A surprising, beautiful meditation on the color blue—and its fascinating role in Black history and culture—from National Book Award winner Imani Perry

Throughout history, Black life has been remarkably intertwined with another color: blue. In daily life, it is evoked in countless ways, from the hopefulness of a blue sky to the deep melancholy of Louis Armstrong’s question, “What did I do to be so Black and blue?” In this book, celebrated author Imani Perry uses the world’s favorite color as a springboard for a riveting emotional, cultural, and spiritual journey—an examination of race and Blackness that transcends politics or ideology.

Perry traces both blue and Blackness from their earliest roots to their many embodiments of contemporary culture, drawing deeply from her own life as well as from art and history: the dyed indigo cloths of West Africa that were traded for human life in the sixteenth century; the fundamentally American art form of blues music, sitting at the crossroads of pain and pleasure; the blue flowers Perry plants to honor a loved one, gone too soon.

Poignant, spellbinding, and utterly original, Black in Blues is a brilliant work that could only have come from the mind of one of our greatest writers.