THE TROUBLE OF COLOR

How generations of a biracial family found their lives shaped—and distorted—by the color line.

A light-skinned African American, New York native Jones had a life-changing epiphany in college when a fellow student implied that she was “not [Black] enough.” It was then she realized that her racially ambiguous appearance “unsettled, perplexed, and even provoked.” In this book that began as a quest in her 20s to understand her family roots and took her to Kentucky and North Carolina, the Johns Hopkins history professor examines how perceptions of color affected different generations of men and women in her family. For some, like the light-skinned grandfather who led a historically Black women’s college, living close to the color line caused painful misunderstandings and a “theft” of identity. Historians writing about him called him white, on the basis of photographs rather than background, which included a formerly enslaved mother and free person of color father. Those in her family who chose to intermarry faced some combination of legal and social discrimination. A white great-great-grandmother from the pre–Civil War era who chose to marry a man of color not only “gave up her past” but also lived in fear of facing penalties for breaking federal anti-miscegenation laws. Jones’ own white mother married her Black father in 1950s Jim Crow America. The difficulties the couple experienced included obstacles buying a home together and social isolation. The price Jones paid as the pair’s biracial child was to be defined as a legal ambiguity along the same color line that had so bedeviled her ancestors. Eloquent, candid, and meticulously researched, this book will appeal to both lovers of family memoir and scholars of Black history.

A deftly woven multigenerational tapestry that celebrates the complexity of African American history and identity.