The History of Blackness Is Entwined With Blue
Cover of Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People by Imani Perry (Ecco, 2025), featuring Titus Kaphar’s “Seeing Through Time” (2018), oil on panel (image courtesy Ecco)
Editor’s Note: The following text has been excerpted with permission and adapted from Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People (© 2025 by Imani Perry), published by Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, and available online. The n-word appears below in quotes that the author uses to analyze language, power, and art.
When Édouard Manet painted Jeanne Duval, her vision was failing. It was near the end of her life, and she needed assistance walking. Syphilis was killing her. Manet captured her in a bed overwhelmed by a dress so fluffy and white she seemed to be swallowed by it. The 1862 title of the painting followed suit: “Baudelaire’s Mistress.” (Now it is called “Woman with a Fan.”) She was described as only an appendage to the Frenchman. Duval had been described in the writer’s work frequently. She and Baudelaire were long-term lovers, though she remained an exotic to his pen and mind. He referred to her home, Haiti, as a “hot blue land.” And in one of his poetic dedications to her he wrote “Blue-black hair, pavilion hung with shadows / You give back to me the blue of the vast round sky; / In the downy edges of your curling tresses / I ardently get drunk with the mingled odors / Of oil of coconut, of musk and tar.” The implied blue-blackness under her skin — the Haiti, the Africa, within a woman who, based on Manet’s painting, we know was light-skinned enough to be blue-veined — was titillation for Baudelaire and his readers. In the painting, the shadows of her dress and fan are blue; her hair and eyes, black.
It is a strange but persistent thing: to be possessed, desired, revolting. This triad of relations to power has been a long burden of Blackness, and its people.
A visitor taking a photo of Édouard Manet’s “Woman with a Fan” (1862) in the exhibition Black models: from Géricault to Matisse at the Musee d’Orsay in Paris in 2019 (photo by Francois Guillot/AFP via Getty Images)
When Charles Baudelaire was just a teenager, Charles Lewis Tiffany founded Tiffany & Co. with a $500 loan from his father, a cotton mill owner in New England, and another $500 from his partner, John Young. The family had been cotton traders and, like Brooks Brothers, had dressed enslaved liverymen. The business flourished, of course, when it entered the modern diamond market. First, diamonds were mostly mined in Brazil with enslaved labor, but by 1900, it was overwhelmingly done by South African Black laborers controlled by the De Beers Consolidated Mines company. The little blue box with a sparkling jewel inside it that would become so iconic had at its root Black people, Black labor, and African land, exploited and expended. Do you see the pattern? There is no easy way to describe what it is to be racially, bodily, devalued and at the same time to provide — in land, flesh, and labor — precisely what is highly valued. The conundrum has had to be lived with and through for centuries. In an 1890 guidebook on West Africa, a vexing description of mixed-race beauty appears,
“With her Andalousian complexion, her delicately blue-stained lips, her jet-black hair that frames two melodious curls of gold filament, her hairstyle, which she calls Dioumbeul, standing several centimeters in the air. Made of flamboyant madras scarves, simple Senegalese scarves with small blue and white squares, or white satin embroidered with fiery red roses, these strange head-dresses shaped like sugar-loaves are wrapped around the head by a narrow black or colored band. This monumental ‘dioumbeul’ offers the allure of a triple-crowned papal tiara, as a garland embroidered with gold fringe spirals it three times.”
The reader is supposed to imagine her beauty. It seems that great pleasure was taken in putting together these words of description and gazing upon her body. And yet such pleasure did not disrupt the colonial project. It did not ensure respect or dignity, for her or the others. In fact, it could fuel an eagerness to conquer and oppress. Admiration was no protection, and of course neither was its opposite: insult. Caricatured Blackness in the figure of someone like “Long Tail Blue” — a dandy in blackface beautifully dressed but considered absurd for the effort — was mocked yet desired. The delight taken in his movement and elegance was also a form of humiliation.
In the appeal and revulsion, mixed together and projected onto Blackness, something emerged that is even more important and much more challenging than recognizing the deep contradiction. The push and pull have become the basis for a fundamental distrust that still lies deep. A White smile, a White compliment, a White invitation — could they be trusted any more than the snarl? The questions can’t be dismissed as paranoia. I wonder if anyone will talk about this every time we cycle through performances of racial healing. It is a miserable and disorienting thing to wonder. But it could not and cannot be avoided. An eerie matrix of wanting was cultivated in the close quarters of bodies and feelings that live inside both the slave state and the colonial enterprise. And it was so intense that even objects became imbued with the contradictions of race. We become things. Things become us. Boucle fabric, made of looped yarn of wool or mohair into a cloudlike surface, suggested Blackness. An 1886 fabric advertisement announced, “Nigger head boucle at 57 cents per yard.” In response to a query about an advertised fabric to a magazine titled Textile World in 1895, the editor replied that it “is an astrachan cloth on stockinet back, although it somewhat resembles what is called nigger head boucle. We find the sample almost completely matched at Jordan Marsh & Co.’s in Boston . . .” The wearer of a boucle coat, cloche, or purse would be — at least symbolically — adorning themselves with the hair of a Black person, I suppose like a skinned calf or rabbit. They became a little bit Black, it seems, with adornment. Coats advertised as “nigger head blue” were midnight in color and softly coiled in texture, enclosing the wearer somewhere between blackness and the darkest night.
It wasn’t unusual for the slur to be used in advertising in everything from candy to coal, and even plant life. Anything with a fuzzy crown, from echinacea to cacti, could refer pejoratively to Black people and their distinctive heads of hair. And it was wanted. The same is true of color. In the 1920s and ’30s, “nigger brown” was advertised as a color for coats, mostly referring to dark brown. But in millinery advertisements of the same period, it was also common to see “nigger blue” as a selection. “Nigger blue” didn’t have a completely consistent meaning, however. In some places it was identified as a milky greenish blue, and in others a very dark blue. I suppose the latter is a version of blue-black. Maybe the lighter one was the color of their worn denim clothes, like what was once called “negro cotton.”
Blue-blackness wasn’t only donned; it was consumed. A 1937 recipe for the alcoholic beverage “Blue Nigger” is 25 percent Jamaica rum, 50 percent grapefruit juice, 25 percent French vermouth, and a dash of gomme syrup. Shake and strain. The drink is a golden color. The blue can’t possibly then have referred to the color of the drink. Instead, it must have referred to feeling. What a thought: the idea that a White person could get drunk enough to become a Black person with the blues.
In the early-20th-century period of Egyptmania, paint catalogs featured references to the browns and blues of Egypt, like Luxor and Nile, colors we would call russet or mahogany, turquoise and teal. These were also colors of Black people’s bodies and adornment. The same color could be a slur and a praise. Brown could be both luxurious and grotesque, and blue adornment could be garish or gorgeous. I suppose that is part of what racism consists of, painstaking yet wild sorting of things into good and bad where they don’t exist naturally. We must be trained to see colors in particular and sometimes contradictory ways for racism to function.
Charles Baudelaire, Jeanne Duval’s famous lover, is known for several things. One is the concept of the flaneur, who exists “amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite.” Another is the concept of modernism. Duval moved too, traversing the globe like Baudelaire did. She traveled from Haiti to France, and then, as she was ailing, she moved all about France on crutches. But her movement was not what we would consider exactly free. She was a burdened flaneur. Each step was fraught and constrained by the way she was moved about, literally and figuratively, in the poet’s imagination. Duval was a modern subject, and she was objectified. Cosmopolitan and global yet flattened by lust and disgust. Pleasure and denigration: These are central features of how racism would be performed in the 20th century and into our 21st. The dance between the two extremes would employ generations of Black entertainers — who were and are asked to be ugly caricatures and intoxicating exotics both. It would be a different form of exploitation than sharecropping, mining, and factory working, one that had to be negotiated delicately. Art was treacherous when you wanted to eat, to work, to create. Black artists learned to smile while singing the blues and to rage on the electric guitar.
Ambivalence about Black people is a key to why we have been depicted as dangerous. We titillate as much as we threaten, in the imaginations of those who have dominated and the throngs who believe the domination is right and good. Black people aren’t the only ones to be cast in contradiction in imperial imaginations. It is a long-repeated strategy. But here I’m sitting with what it did and does to the inside of Black life. The spiraling reduction of who we are to a vice, a fad, a yearning, and then a pestilence is exhausting. The moral panics around each branch of Black art, integration, political leadership, books, music, dance, style, anything that captivates a mixed audience, leads to this (usually implied) question in one form or another: “Will we be destroyed if we fall prey to Black wiles?” The olive branch of art, “Enjoy this beauty,” is read as “We will corrupt your children and maybe even you.” And this adds another layer of distrust that is already so well-earned. How can we believe what you say — the claim that you don’t have any racist bones — when we’ve seen what you’ve done and said about us, to paraphrase Baldwin, even and especially when kindness comes belatedly after much contemplation and consternation? Black watching, worry, caution, are wise because what if the ones holding out their hands don’t, in fact, shake yours warmly, but instead snatch you into snares? And you lose your balance, gone in an instant, like a fly in a Venus flytrap?
🔗 Source: Original Source
📅 Published on: 2025-01-30 00:07:00
🖋️ Author: Imani Perry – An expert in architectural innovation and design trends.
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