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When historian Martha Jones began excavating the history of her own family, she found a remarkable story of what she calls the trouble with color. 

“In this book, the term trouble has two meanings,” Jones tells Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas. ”I open the book with the lyrics of a spiritual, ‘

.’ You know, ‘God’s gonna trouble the water.’ And that comes from the book of John. In the book of John, we learn that when God troubles the water and we step into it, we are healed. This is the way forward for us. I think in some ways, trouble is precisely what we need.” 

” tells the honest story of her own family — filled with pain but also joy and resilience. Because, as Jones says, she believes we all have the capacity to sit with hard stories and be healed. 

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Historian Martha S. Jones found a remarkable and complicated story of identity, race and belonging as she researched her own family’s past.

'The Trouble of Color: An American Family Memoir'

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