A Daring Memoir that Honors Generations, Challenges Myths, and Reclaims the Historical Record
★★★★★ Review by Jeff Geoffray
In “The Trouble of Color”, Martha S. Jones weaves a breathtaking memoir that spans over two centuries and six generations, illuminating the ways race, color, and power have contorted and defined the American experience. More than a personal family story, this is a bold confrontation with history’s silences and distortions. Jones, a preeminent historian and prize-winning author, puts her own lineage on the line—not simply to tell the story of her family, but to expose how America’s color line has always been jagged, shifting, and morally bankrupt.
Jones’s book is as intimate as it is archival. She mines family letters, pension records, deeds of manumission, church ledgers, census documents, and oral histories, revealing how her ancestors—women like Nancy Bell Graves, Isabella Holley, Susan Penman Davis, and Musie Jones—lived through enslavement, war, Reconstruction, passing, and Jim Crow. These are not abstractions. These are people. They are family. And the reader feels that.
For those of us working in documentary storytelling and genealogical recovery—especially in collaboration with institutions like the Amistad Research Center, where the papers of Martha’s family and ours reside—this book is a revelation. It validates the power of personal archives, and it insists on the dignity of fragmentary records. Through her work, Jones shows that even when the archive omits us, misnames us, or distorts us, we can still reclaim the truth.
In our work at the 431 Exchange, we are actively digitizing and annotating the archive of the Adult Education Center in New Orleans—a school that served Black adults in the 1960s and beyond, many of them descendants of those once counted only as property or statistics. Reading “The Trouble of Color” alongside our project is a reminder that no history is too personal to be preserved, and no family is too ordinary to deserve memory.
“Because of them, we are. Because of them, we know what we know.”
Jones’s prose is lyrical but unflinching. She writes of her father Paul, whose attempts to pass as white and whose lifelong struggle with identity and depression left their mark on the family. She writes of a birth certificate that lists him as "white," and a death certificate that makes the same mistake. The bureaucratic erasure of Blackness is a theme familiar to many researchers working in African American genealogical studies—and Jones uses these moments to reflect on the moral cost of silence and denial. In this way, her work serves not only as scholarship but as spiritual repair.
What makes this book extraordinary is how it insists on nuance. Race is not a fixed category here—it is a negotiation, an inheritance, a performance, and often, a wound. Her stories of passing, of census misclassification, and of colorism are layered and never reductive. Her foremothers are not saints, but survivors, and Jones is careful to allow contradictions to breathe.
For those doing genealogical work—especially Black Americans tracing roots through enslavement, migration, and racial violence—Jones offers a roadmap for how to read between the lines of the archive. She shows us how to read a ledger entry as a poem, a census line as a scar, and a photograph as a declaration of being.
And for institutions like ours—committed to preserving the lives of ordinary heroes and overlooked communities—Jones’s book is a call to action. She reminds us that archives are not neutral, and that it takes courage to read what has been omitted, or what was never intended to be read by us at all.
In the end, “The Trouble of Color” is a triumph of love over silence, of truth over omission. It is both history and memoir, both research and remembrance. It is, above all, an act of defiance—a refusal to let the stories of our ancestors be forgotten or misunderstood.
If you’ve ever visited an archive, questioned your family tree, or wondered how race has shaped the map of your life, this book is for you. And if you work in public history, education, or justice, “The Trouble of Color” should be required reading.
Based in New Orleans’ historic Marigny neighborhood, Baldwin & Co. is a black-owned independent bookstore serving individuals, schools, businesses, nonprofits and more using the power of books to inspire social justice.