Posted on November 28, 2025 in Featured Review
Authors:
Hilary AquinoThe Trouble of Color: An American Family Memoir, by Martha S. Jones. Basic Books, 2025. 336p ISBN 9781541601000 $30.00, ISBN 9781541601024 $18.99
What can a family story teach readers about the history of the United States? The answer is quite a lot, if the family belongs to award-winning historian Martha S. Jones (Johns Hopkins Univ.). Those fortunate enough to read The Trouble of Color will follow Jones’s quest to answer the question she was confronted with in 1976, “Who do you think you are?” (p. 1) by the leader of the Black Student Union at college. That question is the title of the introduction to her memoir, an American family memoir, as the history of her family chronicled some of the most important and troubling aspects of American history, a history that some now seek to hide once again. Jones explains that “approaching the [color] line, I am tethered to the generations before me by ambiguous and even unspoken beginnings—expressed in skin too light, features too fine, hair too limp. I am the heir of misunderstandings, misapprehension, and mistaken identity” (p. 25). At a time when important parts of American history are being removed from government websites, books like The Trouble of Color become even more crucial than in previous years.
An award-winning academic (including a 2025 Guggenheim fellowship), Jones’s other works are scholarly histories. Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All (CH, Dec’21, 59-1160) is a political history of Black women’s contributions to rights campaigns through the Voting Rights Act. Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (CH, Jan’19, 56-2127) chronicles the ways in which African Americans constructed and defined their rights before the passage of the 14th Amendment. Before that, Jones analyzed the ways in which African American women worked within existing structures to create their own public culture in All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830–1900 (CH, Aug’08, 45-6984). She also served as co-editor of Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women (CH, Oct’15, 53-0963). All of her previous scholarly endeavors have laid the foundation for her most recent work.
Jones is clear that these inaccuracies enraged her, not only because they were about her own family members, but more so because they erased the histories of people who mattered, individuals whose lives altered the history of the United States.
A memoir is typically not considered a scholarly work because it does not undergo the peer review process. When a professional historian, who was also a former attorney turned legal scholar, is the memorialist, this issue becomes moot. Because Jones’s biracial family became a prominent one in the South, other historians had previously interviewed some of her family members, including her grandmother, whom she refers to as Musie (Susie W. Jones), and used their findings for their own academic writings. Details such as her grandmother’s full name were incorrect, while another historian misidentified her grandfather, David Dallas Jones, president of Bennett College, as a white businessman (pp. 13–14). Jones is clear that these inaccuracies enraged her, not only because they were about her own family members, but more so because they erased the histories of people who mattered, individuals whose lives altered the history of the United States.
The book is divided into eight chapters and would have benefited from a family tree to help readers keep track of the many names. In trying to piece together the story of her great-great-great-grandmother Nancy’s family and life in chapter 1, Jones reminds readers that “so much of the historical record was written with silence,” necessitating that she fill in the gaps with other types of sources (p. 37). Nancy was owned by a woman named Martha Fry Bell, so she was officially recorded as Nancy Bell. Upon Martha Fry Bell’s death, her son-in-law, Ormond Beatty, inherited Nancy and her children. Beatty’s account ledgers became important for tracking Nancy. He recorded all of her debts and credits for twenty years. This became a crucial source of information about one branch of Jones’s family, which had been overlooked by a previous archivist.
Jones posits that Mary would have been very worried about what the new census takers would think, as fornication and bastardy were both crimes in North Carolina, reminding readers that interracial marriages were illegal.
“Amalgamation” (chapter 2) highlights the risks of miscegenation. Jones’s great-uncle, known as The Bishop (whose papers are preserved at the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University), revealed that his grandmother, Mary, was a white woman who had married his grandfather, a free man and a shoemaker by trade. Census takers in 1840 classified the family, then with five children, as “free persons of color” (p. 70). The 1850 census required more information about race, reflecting fears of “mulatto degeneracy” (p. 70). Jones posits that Mary would have been very worried about what the new census takers would think, as fornication and bastardy were both crimes in North Carolina, reminding readers that interracial marriages were illegal. Jones’s own parents had an interracial marriage, and while Loving v. Virginia (1967) overturned anti-miscegenation laws, she still experienced some of their aftermath.
The story of Jones’s great-grandparents, Jennie and Dallas Jones, forms the basis for chapter 5, “Reconstruction.” Dallas Jones became a well-known Republican politician in Greensboro, North Carolina, connecting Jones’s story to themes in W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction (1935). The end of the chapter, however, segues into a section on the family’s potential connection to John Jacob Astor. A family rumor, and one that Jones cannot substantiate, it is a somewhat distracting part of an otherwise interesting lesson in American history concerning the brief rise of Black politicians in the post–Civil War South.
In the afterword, the author tells readers that she “learned new ways of conveying truths about the past … by the transformation of words into feelings,” which she hoped would help readers “think and then discover how to feel the ancestors who have shaped us” (p. 282). And that they did, as even readers whose story this is not still feel the pain conveyed in her family’s histories.
A memoir written by such an eminent historian is an excellent way to introduce students to the discipline of history.
The Trouble of Color has been well-received by critics, including a glowing review in The New York Times, highlighting its broad readership as it puts the history of race and racial ambiguity at the forefront of family history and the history of the nation. A pleasure to read, the book’s writing style enables readers to become invested in Jones’s family history, eager to turn the page to discover what she has uncovered or what roadblocks she encountered. A memoir written by such an eminent historian is an excellent way to introduce students to the discipline of history. The text cleverly embeds the historian’s methodology and craft—e.g., visiting multiple archives, scrolling through many newspaper reels—and reveals both the rewards and frustrations of such work. Jones demonstrates the importance of meticulous source checking, as sometimes misinformation may be perpetuated, as in the case of her grandfather. The lessons of American history are woven into the chapters, demonstrating how past lives were chronicled, sometimes as commodities, as in the analysis of the Beatty ledger in chapter 1. This should be a required purchase for any academic library.
Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.
Interdisciplinary Subjects: African and African American Studies, Law & Society, Women’s & Gender Studies, Racial Justice
Subject: Social & Behavioral Sciences – History, Geography & Area Studies – North America
Hilary Aquino is Assistant Professor of Public Health at Albright College in Reading, Pennsylvania, where she also teaches history. She holds a PhD in American History from Stony Brook University, SUNY.
 | Zacharia Nchinda’s review of Raceless (2021), “Colorblindness Is Identity Theft: Acknowledging Racist Histories to Create Diverse Futures“ |
 | Gerald R. Butters Jr.’s review of Brothers (2023), “The Personal Is Historical: Slate’s Memoir Brothers Underscores Race, Loss, and Family“ |
 | James Borchert’s review of Shelter (2022), “A Complicated Homecoming: Lawrence Jackson Dissects Baltimore’s Racist Legacies in Shelter“ |
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