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Alison Stewart: You are listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. In case you haven't heard, our Get Lit with All Of It book club event is coming up next week, but there's still time to pick up and finish our selection. This month, we're reading the latest book from National Book Award winner Imani Perry. It is titled Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People. The book is an exploration of the relationship between Black Americans and the color blue from the role of indigo dye in the slave trade to rhythm and blues.

Imani will be joining us for an in-person and virtual event on Wednesday, February 26th. We're also thrilled to announce that this month, we have two very special Grammy-winning musical guests. Esperanza Spalding and Bilal will be with us for a unique collaborative performance. You won't want to miss it. You can get your tickets now. New Yorkers can borrow an e-copy of the book from the New York Public Library by heading to wnyc.org/getlit. Now, let's hear a bit of my preview conversation with Imani Perry. I began by asking what inspired her to write about the color blue.

Imani Perry: Well, it seemed like it was this recurring theme in my life. My grandmother's bedroom, which was the first home that I lived in, was blue with blue drapes and blue prayers in the corners of the mirror. I think maybe that was a portal. Then, of course, the blues and the recurrence of blue and Black folk culture and haint blue porches in South Carolina and so on and so forth. It just was present in a way that appeared to me. I just had a passion for telling the story and here we are.

Alison Stewart: Why do you think blue is such a beloved color even though it's sometimes associated with the emotion of sadness?

Imani Perry: Well, I think because it's contrapuntal, that is it can capture both sadness and joy. It's the color of the waters and the skies. It's both a color for cold and hot, blue flames and the coldness of the--

Alison Stewart: Blue ice.

Imani Perry: Blue ice. I think it has this ability to resonate in multiple ways. I think of it as the world's favorite color.

Alison Stewart: Would you read a section called Writing in Color for us?

Imani Perry: All right. I'd like to. "In the beginning, when I was just calling this my blue book, I read books and essays about colors. I loved how the writers ran through the signs, symbols, and feelings associated with various hues. Some of these works read more like ornamental lists than narratives. As much as I enjoyed them, I knew my task was different from their authors. I didn't want to write an exegesis on blue. I realized I wanted to write toward the mystery of blue and its alchemy in the lives of Black folk."

"As far back as I can remember, I was aware of belonging to a group for whom the word 'color' was potent. The color of your skin, colored people, colorful people, and people of color are all phrases that are associated with us Black Americans. While black is our nominal color, even though our bodies range from alabaster to jet, the blues are our sensibility. Hence, the designation made famous by the writer, Amiri Baraka, blues people."

"Like most of my skin folk, I would guess, I have an intuitive sense of what it means to be Black. When I have tried to use my scholarly training to offer accounts of the how and why we are this, for lack of better word, thing, my descriptions feel distorting. Disquisitions about the political economy, about race as an ideology, and/or social construct of modernity. Something a little bit phenotypic, round, coily-haired, but not completely reducible to that at all. Genealogical but certainly not biological."

"An existence born of empire ships, captivity, colonies and trade, a living molded by bias and bigotry. All of it feels too clinical. These concepts can't fully capture important truths like how it was that people held in the bottoms of slave ships survived so many figurative shipwrecks and literal ones too. Academic descriptions of blackness fail to explain how at the heart of being Black is a testimony about the universal power of existence."

"I wanted to write you and me something more. I wanted to offer truth with a heartbeat, and so I steadily collected Black stories of blue and the blues, both literal and figurative. As I plotted them out, I found that my collection of tales was already bound together in a tight weave. I wasn't constructing a story. I was revealing and witnessing, quilting something present."

"Along the way, I learned much more than I already knew about what it means to be a blues people. Events, artifacts, sound, color, breath, death, and depth spoke to me and through me, and that is this book. In it, loose threads and frayed patches are as important as seamless compositions and straight-stitched stories. Perhaps more so because life is neither tidy nor done. It is doing."

Alison Stewart: That was Imani Perry reading from her book Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People. It's our February Get Lit with All Of It book club selection. To find out more, head to wnyc.org/getlit. What was your research process like for this book? How do you research a color?

Imani Perry: Well, it had a variety of different approaches. I would come upon a story. Say, for example, I was interested once I learned about the patches of periwinkle flowers that tend to be in the Upper South that are signs that the enslaved were buried underneath. That led me to archival records and also to physical locations where I could see where these beds of periwinkle were and also archaeological research or when I was reading about haint blue porches in South Carolina that was both studying the meaning of blue in West African cultures, but also how indigo was cultivated, to what extent enslaved people used indigo on their own, looking at personal narratives, stories, newspapers, all kinds of resources.

Once I came upon something that I wanted to focus in on, then I went to a lot of different types of materials. My research self was fully engaged. It's like quilting. You pull these pieces together and you [inaudible 00:07:05] shape of the story you want to tell, knowing you can't write too much about each topic because it has this larger narrative, but the research was delightful. It was really, really interesting.

Alison Stewart: We ask all authors this. Is there something in the book that you would like our readers to pay particular attention to, something you worked very hard on or something you think is pivotal to the story you're telling through these essays?

Imani Perry: I want people to tend to what resonates with them. The piece that I haven't been asked much about that I do hope people pay closer attention to perhaps is the way in which Congo culture is thread through the Kingdom of Kongo and then, of course, the way in which Congo culture shaped African-American culture in the South. It really is an important element. It's a thread that gets retied in the 20th century as African-American organizers and activists are paying attention to what's happening in the Congo, the nation, in the 20th century. These threads of connection are really important to me, both the history and other parts of the African and African-American worlds.

Alison Stewart: We will ask you about it at our Get Lit event on February 26th at 6:00 PM. Imani Perry will be my guest. Thank you. Thank you so much for your time.

Imani Perry: Thank you for having me.

Alison Stewart: That was my conversation with Imani Perry about her new book, Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People. It's our February Get Lit with All Of It book club selection. On tomorrow's show, we'll talk about a new documentary exploring the life and the work of Art Spiegelman. He will be my guest. Plus, we'll hear some live performances from War and Treaty and talk about the husband-and-wife duo about their album Plus One. I'm Alison Stewart. I appreciate you listening and I appreciate you. I will meet you back here tomorrow.

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