Publisher's note: The following text was extracted 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 publishers harfercollins, and available online. The word does not appear below under the quotes that the author uses to analyze language, power and art.
When Édouard Manet painted Jeanne Duval, his vision failed. It was towards the end of her life and she needed help on foot. Syphilis killed her. Manet captured her in a bed overwhelmed by such a soft and white dress that she seemed to swallow by her. The title of 1862 of the painting followed suit: “The mistress of Baudelaire”. (Now his name is “Woman with a fan. ) It was described as only an appendix for French. Duval had been described frequently in the work of the writer. She and Baudelaire were long -term lovers, although she remained exotic to her pen and her mind. And in one of his poetic dedications to her, he wrote “Hair Bleu-Noir, pavilion hanging on shadows / You give me the blue of the vast round sky; / In the edges of the down of your curling of curling / I get drunk ardently with the mixed odors / coconut oil, musk and tar. The blue implicit under its skin – Haiti, Africa, within a woman who, based on manet's painting, we know enough to the skin to be blue – was the titillation for Baudelaire and her readers.
It is a strange but persistent thing: to be possessed, desired, revolting. This triad of relations with power was a long burden of darkness and its people.
When Charles Baudelaire was only a teenager, Charles Lewis Tiffany founded Tiffany & Co. with a loan of $ 500 from his father, a cotton owner in New England and an additional $ 500 of his partner, John Young. The family had been cotton merchants and, like Brooks Brothers, had dressed the Livers enslaved. The company prospered, of course, when it entered the modern diamond market. First, the diamonds were mainly extracted in Brazil with enslaved work, but in 1900, it was massively carried out by South African black workers controlled by De Beers Consolidated Mines Company. The small blue box with a sparkling jewel inside that would become so emblematic had black root, black labor and African lands, exploited and spent. Do you see the model? There is no easy way to describe what it is to be racial, bodily, devalued and at the same time to provide – in the ground, in the flesh and in work – precisely what is very appreciated. The enigma had to be lived with and over for centuries. In a guide of 1890 on West Africa, a vexing description of mixed beauty appears,
“With her Andalusian Complex, Her Delicately Blue-Stahed 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-Drades Shaped likes sugar is rolled around the head by a narrow black or colorful band.
The reader is supposed to imagine his beauty. It seems that a great pleasure was taken in the process of gathering these words of description and looking at his body. And yet, such pleasure has not disrupted the colonial project. This did not guarantee respect or dignity, for it or the others. In fact, it could fuel the desire to conquer and oppress. Admiration was not protection, and of course, its opposite was not either: the insult. The caricatured darkness on someone's figure like “long Blue Tail” – a dandy in black beautifully dressed but considered absurd for effort – was mocked but desired. The pleasure taken in its movement and its elegance was also a form of humiliation.
In the appeal and repulsion, mixed together and projected on the darkness, something has emerged which is even more important and much more difficult than recognizing the deep contradiction. The push and traction have become the basis of a fundamental distrust which is always deep. A white smile, a white compliment, a white invitation – can they trust more than rumble? Questions cannot be rejected as paranoia. I wonder if someone will talk about it every time we go through racial healing performance. It is a miserable and disorienting thing to wonder. But he couldn't and cannot be avoided. A strange matrix to miss has been cultivated in the neighborhoods close to the bodies and feelings that live both in the state of slaves and the colonial enterprise. And it was so intense that even the objects impregnated the contradictions of the race. We Become things. Things become us. Fabric buckle, made of woolen or mohair loop thread in a cloud -shaped surface, suggested a darkness. A fabric advertisement of 1886 announced: “Nigger Head buckles 57 cents per meter”. In response to a question about a fabric announced to a magazine titled Textile world In 1895, the editor -in -chief replied that he “is an astrachan fabric on the Stockinet back, although it somewhat looks like what is called Nigger Head Boucle. We find the sample almost completely matching Jordan Marsh & Co. in Boston … “. The wearer of a loop coat, a bell or a handbag would be – at least symbolically – to assert with the hair of a black, I suppose like a skin with skin or a rabbit. They have become a little black, it seems, with a set. The coats announced as “Nigger Head Blue” were in midnight in color and rolled out gently rolled up with texture, surrounding the carrier somewhere between the darkness and the darkest night.
It was not unusual that suspension was used in advertising in everything, coal candies, and even in plant life. All that with a fuzzy crown, from echinacea to cacti, could refer pejoratively to blacks and their distinct hair heads. And it was wanted. The same goes for color. In the 1920s and 1930s, “Nigger Brown” was announced as a color for coats, mainly referring to dark brown. But in the advertisements of Millinerie of the same period, it was also common to see “Nigger Blue” as a selection. “Nigger Blue”, however, had no completely coherent sense. In some places, it has been identified as a milky greenish blue, and in others a very dark blue. I guess the latter is a version of Blue-Black. Perhaps the lightest was the color of their worn jeans clothes, as well as what was called “Negro cotton”.
The blue-black was not only put on; It was consumed. A recipe from 1937 for alcoholic “Blue” alcoholic drink is 25% of Jamaica rum, 50% grapefruit juice, 25% French vermouth and a pinch of gum syrup. Shake and tender. The drink is a golden color. Blue cannot then refer to the color of the drink. Instead, he must have referred to the feeling. What a thought: the idea that a white person could get drunk enough to become a black person with the blues.
In the period of the beginning of the 20th century of Egyptmania, the painting catalogs presented references to the brown and the Blues of Egypt, such as Luxor and Nile, colors that we called Ruste or mahogany, turquoise and Turreur. They were also colors of the blacks of blacks and sets. The same color could be an insult and a praise. The brown could be both luxurious and grotesque, and the blue adornment could be garish or magnificent. I guess that is part of what racism is, a meticulous sorting but wild of things in good and bad where they do not exist naturally. We must be trained at see Colors in particular and sometimes contradictory for racism to work.
Charles Baudelaire, the famous lover of Jeanne Duval, is known for several things. One is the concept of the flanor, which exists “in the middle of the flow and the movement flow, in the middle of the fugitive and the infinity”. Another is the concept of modernism. Duval also moved, crossing the globe as Baudelaire did. She traveled from Haiti to France, then, as she was going, she moved everything to France on crutches. But his movement was not what we would consider exactly free. She was an overwhelmed flattering. Each step was heavy and limited by the way it was moved, literally and figuratively, in the imagination of the poet. Duval was a modern subject and was objectified. Cosmopolitan and world but flattened by lust and disgust. Pleasure and denigration: these are central characteristics of the way in which racism would be carried out in the 20th century and in our 21st. The dance between the two extremes would use generations of black artists – who were and are invited to be ugly caricatures and intoxicating exotic. It would be a different form of exploitation from that of well-actions, mining and factory work, which had to be delicately negotiated. Art was treacherous when you wanted to eat, work, create. Black artists have learned to smile while singing the blues and raging on the electric guitar.
The ambivalence on blacks is the key to the reason why we have been described as dangerous. We titil as much as we threaten, in the imagination of those who have dominated and the crowds that believe that domination is good and good. Blacks are not the only ones to be thrown into contradiction in the imperial imagination. It is a long -term strategy. But here I sit with what he did and did inside black life. The spiral reduction of who we are to a vice, a fashion, a desire, then a plague is exhausting. The moral panics around each branch of black art, integration, political leaders, books, music, dance, style, everything that captivates a mixed audience, leads to this (generally implicit) question in one form or another: “Will we be destroyed if we fall into black tricks?” The branch of Olivier de l'art “Enjoy this beauty” is read as “we corrupt your children and maybe even you”. And this adds another layer of mistrust which is already so well deserved. How can we believe what you say – the assertion that you do not have racist bones – when we saw what you have done and said about us, to paraphrase Baldwin, even and especially when kindness comes late after a lot of contemplation and dismay? The observation of the blacks, the concern, the prudence, are wise because if those who stretch their hands do not shake, in fact, yours, but rather stop your collar? And you lose your balance, disappeared in an instant, like a fly in a Venus Flytrap?
