The Trouble of Color

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”
 

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”