The Trouble of Color: An American Family Memoir

by Martha S. Jones

Overview

An “intimate and searching” (Natasha Trethewey, New York Times–bestselling author of Memorial Drive) memoir of family, color, and being Black, white, and other in America, from “one of our country’s greatest historians” (Clint Smith, #1 New York Times–bestselling author of How the Word is Passed)

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. 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, The Trouble of Color is a lyrical, deeply felt meditation on the most fundamental matters of identity, belonging, and family.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781541601000
Publisher:	Basic Books
Publication date:	03/04/2025
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Martha S. Jones is the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor, professor of history, and a professor at the SNF Agora Institute at the Johns Hopkins University. A prizewinning author and editor of four books, most recently Vanguard, she is past copresident of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians and has contributed to the New York Times, Atlantic, and many other publications. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

Editorial Reviews

The Trouble of Color is a pointed rebuttal to those who still insist that enslaved peoples’ histories are unknowable, or that Black people cannot be trusted as narrators of their own past…Jones has done more than honor her family’s history; she reinscribes their story on the tablet of our collective imagination.”—New York Times

“Relying on years of extensive research, family records and interviews, Jones constructs a moving narrative, bringing her ancestors to life…The Trouble of Color is a genealogy with staying power that will change the way readers understand race.” —Bookpage (starred review)

“A deftly woven multigenerational tapestry that celebrates the complexity of African American history and identity.”—Kirkus

“Martha S. Jones is one of our country’s greatest historians. Her work has provided us with the tools, the language, and the insight to better understand our collective past. Now, in her book The Trouble of Color, she has turned her historian’s eye towards her own family, and in the process has allowed us to be part of a remarkable journey of discovery. Elegantly written and painstakingly researched, The Trouble of Color has inspired me to look deeper into my own family history. I am so grateful to have this book as a model. I am so grateful that Martha Jones has shared her family’s story with all of us.”—Clint Smith, #1 New York Times–bestselling author of How the Word is Passed

“Blending meticulous archival research—the gifted historian’s keen-eyed ability to find the luminous details that animate the overlooked and nearly-erased past—with the truth-seeker’s willingness to ask difficult questions of the self, Martha S. Jones has crafted a capacious account of a remarkable family’s history over five generations. Intimate and searching, The Trouble of Color examines what it means to be truly seen, brilliantly excavating the personal in service of a deeper understanding of public history, of American lives shaped—across time and space—by the color line.”—Natasha Trethewey, New York Times–bestselling author of Memorial Drive

“The Trouble of Color most definitely troubles some supposedly still waters. Martha S. Jones deftly wraps an engaging, suspenseful story around the complicated story of color and complexion in this empire. I'm most wowed by the playfulness of the prose here. Superb writing. Necessary work.”
 —Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy

“Through richly descriptive language and revealing personal insight, The Trouble of Color invites us to join the prize-winning historian Martha S. Jones on her courageous quest to recover and confront a troubling racial and family history. This multi-generational memoir is at once moving, surprising, disturbing, and unsettling. Jones presents the multi-racial and mixed-race members of a Black family tree branching back to the early 19th century, exploring how they ‘wore’ and experienced their lighter-than-most skin and carried the mantle and advantages of the ‘talented tenth’ even as they bore private burdens of memory, identity, discrimination, and representation.”—Tiya Miles, National Book Award-winning author of All That She Carried

“In The Trouble of Color, award-winning historian Martha S. Jones shares the unforgettable story of her family's travels along the ‘jagged color line’ of the United States. It is a story of African American striving under duress, and a testament to the beautiful complexity of African American identity. Jones writes with the intellect and rigor of a superb historian and the heart and soul of a Black woman who insists upon her place in the rugged American landscape.”—Imani Perry, National Book Award-winning author of South to America

“The Trouble of Color illustrates not just Martha S. Jones’s enormous talents as a writer and historian, but also her remarkable generosity. She has shared her family and herself, gifting us an intimate and powerful chronicle of American lives made by the color line. An unforgettable, necessary book.”—Ada Ferrer, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Cuba

“The Trouble of Color is an astonishing literary feat by an author who combines the scholarly brilliance of a professional historian with the fearless curiosity of a memoirist determined to unlock the family story inscribed in her very being. As she climbs the branches of her ancestral tree through painstaking archival research and the great gathering of stories passed down from one generation to the next, Martha S. Jones personalizes the color line that Du Bois wrote about so prophetically in The Souls of Black Folk. In doing so, Jones traces that line’s jagged edges through the bloodlines of an American family whose extraordinary tale of survival reaches back into the darkest corners of slavery through emancipation and the civil rights struggle that made her own story possible.”—Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University

“Martha S. Jones displays her deft historical acumen in this beautifully written, powerfully engaging, genre-spanning work. As history, it leads readers from slavery to freedom in a nation that remained fixated on color. As memoir, it complicates and deconstructs the experiences of mixed-race Americans in brave and honest prose. The Trouble of Color is a mighty book.”—Erica Armstrong Dunbar, author of Never Caught

“The best memoirs tell us something about our shared history, and ourselves. Through deep research and masterful storytelling, The Trouble of Color does exactly that, with a narrative that spans centuries, regions, unforgettable characters, and shifting social norms around the ever complex and often menacing color line. Martha S. Jones has a knack for making history both accessible and unforgettable. With this powerful exploration of her remarkable family, she has delivered yet another masterpiece.”—Michele Norris, author of Our Hidden Conversations

“To tell the story of race in America well requires rigor, fortitude, and vulnerability. Martha S. Jones's evocative and perceptive memoir does that, and so much more. The Trouble of Color shows how intimately the story of race maps onto our lives and bodies, and the spaces and stories Black families carve for themselves beyond it in order to be whole.”—Salamishah Tillet, Pulitzer Prize–winning critic

From the Publisher

2025-01-16
How generations of a biracial family found their lives shaped—and distorted—by the color line.

A light-skinned African American, New York native Jones had a life-changing epiphany in college when a fellow student implied that she was “not [Black] enough.” It was then she realized that her racially ambiguous appearance “unsettled, perplexed, and even provoked.” In this book that began as a quest in her 20s to understand her family roots and took her to Kentucky and North Carolina, the Johns Hopkins history professor examines how perceptions of color affected different generations of men and women in her family. For some, like the light-skinned grandfather who led a historically Black women’s college, living close to the color line caused painful misunderstandings and a “theft” of identity. Historians writing about him called him white, on the basis of photographs rather than background, which included a formerly enslaved mother and free person of color father. Those in her family who chose to intermarry faced some combination of legal and social discrimination. A white great-great-grandmother from the pre–Civil War era who chose to marry a man of color not only “gave up her past” but also lived in fear of facing penalties for breaking federal anti-miscegenation laws. Jones’ own white mother married her Black father in 1950s Jim Crow America. The difficulties the couple experienced included obstacles buying a home together and social isolation. The price Jones paid as the pair’s biracial child was to be defined as a legal ambiguity along the same color line that had so bedeviled her ancestors. Eloquent, candid, and meticulously researched, this book will appeal to both lovers of family memoir and scholars of Black history.

A deftly woven multigenerational tapestry that celebrates the complexity of African American history and identity.

Kirkus Reviews