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The Trouble of Color

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What to expect

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.

Critics Review

“Martha 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 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 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
Author Martha S. Jones
Narrator Martha S. Jones
Duration 9 hours and 7 minutes
Release Date
ISBN 9781668647974
Format Audiobook
Publisher Hachette Audio
Genre Biography: general, Ethnic studies, History of the Americas, Local history
Availability US

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