The Trouble of Color: An American Family Memoir

Martha S. Jones grew up feeling her Black identity was obvious to all who saw her. But weeks into college, a Black Studies classmate challenged Jones’s right to speak. Suspicious of the color of her skin and the texture of her hair, he confronted her with a question that inspired a lifetime of introspection: “Who do you think you are?” Now a prizewinning scholar of Black history, Jones delves into her family’s past for answers to that very question in The Trouble of Color: An American Family Memoir.

In every generation since her great-great-great-grandmother survived enslavement to raise a free family, color determined her ancestors’ lives. But the color line was shifting and jagged, not fixed and straight. Some backed away from it, others skipped along it, and others still were cut deep by its sharp teeth. Journeying across centuries, from rural Kentucky and small-town North Carolina to New York City and its suburbs, Jones offers a lyrical, deeply felt meditation on the most fundamental matters of identity, belonging, and family. In telling this story, Jones confronts the limits of the historian’s craft, while finding immeasurable skill and understanding in the very thing she is searching for: Family. 

She immediately recognized an error in the historical record, when her grandfather David Dallas Jones—who for three decades served as president of the historically Black women’s college, Bennett College—was labeled “a white businessman”. She knew better. His father had been a free man of color, and his mother was born enslaved. In the case of an archivist who could not locate crucial family records, Jones knew even the most seasoned of professionals is no match for a motivated descendant when it comes to combing through the depths of the past. She ended up finding the information herself and it surged her forward on her journey to finding the truth within the stories her ancestors told about themselves and the tales that others crafted about them. In her excavation of race and family, Jones respectfully finds and corrects the record. Born from a preoccupation with the people she comes from, paired with a dual and complicated sense of self, THE TROUBLE OF COLOR is a story about discovery, family, and country. It tells adeeply personal story about being Black, white, and other in America—defying preserved wisdomabout slavery, racism, passing, Jim Crow, colorism, and civil rights.

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