What do you love most about your memoir?
With The Trouble of Color complete, my husband will no longer question my habit of saving family mementos. He’d been the one to pack and repack them each time we moved! I’m joking, of course, because he has always been supportive, coming along on my research adventures. It is more accurate to say that I love how this book created a home for the photos, reminiscences, letters and souvenirs I’d collected. It is a practice begun as a small child, when my grandmother began mailing me keepsakes. I love how the book has given these things a purpose by letting them tell a new story about an American family, about who we call kin and how that can change across generations.
What kind of reader do you think will most appreciate or enjoy your book?
The Trouble of Color is for readers eager for a journey of discovery: of the self, of what it means to be family and how the color line has shaped us. If you have been misapprehended, mistaken or misunderstood for someone you are not, this book is for you. If the look of your very person confounds, confuses or provokes others, this book is for you. If you have been rebuffed, wounded or dismissed along the color line, this book is for you. If you’ve ever felt discomfort when checking a box, filling a blank or choosing a side, this book is for you. If you’ve heard that your family is too complicated, too out of bounds, confused or contradictory, this book is for you. For everyone, The Trouble of Color is an invitation to reflect deeply on their own family stories.
At what point did you know this story was a book?
I’ve collected family memories for a long time. But I only knew I might have enough for a book when I uncovered the story of my great-great-great grandmother, Nancy. She was born a slave in 1808 Danville, Kentucky, and no one in our family had spoken much about her. I stumbled onto the details of her life in the pages of some old, dusty account ledgers, and I could see how she was at the start of a book that stretched out across generations, all the way to me. I wrote The Trouble of Color with her portrait at my shoulder, hanging next to my desk, and always felt sure that Nancy would be pleased to know that I had put her and her descendants’ lives on the page.
If you have been rebuffed, wounded or dismissed along the color line, this book is for you.
What was the hardest memory to get on the page?
I knew I would have to confront my father’s life, including his troubled times. As a girl, I had heard his stories. But as a memoirist, I had to confront raw details: As a young man, more than once he’d barely escaped a tragic end. I wrote and rewrote those passages many times, wanting to be both honest and compassionate. I rooted for him, held my breath when he faltered and discovered that I could understand and even love him, despite his shortcomings. But to get there, I first had to face things that our family rarely talked about.
Was there anything that surprised you as you wrote?
I grew up thinking that my parents, who wed in 1957, were the first couple in our family to marry across the color line. They were not, I discovered. Long before couples like them tested their right to marry as part of the Civil Rights generation, men and women together defied so-called anti-miscegenation laws and legally wed. This was true 130 years earlier for my great-great grandparents, Elijah and Mary Jones. In 1827 they fooled a North Carolina county clerk long enough to get a license and say “I do,” even if the law barred him, a free man of color, from marrying her, a white woman. My parents were not outlaws—they were part of a family tradition.
How do you feel now that you’ve put this story to the page?
I feel like I’ve stepped into a new world. For two decades, my reading and writing life had been dominated by history and related scholarship. I love that work and the discoveries it has led me to. But historical writing does not very often invite us to put our imaginations, our dreams, our fears and ourselves on the page. Reading memoir has taught me a new way of thinking about the past and of explaining it in very personal terms. Writing memoir has given me the freedom to share not only what happened in the past. It has allowed me to discover how it feels to know that past and also live its inheritance. I feel excited for readers to know me in this new way.
How have you changed since you started writing it?
I found a new sense of humor while writing The Trouble of Color. I haven’t always found moments in which people misread me and my skin color to be funny. Mostly those were painful scenes. But I learned about my great-grandmother Fannie and her “passing” in downtown St. Louis. She was oftentimes amused when her skin fooled the eyes of department store clerks or train conductors. She shopped and traveled like a white woman when she chose to and, like many a trickster, enjoyed every moment of the farce. Only today, knowing Fannie better, am I also bemused by the misunderstanding that my color invites: People assume I am who I am not. Like Fannie did, I can now see the absurdity in that and laugh, at least to myself.
Read our starred review of ‘The Trouble of Color’ by Martha S. Jones.
What is the most interesting thing you had to research in order to write this book?
To write about my parents’ lives as suburban activists, I had to go back there, literally. When my memories failed, I returned to my hometown public library where they keep the only run of our weekly newspaper, the Port Washington News. Talk about going back in time: There I was, doing research in the place where, as a girl, I checked out books and studied after school. I was greeted by my junior high social studies teacher, now retired and a library volunteer, and spent days reading issue after issue, gingerly turning the brittle pages. I unearthed tidbits about my parents’ lives and more. I sometimes think there are stories for a next book about my own growing up waiting for me there.
Can you describe your book as an item on a menu?
The Trouble of Color is like a side of greens. Mine are made from improvisation and with love. There’s the sweetness of onions. Heat of pepper flakes. Savor of a smoked ham hock. Bitterness of greens: collards, mustard, chard and beet. Next, laborious prep. Rinse and soak the leaves. Repeat. Tear the tender parts from the stems. Keep the stringy bits for flavor. Magic happens when the greens hit the brew of stock, vinegar and hot sauce: wilting down to a thick, rich stew. Greens are great that first day, but let them sit. The jelly collects. The pot liquor thickens. They taste better than the day before. My greens are like family: contrasting ingredients, labor in the making, transformation in the cooking and always changing with goodness that lasts.
