A Historian Dives Into Her Family History — and Wonders If Maybe You Should, Too
With Professor Martha S. Jones
Today, I want to share something a little different: a personal story from “one of our country’s greatest historians.”1
In The Trouble of Color: An American Family Memoir, Professor Martha S. Jones unearths her family’s history, dating back to when her great-great-great-grandmother survived enslavement. Over the generations—from Kentucky to North Carolina to Long Island—Professor Jones’s forebears challenged “the notion that there is a straight, clear, bright color line.” The story is at once unique to her family and quintessentially American. All of us, Professor Jones told me, have records that historians treasure (so don’t throw them out!).
Martha S. Jones is the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor, Professor of History, and Professor at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University. She has contributed to The New York Times, The Atlantic, and many other publications and is the prizewinning author and editor of five books. A transcript of our conversation, edited for clarity, is below.
Ben: Early in the book, you say, "Nancy bequeathed to us the trouble of color, somewhere between too little and too much of it." Can you talk a little bit about what the trouble of color is and what you mean by Nancy bequeathing it to your family?
MSJ: Sure. That passage is a reflection on a portrait of my great-great-great grandmother, born in 1808. Friends told me I looked like her. I didn't exactly see it until I took a careful look at her skin color, and I thought there might be a story there: about how it is that we come to look the way we do, and how that matters in a country that has always been preoccupied with race and color.
“Trouble” is an important word here. I mean trouble in the colloquial sense—that is to say, the challenges, the misapprehensions, the violence that color invites in our family life and American history. But there's a second meaning of color.
I open the book with the lyrics from a spiritual, "Wade in the water / Wade in the water, children / Wade in the water / God's gonna trouble the water." This comes from the Bible in the book of John, and there it is God who troubles the waters. But it is also up to us to step into those waters, and in the Bible, stepping into the troubled waters is a healing process. It is the thing that makes us whole, that makes us human, that cures us.
Ben: You push the reader to join you in exploring those murky waters—and part of that journey is the difficulty of finding records about your family. Little Texas seems like a great example of this.