THE TROUBLE OF COLOR: An American Family Memoir, by Martha S. Jones

When Martha S. Jones was a student at SUNY New Paltz, she took a course called “Black Sociology” with Prof. James Bowen. It was the mid-1970s, and the first Black studies department, founded at San Francisco State University at the height of 1960s student protests, was less than a decade old. As part of the first generation of African-descended young people to engage with Black culture and history in the college classroom, Jones was excited for all that Bowen’s class could offer. Despite her fair skin and “hair too limp” (her words), she relished the chance to become “sisters of the skin” with her classmates.

Rather than camaraderie, however, Jones experienced a humiliating confrontation while giving an oral presentation on Frantz Fanon’s book “A Dying Colonialism.” Looking back on the incident in her consummately readable, lyrically rendered new memoir, “The Trouble of Color,” Jones, an award-winning professor and gifted historian at Johns Hopkins University, acknowledges that her Blackness was not the same as Fanon’s. “Fanon came of age in colonized Martinique and then through military service and medical training,” she writes. “Instead, my self-discovery began in that cinder-block and linoleum upstate New York classroom.”

Anxious to please and struggling through her first attempt at public speaking, Jones gave a mechanical recitation of Fanon’s work, inciting protest from her classmates. One of the most vocal critics was Ron, a “suitably brilliant, handsome and outspokenly confident” student, who scoffed, “Enough of this. We shouldn’t have to listen to this. She doesn’t even know where the French Antilles are.”

Jones, the author of multiple, field-defining works of African American history, understands this painful moment as a consequence of adolescent racial gatekeeping, predicated on the other students’ assumptions about her Blackness. But as an 18-year-old, she attempted to deflect the accusation of racial inauthenticity by saying, “Well … the French Antilles are in France.”

She eventually befriended Ron but never forgot what he spat at her: “Who do you think you are?”

“The Trouble of Color” is an attempt to answer this question through a sophisticated analysis of race using Jones’s own family history as a prism, while implicitly arguing for the centrality of Black women scholars in the historical profession.

Jones’s paternal grandfather was David Dallas Jones (1887-1956), a North Carolina native, graduate of Wesleyan University and president of Bennett College, in Greensboro, N.C., now one of only two all-women H.B.C.U.s in the United States (Spelman College, in Atlanta, is the other). Jones knew him as “Grandy,” although he died before she was born.

The affectionate nickname belies David Jones’s significance. Under his presidency, Bennett, founded in 1873, became known as the “Vassar of the South,” a place where Black women, the children and grandchildren of enslaved people, obtained a rigorous liberal arts education in defiance of cultural expectations. Alumnae include Belinda Foster, North Carolina’s first Black woman district attorney; Carolyn Payton, the first Black woman head of the Peace Corps; and Gladys A. Robinson, a North Carolina state senator.

Martha Jones’s father, David Dallas Jones Jr., along with his siblings and kin, grew up within the segregated yet racially proud world of Bennett College, and the stories she heard about ancestors, enslaved and free, who navigated the 20th-century color line shaped her subsequent scholarship.

“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. In a moving passage at the beginning of the book, Jones describes her frustration during the 1980s and ’90s when, reviewing literature in the nascent field of Black women’s history, she uncovered secondary sources that whitewashed her family’s past. One source mistook her grandfather for white, an inference presumably derived from photos depicting his light complexion.

Another source, a scholar of the civil rights movement, misspelled the name of Susie W. Jones, David Dallas Jones’s wife and Martha’s beloved grandmother Musie, whom he’d interviewed for his book — an error as grating for Jones as it is for many Black women who have routinely been misnamed or decredentialed, either deliberately or in ignorance.

As Martha Jones puts it, “I boiled with outrage, and one of Musie’s stories came immediately to mind: In the Jim Crow years, she’d battled local white people to be addressed by her preferred name — ‘Mrs. Jones’ — rather than the overly familiar ‘Susie’ or the demeaning ‘Gal.’ For people like my grandmother, what they were called mattered.”

Jones’s account of these errors is particularly poignant coming at a time when a respected scholar and the first Black woman president of Harvard University can be dismissed as an incompetent “diversity hire.” Black women’s history, Jones insists, is vital for those who want to honor the generations of Black people who paved the way for our current achievements.

Although she never says so explicitly, Jones’s compelling descriptions of reading the archives, accompanied by images from the archives themselves, make clear that she understands the central role Black women historians have played in disrupting an academy that, like much of the world, constantly demands that we prove ourselves.

At one point, Jones recounts a visit to Oxmoor Farm, in Louisville, Ky., in search of traces of her oldest known ancestor.

Here Jones is at her analytical best, as she relates her ancestor Nancy Bell Graves’s enslavement to Martha Fry Bell, the wife of a Danville, Ky., merchant. After a dogged search, Jones unearths records of Nancy and her husband, Edmund, in the papers of a white professor and enslaver, Ormond Beatty. She discovers that Nancy had at least two sisters, Tinah and Betty — their names listed in holdings at Centre College in Danville that, according to the confident local archivist, contained no traces of Jones’s family.

This find leads Jones to the Filson Historical Society in Louisville and then to Oxmoor Farm, where she is struck by the decadence of a house museum maintained on the grounds where her ancestors were possibly enslaved. Jones enters Oxmoor in a state of high emotion, but she is comforted by the words of the historian Nell Irvin Painter, who advises colleagues to “remember the blood on the page” — a mantra that Jones, in a heartbreaking scene, repeats to herself as she searches for evidence of Nancy’s kin at Oxmoor. The experience is a reminder, she writes, that “the documents I sometimes read, though neat and elegantly scripted, had their origins in brutal force.”

In “The Trouble of Color,” Jones has done more than honor her family’s history; she reinscribes their story on the tablet of our collective imagination. On Jan. 4, Thavolia Glymph, a historian at Duke University, delivered her final address as president of the American Historical Association. Like Jones, Glymph is a towering figure in her field, part of the cadre of Black women scholars who inform so much of Jones’s work. In her speech, Glymph, the first Black woman to head the A.H.A., argued against popular assumptions, both within and outside the academy, that the stories of America’s enslaved people can never be told, and that the archive, as we have traditionally understood it, cannot be relied upon to reveal the intricacies of Black life.

“The archive of slavery is not a black hole,” Glymph said. “The desires of slaveholders are not of such density and gravity that the voices of enslaved people cannot be heard. This is not the archive of the enslaved with which I work. The archive I have, and that we have, is one in which enslaved people speak, loudly, and act with intention.”

At a time when Black history is under attack, Glymph asks us to recognize that those histories we deny or deem unknowable are everywhere in the historical record — precisely what Jones’s beautiful memoir confirms.

THE TROUBLE OF COLOR: An American Family Memoir | By Martha S. Jones | Basic Books | 314 pp. | $30