For years, historian Martha S. Jones has chronicled the lives of others. Through her research and creative practice — often grounded in personal essays — she tackles subjects like slavery and women’s suffrage as well as modern-day conversations about race and identity.

In her latest work, “The Trouble of Color: An American Family Memoir,” Jones turns inward, unearthing her family’s past to confront this nation’s race problem and its deeply ingrained colorism. “I decided early on that I wasn’t going to edit out the difficult things — the moments that were uncomfortable or complicated — because they’re part of what makes the story true,” said Jones, a history professor at the Johns Hopkins University. “I didn’t want to write around the trouble.”

“The Trouble of Color” begins with an inciting incident: a moment of reckoning that leads Jones, who is biracial, to retrace her lineage and recount the stories of ancestors like Nancy and Grandy.

Jones, who will join The Banner Book Club on Wednesday evening at 6 p.m., spoke to us about how those relatives’ lives illuminate how race, color and belonging have shaped generations of one American family.

This interview has been edited for clarity and concision.

You open your memoir with a flashback to your freshman year in college, when a classmate questioned your right to speak in a Black studies course. Why did you decide to begin the book with that moment?

I had to learn to live with that question and the discomfort and all of the things that went with it if I wanted to be a person in the world. It was an important question that was with me, and I had never really managed to wholly answer it.

If you’ve ever been asked the question along the lines of “What are you?” or “Who do you think you are?” “Where are you from?” — there are lots of variations on it — you know that most of the time you have about 15, 20 seconds to answer, and then the conversation moves on.

It’s so rare that somebody actually comes with a sincerity and a kind of commitment to actually want to know who you think you are, what has made you the person you are. I had never really sat down to try and answer the question.

I’m curious how you were able to fill in the details about your ancestors’ lives and really put readers in that place. Did you take any creative license?

When I was piecing together the story of Nancy, one of my ancestors, what I had to work with were fragments — church minutes, a few records and names written by someone else’s hand. The minutes tell you a lot about the scene. And if you dig a little farther, it’s not hard to learn how many square feet, how the space was arranged and where the church sat — on Main Street next to this and next to that. You can get out a map and figure out how far that is from where she lived, and the route she likely took to get there. It’s about slowing down, standing in her shoes and looking around.

It’s also about looking at the graphic space of that document. One of the first things that struck me was the way the clerk wrote her name and how different it was from the way he recorded the names of white congregants.

Was there a moment in the writing process that felt emotionally transformative or healing for you?

That’s certainly the case with my own writing about my parents. The book ends with two letters, one written to each of them. I had never been able to see my parents except through my childish eyes. I’d never really been able to see them as the complicated adults they were — people navigating complicated life circumstances in a complicated world.

My parents had very different ideas about who I was. My mother was a white woman, the descendant of immigrants, who subscribed to the “brotherhood of humankind” ethic. She believed she was bringing children into a world where color didn’t matter, history didn’t matter, race didn’t matter, racism didn’t matter. That was my mother.

But my father was not that person at all. My father was not only Black-identified, but also deeply troubled by race and color. And we never talked about it, which is why I had to write them letters at the end of the book. People ask me to explain myself, assuming I’m unsure who I am. Am I the embodiment of some utopian post-racial world, or just a Black girl who can’t quite account for herself most days and is destined to be misunderstood? Those are two very different messages.

The beauty of it, for me personally, in writing the book — and this goes back to the other meaning of “trouble” — is that I was finally able to see them, and the different, competing ways they raised me. I was able to let go of it and not be so troubled by it. That’s huge for me. I even have a sense of humor about it for the first time in my life.

For people grappling with their own family histories and reckoning with race and lineage, what advice would you offer?

The first is that there may very well be more to know than you think. Time spent with fellow travelers — more experienced researchers — is very important because folks will teach you where the stones are, how to overturn them, where the lockboxes are. There’s probably more to know, and there are more things coming online all the time.

Finding a group, finding experienced folks — not only working late at night alone — makes a huge difference for cracking the code. Be prepared to find things that you don’t want to find, and be kind to yourself when you do. I found things in this book that I put away for years because they were too difficult to sit with. And that’s OK, because we are part of the story. We are part of the journey.

The last thing is that, for me, there was a lot of joy. I loved getting to know more and spending time with these ancestors I hadn’t known. So don’t forget the joy.

What do you hope people carry with them after reading “The Trouble of Color”?

I was somebody who was raised — not on purpose, exactly — but I was raised in a world where I thought my [interracial] family was aberrant. My family was wrong. It was illegal in I don’t know how many states for the first 10 years of my life. And I carried that around in a bag we call shame.

I’ve now spent six months traveling and talking with people about the book, but really about family, and about their own families. Inevitably, people will tell you their story or some part of it. And what I discovered is that actually my family really is the American family, or a version of it. That’s why it’s called “An American Family Memoir.”

Because the idea that the American family is some pure, purebred, stately oak tree with majestic branches and clear lines just doesn’t hold up. Get folks talking, and I mean all kinds of folks, and they’ll tell you how complicated the American family really is. It might be lines of race and color. It might be lines of faith, culture or language.

And if you didn’t come from a mixed-up family in the past — and we know, right, all Black Americans come from that — it turns out that today, every kind of American does. You’re divorced, or your daughter marries — my granddaughter just married a lovely man from Nepal. OK, so what do we call that? That’s the American family.