When we speak of race we often speak in hermetically sealed categories: black, white, Native American, Asian, and so forth. Yet, as Ariela Gross's latest book illustrates, the real excitement is at the margins—that area of law and space occupied by people who do not fit neatly into one category or another. For it is here that the difficult questions are posed—about race, about status, about property, and about citizenship. What Blood Won't Tell takes us to these places, and in the process we get to observe both how the meaning of race has changed throughout our history and how ordinary people have been active agents in its formulation.

What Blood Won't Tell confirms why Gross is at the forefront of studies of race, law, and history. In it, she demonstrates an amazing breadth of knowledge, covering a number of topics spanning both time and space. The book begins with several chapters on trials of racial identity during slavery and the immediate years after, before moving on to black Indian identity and the Dawes Rolls, Hawai'ian identity and the Pacific islands, non-European identity and the politics of immigration, and Mexican American identity and the notion of “other” whites. Throughout, Gross explores the question of the meaning of race and how it played out in the county courtrooms, under the enrollment tents, and before the federal courts. Expertly researched, these are not the usual cases we often read about; instead, these stories come from Gross's detailed work with local trials, shedding light on the interests and concerns of regular people. The approach is noteworthy. Traditional legal history tends to emphasize formal rules and regulations, searching out legislative enactments and high court opinions for insights into the way things were. But Gross's work suggests that we have more to learn by looking to the bottom. Of far more importance than a law defining a “negro” as someone with one-fourth, one-eighth, or one drop of African blood, for example, was the local community's understanding about what made a person white or black or something else. In this way, Gross is absolutely right: race never was “something imposed from above.” Rather, “race was created and re-created every day through the workings of community institutions and individuals in daily life” (10).

A few examples should suffice. In chapter 2, Gross introduces us to Jacob Perkins, a man of indeterminate ancestry in antebellum Tennessee who brought a slander suit after a neighbor accused him of having “negro blood.” Success depended on proof, and proof came in the way of Perkins's reputation in the community, intimate details about the family's bodies (did they have a “negro smell”), and whether and to what extent Perkins did the sorts of things white men did, like voting and sitting on juries. Perkins's race, in other words, did not depend on abstract rules of blood, to be decided by lawmakers, but instead by members of the community based on their “common sense.” In chapter 5, Gross takes us to Indian Territory, where federal officials were busy separating “Indians by blood” from “freedmen” for purposes of land allotment. As in the antebellum era, classifications came down to a combination of appearance, performance, and associations, and in the process of categorizing, local citizens were making race. Ellen Perry was one of the people listed on the freedmen rolls despite her insistence that her “mother was a Choctaw,” because testimony also suggested that her father may have been a slave: “I saw [the purported owner] myself tie him up and whip him until the blood run to his heels” (157). Or consider chapter 8, where Gross deals with the blurring of the black-white divide when it comes to Mexican Americans. After establishing that Francisco Flores was “a Mexican, or at least of Spanish extraction,” a jury in Texas treated him as white and convicted him of “unlawfully marrying a negro” in 1910 (260). Yet this did not stop a significant number of Texans from reversing course and keeping the same group out of white schools. Among the reasons: “Latin-Americans are ‘a different race,’ ‘socially inferior,’ ‘not clean’” (269). The message seems to be that race depends on circumstance, and circumstance is often dictated by local matters and concerns.

No doubt some will object that Gross's method of privileging individual stories like that of Perkins, Perry, and Flores ultimately tells us more about her than about her subject. To that, Gross herself has provided an answer: through breadth of research and quantitative analysis, the cases she uses can be seen as both typical and representative. But more than that. For me, sifting through the evidence, rearranging it, and trying out new formulations is what ultimately allows us to gain new insight into the past, and that, in the end, is arguably the most lasting contribution of Gross's work. By forcing us to consider the evidence in a new light, by holding it up and turning it over, she has forced us to rethink and reconsider the entire historical terrain of race.