Kelly welcomes Martha Jones back to the podcast. She is the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor and professor of history at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University. We spoke to her last about her book “Vanguard.” Her new book is called “The Trouble of Color: An American Family Memoir.”  

You write in the book: “I discovered my faith in the capacity of words to help me know myself and the people who made me. I started this book without anyone from whom to seek permission. My elders were all gone. All I had was the belief that if I dedicated the best of myself to them, to their memories, and to making sense of their lives, the result would be a tribute worthy of all they were of all they endured along the color line.” Do you think you accomplished the task? 

“I do, at least on most days. And that’s because, as you know, books go through many iterations. And this book is no exception. So, you’re reading a version – I don’t know if it’s version 5 or 6 or 7 or 8 depends on which section – but I know the journey to getting the words right, and to getting the words to a place where I could convey knowledge and understanding and insight into the past, but that I could also confront the concerns and the regard that my ancestors tried to establish for themselves in a very troubled, roiling world, and at the same time honor my own feelings. So that doesn’t happen, at least not for me in the 1st draft.” 

You trace your ancestors back to Nancy Bell Graves in 1808 – but there’s a problem when you are trying to understand how many children she had. 

“You know I’m trained as a historian to rely upon many kinds of official records, and so I began to use things like the census to count Nancy’s children, and I think I got to 7 at one point. But then I was also collecting stories of other women in my family who spoke about Nancy, and now they remember her children as 14 rather than the 7 I was able to find. And here’s the dilemma: who’s telling the better story? Right? Who’s telling the story that you’re going to go with as a writer, as a descendant, and I had to give up, in a sense, my historian’s instinct – which was to rely on the census and death certificates and the kinds of records that many of us turn to when we’re trying to reconstruct a family past – but to honor someone like my father’s sister, my Aunt Tuppy, who remembered that Nancy had 7 daughters, not 4 daughters, and to recognize that she was carrying a memory that no official record would document for me.” 

And this brings up the issue of who are we, exactly? 

“I think what I discovered about people like Nancy, her daughters, and the generations that follow is that really ‘who we are?’ And I put that in quotes. ‘Who we are’ is this exchange between who we know ourselves to be the people around us – those who we call family or kin, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, what officialdom dubs us to be right and officialdom is only interested in some categories and not others. It works with limited categories. You know I’ve lived long enough to see the census change from check one box to check as many boxes as you’d like when it comes to race. Well, that’s a sea change, and it’s complicated, but it doesn’t substitute at the same time for the way we know ourselves to be or the way we understand our families. But we’re definitely in dialogue with those kinds of instruments all the time.”