For Black identity, the color blue goes beyond the sky and water and speaks to the fabric of daily life. Imani Perry is a National Book Award–winning author, Henry A. Morss Jr. and Elisabeth W. Morss Professor of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, and a 2023 MacArthur Fellow. She joins host Krys Boyd to talk about the significance of the color from indigo cultivation, singing the blues, even how “Blue Lives Matter” was used to counteract “Black Lives Matter” protests. Her book is “Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People.”
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Transcript
Krys Boyd [00:00:00] When you ask people what color they love, the number one answer all over the world is blue. Evolution might drive that preference. Something deep within us knows a flash of blue on a landscape might indicate the presence of the water we need to survive. But Blue also has fascinating, contradictory cultural meetings, especially when you look at the links between this color and black identity. From K-E-R-A in Dallas, this is Think. I’m Krys Boyd. From free and then enslaved people cultivating indigo to the counterintuitive joy to be found in blues music. To the Blue Lives Matter rhetoric used to deflate Black Lives Matter advocacy. My guest has long collected accounts of how Blue has shaped black existence for centuries. Imani Perry is a National Book Award winner. She is a Henry A. Morss Jr., and Elisabeth W. Morss, professor of Studies of Women, Gender and Sexuality and of African and African-American studies at Harvard, also a 2023 MacArthur Fellow. Her newest book is called “Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People.” Imani, welcome back to Think.
Imani Perry [00:01:08] Thank you so much for having me.
Krys Boyd [00:01:10] As a Black woman, you write that you always understood you were part of a group for whom the word color had special significance. Do you remember when you started noticing the particular resonance of the color blue?
Imani Perry [00:01:23] You know, I don’t remember. I mean, one of the things I talk about in the book is, is my grandmother’s bedroom being the color blue, which is, you know, in some ways my first home. And so I was surrounded by blue from birth, frankly. So it’s sort of it’s a it’s been a color that is familiar from from as far back as I can remember.
Krys Boyd [00:01:50] I had not realized that in the Middle Ages, English people might have referred to the people we now call Black as blue. Why blue?
Imani Perry [00:01:59] You know, I don’t know. It’s one of these fascinating details. And in that section, I’m sort of talking about these varying designations. Right. That went throughout the ages of how people of African descent were referred to by Europeans. And then on the other hand, all of the various sort of identities that people of African descent had of their own long before Black was actually a concept. Right. So people black is a relatively new idea. You know, the the folks we think of now as Black, where we’re Ibo and the Akan and and Zulu and all all of those ethnic designations. Now nations that preceded both the transatlantic slave trade and colonialism. And so I you know, I was I wanted to list all of those those various ways of designation to talk about how it was that this group of people became known as Black and then and under quite harrowing circumstances. And then how they made something of it that was quite beautiful. So that reference from blue in the past is almost sort of just an example of how these things that we take for granted now aren’t actually necessarily how they should be or how they could be.
Krys Boyd [00:03:22] While we are on that point, we should touch on something here, which is that some people look at history and conclude that Africans willingly sold one another into slavery. That assumes there was some pan African or shared Black identity at the time when it was more like, as you mentioned, many different nationalities and tribes and communities that like would never have sold their own people but might have sold members of a rival group.
Imani Perry [00:03:46] Right. I mean, we we talk about Africans as though that’s a kind of a self-evident designation. But even the name Africa is a is a term applied from the outside in right. These are people of varying communities. So to say Africans sold themselves assumes that there was a common identity when in fact, these are people who are selling folks to whom with whom they were at war or in conflict, or people who were already enslaved and the like. And so this sort of look backwards. We have to be very careful not to project onto the past our frames of recent history.
Krys Boyd [00:04:25] In modern times, it’s easy to overlook how a product like a fabric dye could be a really big deal. But when the world went mad for Indigo, starting in the 16th century, Europeans realized nobody was better than West Africans at producing it. And this had earth shattering consequences.
Imani Perry [00:04:44] Yeah. So Indigo captivates the world and everybody wants a way to produce blue in, you know what they had. And in England was Woad which was is a beautiful blue, but is not nearly as color fast or as deep as indigo. And so indigo techniques from Asia and Africa were and, and the plant in that sort of harvesting became incredibly important. Part of what I try to track is the transition from, you know, the reality of being an African crafts person who is cultivating indigo, who is creating beautiful clothing from indigo to what is a horrifying reality, which is eventually that human beings are being traded for indigo. So imagine someone who makes indigo suddenly seeing him or herself reduced to the status of a block of dye. And that that is, in some sense one of the first steps towards this new sort of characterization of this new categorization in the world of people as Black people. And so that that indigo going from being something that people make to something that human beings are seen as equivalent to is is pretty devastating.
Krys Boyd [00:06:01] We should say that making dye from indigo is not simply a matter of like boiling up some roots or flowers and dunking in a piece of cloth. This is difficult, dirty, even dangerous work.
Imani Perry [00:06:11] It is arduous work. It is. It is toxic. And people become sick from it. I mean, it is it is not easy work. There’s various boiling things and extractions. The bodies of people who worked in indigo were often permanently dyed the color. I mean, it’s it’s quite challenging work. And it it’s one of those examples where you see the kind of quest for beauty is so complicated amongst human beings. We we we want beautiful things. We want pleasure. We seek them. But sometimes in human history, those very things that are beautiful are a source of great suffering. And that’s one of the things that I wanted to get at in the book. So it makes sense that everyone loves Indigo. But then we think about, well, what’s the cost? We see that over and over again and we see that now in recent years with diamond mining and tanzanite mining, that often human suffering is connected to our desire for beautiful things.
Krys Boyd [00:07:18] How did enslaved people use Indigo to claim at least a modicum of beauty in their lives?
Imani Perry [00:07:24] Yeah. So I loved sort of tracing this because you would think on one level, particularly for people who were working Indigo, it was incredibly painful to labor. And on the one hand, so, you know, working indigo is really hard and unpleasant. And yet there was still this desire for indigo people who wanted indigo clothing, who both you enslaved people who both used indigo dye that was left over from the processes on plantations to paint their homes, to paint their porches, to paint their the ceilings of their porches, where you get the traditional color haint blue in South Carolina, which is supposed to protect a home from ghosts and other spectral presences. And then you even have people who cultivate indigo privately. And so there is this turning of the very thing that is a source of suffering into something that is also beautiful and delightful and even a form of protection, which I think of is in some sense part of the power of and resilience of the tradition that I’m trying to describe, that there is over and over again this creation of beauty at the very sight and context of wounding.
Krys Boyd [00:08:50] Yeah, I mean, protection, resilience, even defiance. I mean, despite everything, they were denied the fact that enslaved Back people did maintain esthetic sensibilities. That is itself a form of pushing back against subjugation.
Imani Perry [00:09:06] It is. It’s a form of pushing back against subjugation. And it also is simply part of being human. And I think part of what we and I mean, all of us often forget because we want to impress upon the world how devastating enslavement was, is that we forget that people were born, lived and died enslaved. And we’re human beings in that context, which means they saw it moments of beauty. They saw, you know, they experienced laughter. They even experienced moments of joy. And I think it’s really important to remember that one, because that’s the only way you get access to the fullness of their humanity. But it’s also important to remember that’s part of how we understand what, in fact, the horror of slavery was, is if we understand the people who were enslaved as fully human. So they’re figuring out ways to live even under horrific and unjust conditions. And I for me, it feels like an important task to to bring that to the world.
Krys Boyd [00:10:10] How did South Carolina specifically become such a hub for indigo production?
Imani Perry [00:10:16] So it’s so interesting. And the young woman, Eliza Pinckney, in the late 18th century is the person to whom, you know, the the and the credit is often given for developing indigo in South Carolina and making it this this huge export rivaling other other indigo producing locations in the Caribbean. And certainly she is a precocious young woman, diligent student of indigo and and dedicated and runs a plantation in South Carolina, though born in Antigua. But really, the person who allows her to develop success and a successful indigo plantation. That person’s name is unknown to history. We know it was an enslaved man. We know he was brought from one of the francophone islands, but we don’t know much more. And he’s the person, after many efforts who actually taught Eliza Pinckney how to cultivate indigo properly. And so for me, this is an important detail because it actually is part of the story of what it meant to be enslaved was to have your intellectual labors, your contributions to the world written out of the story on the one hand, and then on the other hand, you know, this is a person who brings a technique that is important for the wealth of the colony and the state eventually. And then on the other hand, that wealth is produced through the unfree labor of that person and many others. So it’s that, you know, that’s that tension between being treated as property and having one’s labor and intellect necessary for the proliferation of property. And there are multiple examples of sort of these products of plantations having this huge international impact on the economy. And they. Really are at times. You know, rice and cotton are in some sense sort of staple goods. But things like tobacco and sugar and indigo, those are pleasures and they’re pleasures that make a lot of money, but they’re also pleasures that do a lot of destruction in people’s lives.
Krys Boyd [00:12:34] How does Blue figure into or how did Blue figure into burial practices among the African diaspora in, say, the 19th century?
Imani Perry [00:12:43] A variety of ways. It is one of the ways that we find it is in the the use of blue beads or beads that are part of people’s people being actually buried. And at various times, it’s also becomes part of adornment in the process of of burial practices of color on the body and so on. And what’s interesting about that is, one, I am I one of the things I do is I trace blue beads from sort of the the encounter between Europeans and Africans on the west coast of Africa with an attention to the way that the blue bead becomes something for which human beings are traded. And at the same time, oftentimes the only thing enslaved people are wearing with them as they cross the ocean to the middle passage is a blue bead, and then blue beads are found on the bodies of in archeological sites, other beads as well on the bodies of buried enslaved people. And so for me, that is particularly profound because part of what it means to make a home of a is to actually have one’s dead buried in the land.
Krys Boyd [00:14:00] Imani, blue was obviously the color of the oceans on which captive Africans traveled to the sites of their enslavement. You know something I had never considered before, which is that slave ships specifically changed ecosystems they traveled through.
Imani Perry [00:14:17] It did. And in fact, there were eventually it was standard for sharks to follow slave ships because of the number of enslaved people whose bodies were thrown overboard or in some instances of people who leaped overboard because the conditions were so horrific. And so you can imagine, you know that how. Numerous the the, you know, how many people that had to be in order for sharks to begin following the ships, blue green sharks to be to be specific. So there are many writers in the African American tradition who talked about the bones of Africans that lay on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. But it’s also, you know, the movements from here to there of animal life were shifted by this by this horrifying trip and the triangle trade.
Krys Boyd [00:15:26] What’s the story of the ship christened True Blue?
Imani Perry [00:15:31] So it’s one of the stories that I tell in some detail in the book, which I hope people read, but I wanted to tell the story book for the following reasons. One, it is a story that actually takes you through the triangle trade, right between from, England through to the coast of West Africa and also to the Americas. And it’s a story where there are a series of multiple journeys of the ship, and some of them are ones in which there are very high numbers of fatalities, which is fairly standard on slave ships. And I think that was an for me, that was an important detail, but also stories of insurrection and stories of insurrection in which it’s there’s still tension that exists and not between different people, different ethnicities of African people that one group ultimately functions to help recapture the other group that is engaged in insurrection. And so this is for me, this is the point. Like the multiple voyages of the true blue and the different stories that are told on the True Blue and the reality that not only many Africans died on the True Blue Voyages, but the conditions for those who were the crew who were Europeans, but laborers were horrific to not as horrific as those of the Africans, but horrific as well. All of these repeated travels are actually an indication of the process of what it meant for race to become something. Right. So it’s not at first it’s not necessarily the case that different groups of Africans see any resemblance between each other. It’s also the case that the members of the crew, they’re exploited and they’re mistreated, but they also really don’t want to be in the conditions of the Africans. So you see like race differentiating people. You see the reality that being a member of the group that is seen as fit for slavery makes you subject to premature death. And you also see the movement of of of across the oceans. All of this is part of what it meant for race to be made in the modern world. But there’s something about telling the story through a single ship or there’s a couple of ships that I talk about. But telling those stories that I think has the ability to bring it home in ways that allow you to imagine, you know, that these are lives, you know, these are human beings who are experiencing just dramatic transformations. And over the case, over the course of years and generations, things that we now take for granted were put into place by these voyages, by these deaths and by these exchanges.
Krys Boyd [00:18:27] How did blue clothing play into the Haitian Revolution?
Imani Perry [00:18:32] So what’s so interesting to me is that, you know, throughout the Americas, one of the ways that you see the retentions of West and Central African culture is through spiritual symbolism. And so in the context of the Haitian revolution, you see actually warriors who are adorned in blue, who are bringing that from West African cultural practices, who are participating in the insurrection. And it’s also the case that many of the laws, which is the term used for modern deities, who are seen as in some ways the kind of the spiritual practice that is seen as the kind of spiritual foundation of the Haitian revolution. Their colors are also in blue is is the primary colors of those that were at work in the Haitian revolution is also constantly being invoked. So there is, of course, you know, a lot of brilliant history that’s been done on the tactical aspects of how the Haitian revolution was won and the kind of the sharing of information across across various island nations and across the oceans in these various kinds of processes. But it’s also the case that there was this sense of a spiritual force. The other piece that for me is interesting and that I wanted to talk about in that context was the reality of mixed race Haitian landowners who were under color, who many of whom were indigo planters who found themselves. And I focused specifically on one Julian Raymond, who found themselves at first one. And to kind of ensure that they had the same kinds of rights as their French counterparts. But then but then ultimately found themselves casting their lot with the enslaved black people and on the side of revolution. And it was another way to talk about the scope of what blackness would become. You know, these are people who are of different social statuses, even different, you know, slave free. Many of these mixed race landowners, they they had a lot of slaves. And some of them, you know, did not align themselves with with with the black people who were the enslaved. But some did. And you begin to see how black becomes this category that is fairly broad. We talk in this country often about the one drop rule, which is the legal rule that made anybody with any African ancestry classified as as black. But we don’t talk as much. I think about the internal process where people identified with each other even though they had different genealogies through this common condition of being marginalized because of being non-European and then made something out of that more. That is that is cultural, that is social and the like. And so it was a wonderful opportunity, you know, to talk about an important part of history that is also relevant to U.S. history. The Haitian revolution is certainly part of the story of the United States and part of the story of black America, even though it’s another country and and certainly part for me, a part of this story of blackness and love.
Krys Boyd [00:22:09] I had never made the symbolic connection between the French flag and the Haitian flag.
Imani Perry [00:22:15] Yeah. So as the story goes, it was ripped into a ripped in three, rather. And the the and then the the red and the blue part were sewn together in the white in the center was cast out. And some say that the red represented the mixed race people and the blue represented the black people who rejoined together in the revolution. And of course, you know, anybody who’s a student of the history of Haiti will well understand that, that even with the power of that law, Haiti remained a stratified country and stratified by color and and status long after the revolution. But it has this very powerful symbolism that I think still, you know, still resonates. And certainly it captured the imaginations of black people the world over. The Haitian revolution really in some ways solidified a kind of international black consciousness, this idea that black, a black nation and Black people could become part of the world of nation states in the age of revolution.
Krys Boyd [00:23:29] For people who maybe haven’t come across them. Can you explain what bottle trees are?
Imani Perry [00:23:34] Yeah, I I’d love to. They’re so beautiful. And you see them across the landscape in the South, particularly in states like South Carolina. But they but they really exist in multiple places and often in many, many rural areas. And they’re basically trees that are adorned with bottles at the branches. Oftentimes they are cobalt blue bottles. Sometimes now they’re multicolored, multicolored bottles. But the convention is is cobalt blue bottles. And the idea is that those bottles on the tips of branches actually capture malevolent spirits and provide protection to the home in front of the front of which they stand or the community that they adorn. So they’re visually stunning, particularly the way they capture light and the cobalt blue glows. And of course, they’re part of the sign of the spiritual symbolism of blue. But they’re also one of these things that I think is so important, which is the kind of everyday practices of making beauty, which I tried to get at. And in the book as well, you know, there there’s a lot about fine artists in that tradition, but there’s also a good deal about the everyday beauty that people adorned their communities in their homes with.
Krys Boyd [00:25:03] Yeah, they’re simple things, but they really do look magical.
Imani Perry [00:25:06] Yeah, they absolutely look magical and similar to the painting of porches, haint blue or the adornment of yards with morning glories which sprawl all over the place. And they just, you know, they open in the morning in this gorgeous blue tone. It’s, it’s, yeah, it’s, it’s quite moving the way that people, particularly in rural southern communities, may beauty every single day.
Krys Boyd [00:25:35] There have been occasions when black people in this country have been able to turn racist myths around in ways that might help them challenge their subjugation. You talk about this trope around people who have blue gums.
Imani Perry [00:25:48] Yeah, it’s funny. I mean, it’s sort of shocking as well. So there’s was this myth that was quite commonly circulated, what quite commonly circulated in the late 19th through the early 20th century that if you were bitten by a black person with blue gums, you would die. That thought that the bite of a black person with blue gums was poisonous. And this myth was so resilient that I even found it in dental journals. You know, people had journals, newspapers, The Atlantic, even Faulkner. And some of the writing refers to blue gums. And at first I thought, well, is this just sort of a bit of racist lore but what I found is that that myth was held by black people, too, and black people circulated it. And in some sense that makes sense because there even though it’s kind of, you know, it’s predicated on this idea of black people as dangerous. It also entails a kind of mystical power. Oftentimes it was said that people with blue gums were especially good at conjure and hoodoo. And so they you know, it was sort of it was it was part of the power of of being able to work roots or to turn the world on its head in this in your own interest. And so it was one of those things where a kind of a trope, a myth that could be easily applied in racist ways also could be a form of kind of arguing for a bit of power. And you can imagine that if that if someone believed in that myth, knowing the close physical proximity, particularly of elite white people and Black people in the South, people who were in their homes, people who were taking care of their children, the idea that someone that close to you could just turn around and bite you and kill you, it did produce a sense of some power as sort of unpleasant as that kind of myth could be. And so I was really I was really fascinated by the kind of, you know, the complexity of that kind of imagery. The other thing is that, you know, now we know that pretty much a human body can kill somebody because there’s so many so much bacteria in people’s mouths. And so if you weren’t now we know that if you were if you’re bitten by a person and it’s not treated, you can be very, very ill. Right. But then earlier, before that was a widespread form of knowledge. It was kind of easy to turn that into a a racial myth.
Krys Boyd [00:28:28] What is the sound that musicians refer to as a blue note or a blue note?
Imani Perry [00:28:34] Yeah. So it is it’s so interesting because I took great pains to explain it. And what’s fascinating about that is if you’re a listener of American music, which sort of means the whole world, because the whole world listens to American music, you’ve heard it. It is a note that is bent or worried or slurred on the Western scale, and it is one of the understood as one of the primary contributions of African Americans to American music. But part of what’s interesting about that is that it is in some ways, you know, it’s this note that stands out on the Western scale, but it’s a note that stands inside the blues scale or other West African musical scales. And I find it to be this really potent symbol of how black people fit into the United States and in the world. You know, in for African Americans, we are deeply American. And yet there’s a way in which we stand apart because of the history of race in this country. And yet we are also connected to the rest of the world of people of African descent through all of these arteries of inherited traditions and flows from here to there. And the ways in which we’ve had similar encounters with various cultures. And so the Blue Note is a literal it’s a literal sound. You know, it’s a set of sounds really it’s not a single note, and it’s a sound that is a signature feature of blues music, which provides the foundation to so much American music. But it’s also a symbol of of how, you know, black people fit into the national project. And in some ways, the world.
Krys Boyd [00:30:23] The thing about blues music that you note in the book is that it is not exclusively sad. It does always, expressed deep feelings. How is it possible that many people hear a blues song and come away with a feeling of joy?
Imani Perry [00:30:37] Yeah, I mean, because it’s it’s wonderful news. Great. That’s part of what music does for us. I, I, you know, there is this kind of motif of saying, you know, you, you play the blues when you have the blues to get over the blues, you know, you have this power of actually of of a kind of catharsis or a working through of emotions, through art. And, you know, I say this over and over again, that part of the tradition I’m writing about is creating beauty at the sight of wounds, so that if you can play a song about, you know, how you know, nobody loves me but my mama and she may be jiving too, right. That kind of formulation. And then through the creation of Something beautiful, make people get up and dance or laugh or you experience the pleasure of creation yourself. I mean, that is what it means to be human, I think. And so beyond the just the absolute beauty of the form, you know, it’s it’s beautiful music. It has this emotional it does this emotional work that I think is really quite important. And yeah, and deeply moving.
Krys Boyd [00:31:54] What was Louis Armstrong singing about in his song Black and Blue.
Black and Blue Louis Armstrong Lyrics [00:31:58] Cold empty bed, springs hard as lead. Feel like Old Ned, wish I was dead. What did I do to be so black and blue?
Imani Perry [00:32:25] So this is you know, this song is is so powerful because it’s a cover. What did I do to be so black and lose is the refrain and the original song is actually about something that happens within the black community where, you know, the person who was singing it was a deeply brown skinned black woman who was talking about colourism and the preference that that she was experiencing, the men around her having for lighter skinned women. Well, Louis Armstrong changes the lyrics and reinterprets it and uses it to talk about the condition of being black in this country and the way that he he you know, it’s the black and blue is so layered. Of course, on one level, it’s black and blue in the sense of being bruised and beaten up. On another level, it’s black and blue in the sense of being blue or melancholy. And on another level still, it’s actually about that creative work, the blues. And he and the song itself is really interesting because he’s using the phrasing and the kind of the kind of lyrics of blues music. But the song is is a jazz composition. So you get the sense of, you know, the blues as the foundation for the work that he’s known for, which is, you know, as a jazz artist. So there’s all these multiple things that are happening in this one song that has rather simple lyrics and straightforward lyrics about, you know, kind of sad and downtrodden. And it’s about a personal life, but you know, that it’s about race and you know that it is about struggle. But you also know that it is about the power of creativity.
Krys Boyd [00:34:12] It was union soldiers who wore blue uniforms during the Civil War. So for Black Americans, especially enslaved Black Americans, the sight of those uniforms might have signified the approach of freedom. And then after the war, blue uniforms are repurposed for police forces. Did that happen literally like union uniforms were redesigned to outfit law enforcement officers in that day?
Imani Perry [00:34:36] Yes. I mean, in the process, the police force is sort of it’s not a you know, police the establishment of police forces happens in fits and starts in various ways. So yes. But then it’s not necessarily those uniforms as the color blue look proliferates and becomes associated with policing. But that early use of former union Army uniforms for police forces in American cities becomes the process by which it becomes the color of police officers. And I just add, the other piece is that, you know, the boys in blue represented union soldiers coming to bring freedom back for the black men who fought in the Union Army and literally saved the Union Army from defeat. Blue uniforms became what they wore to free themselves. So it has this power and then it becomes associated with policing that. Truly throughout the 19th and 20th century is a really is a source of a really difficult relationship between African-Americans and the government. And I am not and I want to be careful about how I say this, because there’s this ongoing set of stories about different difficulty with police officers. And I think it’s sort of often misunderstood because it’s not really so much about the question of discrimination amongst police officers or not, but it’s about the reality of a history in which Black people were seen as not fully legitimate members of the nation. First, not citizens presumed to be slaves or presumed to be, you know, inferior or not appropriate to be in various spaces. And so the law enforcement arm of the government was often the work that they were doing is to put black people in their place. And this creates a culture that is very fraught and intense throughout American history. So then when you get to the 21st century and you have a dynamic like, you know, the response to the argument that Black Lives Matter is blue lives matter, as though the recognition of black lives is threatening to and the value of black life is threatening to police officers. It’s when you think about it, it’s pretty shocking and even disorienting until you think about, well, what are the histories of these of this social location and this institution in this country? And so I’m trying to tell a story that maybe is felt intuitively, but but not understood quite in that way.
Krys Boyd [00:37:30] What is Egyptian blue?
Imani Perry [00:37:33] So Egyptian blue is this particular. You mean first, I’m sure most of your listeners have seen it. It is the color blue we associate with all that Egyptian iconography. If you’ve seen the exhibitions of, you know, the King Tut exhibition that was national many years ago, or even just that Egyptian iconography that cycles through American designers and interests and culture all the time. So it’s this it’s a particular blue, the font that had a formula that was produced in ancient Egypt and that was very hard to reproduce. And it’s relevant for my book because George Washington Carver, who is the man who is generally known as the scientist at Tuskegee, who made the peanut great, who had all this formula for the peanut, actually made a formula, created a formula to replicate Egyptian blue. He also made other blues in paint. These are paint formulas. He also made other blues. He made a gorgeous Prussian blue as well. And so and this excited people from paint companies. And so they went down to Tuskegee, where he was a member of the faculty, then Tuskegee Institute at Tuskegee University to adopt, you know, to figure out how to make this color, which is, you know, just exciting to sort of learn this detail of the George Washington Carver story. But the larger piece of what I wanted to say, the larger part of Carver’s story that I really wanted to talk about was that, you know, we talk about him as a scientist, but he was also an artist. He painted landscapes and flowers, and he also made paint formula. And he also walked in the woods and figured out multiple uses of plants. And while he was in the woods, he talked to God. And he was also a person who looked at his environment, wasn’t from the South, is from the Midwest. And he when he went to Tuskegee, he looked around and noticed the way people were trying to beautify their homes and their environments and was inspired by that and said that he wanted to make beautiful colors for poor people when he made paint a formula. And so, you know, Carver was a Renaissance man for sure, but he’s also this person who lived a full life. And I loved. To think about people in their fullness as opposed to the sort of silos of what category of work they did or or, you know. And I think he becomes this opportunity to think about how people are shaped by everything around them and shape everything around them in turn. So this person who created a formula for Egyptian blue is also a person who’s creating delicious desserts for people in his community, who’s also the person who’s teaching young people who come to Tuskegee, often from the most arduous of circumstances and making scientists of them. And so he’s a he’s a marvelous historical figure who has been unfortunately flattened. And so I hope this this chat, a little chat I have on him adds a little to a fuller story of who he was.
Krys Boyd [00:40:53] At the end of the book, you share the story of a man you knew as Brother Blue. Will you tell us about him?
Imani Perry [00:41:00] Yeah. Brother Blue was a precious human being, so I met him when I was a little girl. We moved to my mother and I moved to Massachusetts for her to graduate, go to graduate school at Harvard. And he was a man who told stories. He was a Black man from Cleveland and he wore all blue. He wore a kind of denim suit with a tan, not a formal suit, but like a kind of a buttoned down and some and some jeans. He called them his rags, and he often had streamers, rainbow colored streamers falling off of his suit and butterflies pinned all over him. And he was, I mean, really a storyteller. And he would tell different versions of classic stories, like he had a jazz inflected version of King Lear, but he also told stories that were of his own creation. And what was so compelling to me, I mean, as a kid, I just loved his storytelling, you know, And everybody would listen to him, you know, it would be like, you know, five and six year olds like me and it would be Nobel laureates and it would be like, you know, how houseless people and who hung around in the square. And it would be students. You know, there was a beautiful cross-section of people who gathered to hear him tell stories. When I learned his story and his story of coming up in the context of the Great Depression and fighting in World War Two and making his way to Harvard, he wrote a letter to the president of Harvard and was admitted because he had served so well in World War Two and in seeing his image in the Harvard yearbook. And he is this straight laced, kind of like that classic image of like an NAACP lawyer looking young man. I mean, and and so I see this person who has this sort of these classic sort of markers of achievement against the odds. And but he doesn’t decide to go become a lawyer or a civil rights leader, but to become a person who tells stories on the street. And that that was the fulfilling of his calling. And I am so moved by that that choice, it was not self interested in the conventional way, but self-interested in the sense that he found where his gifts ought to lie. And then I also talk about his wife, Ruth Hale, who was an archivist who worked at the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University and founded the Black Women’s Oral History Project, and she accompanied him and was quiet and much more reserved. You know, he had this big personality. And when I thought about them together and I used to try to sort of walk behind them because I love to see the way they interacted with each other, it was the most sort of precious love affair. And and I thought about them and realized, you know, she was a person who was a keeper of stories as an archivist and he was a storyteller. And those two roles are always dependent on each other, even though often we pay attention to the storyteller, often that’s where the charisma is. But the keeper of stories is necessary to the one who preserves, the one who makes sure that we have them for generations to come. And so I just felt, you know, appropriate that they because they were so important to me that they that they took they had a role in this book.
Krys Boyd [00:44:30] Imani Perry is a National Book Award winning author, Henry A. Morss Jr., and Elisabeth W. Morss, Professor of Studies of Women, Gender and Sexuality, and of African and African-American studies at Harvard University, also a 2023 MacArthur Fellow. Her newest book is called “Black and Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People.” Imani, thank you so much for making time for the conversation.
Imani Perry [00:44:53] Thank you so much for having me.
Krys Boyd [00:44:55] Think is distributed by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. You can find us on Facebook, Instagram and anywhere you get podcasts. The website is think.kera.org. Again, I’m Krys Boyd. Thanks for listening. Have a great day.
