

You can't forget it. The dogs and the bombs and that proximity, you know, I think it disciplines you out of just making a kind of abstraction of suffering. It's real. And so is the laughter, right? So is the joy. What are some of the forms in which the pursuit or appreciation or creation of beauty by Black cultures that you find most sustaining, like you personally, that inspires or thrills you? I mean, it's the music. And it's so interesting because it's a tradition that is so musically oriented

that the writers, we're always trying to chase the musicians. And for me that even, it's not just in sort of talking about the music, but it's in writing in ways that are attentive to rhythm and pacing and trying to actually develop a literary aesthetic that has a jazz sensibility or a blues sensibility. You know, that's the sort of the form that's the apex, as it were, of it then, but it's also language. It's also the sound of laughter and extravagance of laughter, as Ralph Ellison put it. It's also increasingly for me the individual arts.

One of the things that made me settle in this book is I was noticing that black visual artists from all over the world were using so much blue over the last 20 years. And I thought, this is really interesting in it, blue toned flesh, but also these huge swaths of blue in large paintings. What's one example? Actually one of my favorite paintings by the artist Mario Moore, it's a piece that is looking from behind at a woman who's actually wearing purple, but she's looking at the river that separates the United States and Canada.

And you see the blue that she's looking into, this vast blue that she's looking directly into, and it's symbolizing the history of escape from slavery into Canada. And it's actually in my bedroom. Oh my God, wow. Yeah. What I mean when I say that my people gave a sound to the world's favorite color is this.

In the blue above, flight is possible. In the blue over the edge of the ship, one plummets to death. Hell was the bottom of the ocean floor until it became salvation. You had to swing mighty low to bring them up to the blue sky, weightless to memory and suffering. A voice could do it. A chorus could ensure it. Blackness insisted upon standing inside of life with a song. Blackness insisted upon standing inside of life with a song. Yeah. How does the blues help do that?

Well, see, the thing that's so magical about the blues is that there's plenty of limitation, but it's certainly not limited to that. And as Albert Murray said, you know, there's a difference between having the blues and playing the blues. Sometimes you play the blues to get over having the blues, that it has this sort of exercising function. It allows for a certain kind of release

of frustration and heartbreak. And it's so intimate, right? It's a musical form where the word I is really important. Right? So we witness, you know, the blues man or blues woman, we're witnessing that very specific interior experience, but it resonates. It becomes that sort of sympathetic vibration that string instruments have. Like you feel it in your gut and it connects with you and it reminds me of that James Baldwin quote where he says, you know, you think that your particular suffering is totally unique, but then you read and you realize it.

That's what blues music is like too. You think your suffering is unique and then you hear the wail of the blues and you say, oh no, there's someone else who can give voice to what hurts. Yeah. You quote Baldwin on blue blues, actually. I love this description because it feels like a really apt description, which is kind of this acceptance of an anguish one finds in the blues and the expression of it creates also, however odd this may sound, a kind of joy. Yes. Absolutely. So it's both.

It's both. I mean, as if the serious function of art is actually living, it shapes what it means to live. Yeah. So the finding of joy is necessary and persistent. And it gave you delight that as you say, your folks, you say, knew and did better than the rest. They knew that joy was so integral to living the hard life. Absolutely. And Baldwin talked about this a lot,

and I think it was one of the greatest lessons he taught is that Americans are very uncomfortable with death. They're constantly trying to sort of pretend like it doesn't exist. You can't do that as a black American. It actually connects you more to the rest of the world where people realize that, you know, as Maya Angelou said, we didn't come here to stay. This is a temporal experience.

And so there's something about being able to sit with that that allows you to have a kind of spiritual maturity that I think has been an incredibly important lesson for the, you know, the, the on font to read nation that is the United States and that is necessary, especially necessary now to try to get to, yeah. You in the book talk about the contrapuntal nature of blue. I'm wondering what an example of a song that really embodies that quality of the blues to you.

Oh, oh, I have to think about that. Kind of something that talks about hardship and sorrow and misery, and it also gives you joy and a respite. Actually there's the playfulness and humor in What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue. It's a song that is all lamentation. It's a song about being mistreated and the suffering of black folks. Yet it's funny. It's playful. Even the mouse ran from my house. They laugh at you and scorn you too.

What did I do to be so black and blue? There's a kind that has a little bit of even swing to it, at least in the part when Louis Armstrong is singing. And there's so many examples of that, that there's not just one sensibility. You mentioned the Blue Note, and it's been the name of legendary music clubs and cafes. It was one in my small little town where I grew up too. And a storied jazz music label. Can you take us inside a blue note?

What is it? So the thing that is interesting is that it doesn't really have a single definition, right? So it's sometimes a flattened note. It is a slurred note. It is both in playing music and also vocalizing. It's sliding between notes. It's a worried note, a kind of tremor on a note. Classically, it was described as that which sort of lay outside of the traditional Western

musical scale. In more recent years, people, musicologists have been talking about, well, if you have a blues scale that doesn't stand outside, it's right in the center, which is just a perfect metaphor for blackness in so many ways. I think of it often in terms of that which does not adhere to conventional musical notation. It's the thing which is so beautiful and complex that we can't even transcribe it. Yeah, so you know it when you hear it, but how precisely one could notate it but also even narrate it, that's always elusive.

You write, the blue note sits like blackness within a tradition that is now a central part of, but also far exceeds the Western empires that named it. And it sounds like, you know, it captures the essence of feeling of black experience in history without capturing it at all. Because it's so irreducible and untranslatable. Is that about right? Yeah. And I love the way you said that because, you know, there is something to be said for saying, okay, we can offer these accounts, but none of it is going to be totalizing and comprehensive because we're talking about human beings. What are some examples of Blue Notes that you particularly cherish?

One of the things I talk about in the book is Aretha Franklin's voice on Chain of Fools because it is this sort of cycle of rising sound and intensity. You told me to leave you alone My father said come on home My doctor said take it easy Oh but your loving isn't much too strong. I'm added to your chain, chain, chain. Chain, chain, chain.

Chain, chain, chain. Chain, chain, chain. You hear her breath. And I'm also, I'm really interested in actually breath, and I have been for years through multiple books, breath as part of the sound of music, so as opposed to being the sort of the aside, it's part of the composition. And so you hear the exertion, you hear the body as well as the sound that the body makes

and the movement across notes that are being constructed. It's just breathtaking, you know. Literally speaking. Well done. I also was just personally struck by the part where you're asked by an interviewer about a writer who inspires you. I think that was the question. And you came up with Thelonious Monk. Yeah. Oh, yeah, absolutely. And it was funny because the person said, well, we mean a real writer. And I was like, a composer is a real writer.

But what is it that he wrote that you heard? One of the things that I love about Monk, well, there's a couple things. One is the repetitions on a theme. So for example, the multiple versions he did of Body and Soul, which is a standard, and so they each work and he keeps doing this thing on them where he's playing something that sounds like and also staying with something, staying with the topic. Those are things that I find deeply influential and really influenced my work.

And it's also connected to Miles Davis where he says this thing about, well, OK, if you play a wrong note, the next note you play tells you whether or not it's actually wrong. And so Monk is always sort of teasing with that. Right. He says, OK, yeah, now I'm going to play this one that doesn't sound quite right. I feel like I'm trying to do that too with every form that I try to approach because I think there's something, there's a story about humanity in that, right, about the things that go wrong that then you weave into a life. The lesson about humanity, but also there's an, I don't know what the word is, maybe it's ethic, there's a kind of ethos that that's connected to. Yeah, so I love Monk. And I

also just love the idiosyncrasy, you know, the shuffle dancing. So that's less about his writing, more about his performance, but then the hat and the wholly unique artist making things that are just so compelling on his own terms. Incredible. Incredible. Yeah. You write that every time you allow for joy, it seems to invite those who would say that it wasn't that bad. It was, you go on to say, horrific. And still there was joy. Telling the whole truth, including delight, cannot, should not absolve the nation of its shame. It should make the indecency even more apparent.

Absolutely. That made me think about Frances Scott Key, who was a slave owner and who wrote the Star Spangled Banner, and in a way is a kind of the antithesis to the blues. Yeah. It just kind of made me wonder whether the anthems of the United States, maybe Canada, other places, should be replaced by a blues song. So.

Is it more appropriate? No, I don't think so. No. Because they're both- Well, it's okay. So this question has come up because I wrote a book about the song that's known as the Black National Anthem in the United States. That book is May We Forever Stand.

Because in the midst of the kind of racial reckoning moment that happened five years ago, which is long gone, but in the midst of that moment, there were all these discussions about should that song, Lift Over Your Voice and Sing, should displace the Star Spangled Banner. And there were even some Congress people who advocated for that and the NFL played it. And the reason I said no is that I did not think the United States had earned the right to claim a song of that sort.

It still is too bound up and cruelty and injustice to lay claim to that music. So I think you'd have to have a complete transformation to do the work for those kinds of anthems to be appropriate. Because what would happen with the shift in choice would then be just a deeper dishonesty. If you made a blues song a national anthem, then it would be a pretense without a commitment. CB. Symbolic, perfunctory.

JG. Yeah. CB. Not, you know- JG. And even deceptive. CB. Too soon. JG. Yeah, way about now. Yes. As you know too well, there's been a fierce backlash in the US against anything that could be construed as a diversity, equity and inclusion initiative, a DI initiative. And we've had echoes of that here in Canada. And under the Trump administration, there's been a kind of a rewriting of America's history

of slavery and racism and an unwriting of black American history and an erasure of celebrations of black Americans and heroes. Of course, this is not an entirely new practice. But did you anticipate that your book would be published in this kind of environment? No. But I think you sort of have to always be prepared for it. I've been saying for several years, there's this ongoing battle between competing stories of the nation and the United States, but also competing stories of modernity, right? And how we talk about what the past 400 years have been.

Do we talk about them in terms of a kind of, you know, Western triumph or do we talk about them in terms of the colonialism and the devastation and domination associated with it? What's the approach? And I think that the reality is that we have to actually tell the story as the story of the conflict between those two positions. It's not one or the other. It's actually the pendulum swinging of conflict over what we will be and do. And I think we tell it that way to be honest,

but also to be transparent for those of us who are invested in justice and humanity and dignity for all people to make the claim transparently. Yes, these things are true, but also I want to talk about them because I want us to be better to other people. Like, I want us to be kind and respectful and loving and just to one another. It's funny, in the midst of when the Trump administration

banned Black History Month and the federal government, and one of the things I found myself saying is, you know, Black History Month did not come from the federal government. It does not own Black History Month. So it had a kind of 50-ish years, 49 years of making the claim that it was relevant to the national story, if it throws it away, that has nothing to do with what it means to actually embrace it in fact. So we hold on. We continue to collect artifacts, we continue to tell the stories, we continue to read the books.

That is the work of being here. Maybe that's why the book, I did not anticipate it coming out in this moment, but maybe part of what makes it useful is that it points to a way of being in duress that actually was not just meaningful, but allowed us to endure, you know? It's like, as I was writing this book, I was planting blue flowers all over the place in my yard.

Oh, wow. And there's something about, you something about being in the earth. This is not a replacement for that, but there is something about sort of wanting to put these stories in a permanent record to be found that I think is meaningful. So it's like, you know, I talk a little bit about the kind of who do books that people created

with spells in them. It's sort of like having that. It's not the same thing as actually the doing of the conjure work, but it's good to have it to hold on to. Would it have sounded or looked different if you hadn't been planting at the same time, planting blue flowers? Oh, absolutely. Because I was, you know, there's something about the materiality of earth and seed and exertion that then works its way into the crafting of writing that I think is important. Yeah.

I could always smell them reading the book. Thank you. You write about how black people quote, haunt the past to refuse to let it lie comfortably as it was. We give it to our ancestors in return for the inheritances they have bestowed upon us. Does this in some way explain the hostility towards all things DEI and the attacks on elite universities like Harvard, where you teach, that have foregrounded black American history and colonial history, that there are people who want the past to lie placidly and not to trouble us.

So, yeah, it's so complicated because to certain extent, elite universities have been given far too much credit in this moment. In this moment. They really have sustained most of what they always have been. I think the backlash against DEI, as well as the backlash against black studies and women's studies and, you know, Latin-A studies, all at the same time, and there are different aspects of initiatives to transform education and higher education. I think the backlash is actually a sign of how deeply

transformative the kind of storytelling that's happened over the past decade and a half has been. So the backlash is actually wanting to quiet the transformations that were happening. You know, when people say, oh, we can't tell these histories because it'll make white kids feel badly. And I always say, this is such an impoverished sense of the possibilities for white children. Why wouldn't a white child feel identification with, moved with, connected with the story of someone who escapes from slavery? Why wouldn't they identify with those figures? And I think that's actually, though, the answer.

It is the way in which exposing these stories and histories were transforming people, especially young people, and allowing them to see themselves and their place in the world differently that was fundamentally threatening to people who want to maintain the status quo. That I think is the source of the backlash, which is part of why I'm like, we have to keep reading the books because they are doing work on people's imaginations and hearts and allowing them to see themselves expansively. I will say this, all is not lost. All is not lost. All is not lost. There are people who are really trying to think seriously

about sustainability, about community, about how to be decent and good and humane. Thank goodness. There is no single Black essence. There is no fundamental inborn way of being Black, but we do watch each other closely and try on each other's grammars. Elegance and survival is contagious.

What do you mean when you say that for Black people living in blues, living is a form of protest? It's a repetition from Lorraine Hansberry's description of her childhood in the Bronzeville neighborhood in Chicago. And Hansberry came from this sort of relatively bourgeois, aspirational, driving black family, right? Her father was a real estate mogul and a civil rights organizer. But she had so much admiration for the kids in the neighborhood, the working class kids

who were not interested in sort of swallowing insult and had a sort of bold sense of themselves and lived fiercely and beautifully and defiantly. And so for me, seeing Hans Berry see that and be inspired by that in her artwork, even if that wasn't precisely the kind of family she came from, I've just been fascinated by that. And I think they're really powerful because if the message is that your life is not important and yet you insist not only is your life important, but your personhood and your desires and your interests are important, then that life is a form of protest.

Right? It's an insistence that rejects the dominant society's messages. And I love that description, so I borrowed it from her. Very good. Very good use of words. As you were writing this book and planting those blue flowers, what were you hoping for the rest of us to notice differently? Well, there is that part about haunting the past, walking around in the past.

So when I think about walking around in the past or walking through these spaces and asking readers to come with me, it's an ethical appeal because it's asking people to tend to those people in places differently with the kind of tenderness towards those who are disregarded, a kind of appreciation and admiration for those who endured. And so it's asking people to see the story with fresh eyes, because I think that if we see the past in some newer, more decent, humane ways, one, it helps us figure out what to do in this moment, which is really hard.

But I also think it does offer the possibility for us to be better in the present, in relation to people amongst us in the present. I hope it does anyway. So that's my hope. And the other part, which is just, I want people to experience pleasure and joy in reading it. I want it to be part of this body of documents of the blues songs and the,

and the paintings and the novels that give people some sense of joy in the face of it. I want, I want the book to be that experience too. It was certainly my experience of it. And what a joy to have you here. Thank you so much. Thank you for coming in. it and what a joy to have you here. Thank you so much. Thank you for coming in. Thanks. Imani Perry is the author of Black in Blues, How a Color Tells the Story of My People. This episode was produced by Chris Wadskow. Our technical producer is Danielle Duval.

Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Senior producer, Nikola Lukcic. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas. And I'm Nala Ayed. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.