“That is a moment that I will take with me to my grave,” says Tamara Lanier, describing the first time she saw the image of her ancestor, an enslaved man known by his descendants as Papa Renty. As she describes in her memoir, “From These Roots: My Fight With Harvard to Reclaim My Legacy,” Lanier was in the early stages of a family genealogy project.
Her mother, who died just three months earlier, had always spoken of Papa Renty, a man enshrined in the family’s oral history for his African heritage and his literate status. “My mother told stories about him that celebrated him, that elevated him,” says Lanier. “And here was this petite man with a determined look on his face, an expression of defiance.”
As Lanier learned, the daguerrotypes of Renty, his daughter, Delia, and several other enslaved people had been created for the use of Louis Aggasiz, a Swiss scientist then at Harvard and now known mostly for his racist belief that white and Black people were of different species.
“I was excited because I had heard so much about this man,” she says. Knowing that Renty’s image had been used as part of Agassiz’s pseudoscientific project to prove white supremacy made her feel queasy. “I knew that was not his legacy. I thought it was so bizarre that Harvard would choose as their symbol of Black inferiority a man who was self-taught and educated others.”
The journey Lanier describes, driving to Cambridge to see the image in person at Harvard’s Peabody Museum, being turned away, then suing Harvard for the return of the image, has been chronicled in the pages of this newspaper. In the book, Lanier makes clear that she’s always been motivated by “love and respect for my mother and the oral history that she so brilliantly held onto.”
The Supreme Judicial Court found in 2022 that Lanier can sue Harvard for emotional distress but stopped short of awarding the image to her. While Lanier won’t comment on any ongoing legal action, she points out that other historically wronged groups already have legislative protections to their rights to cultural property: “If I were a Native American or the descendent of a Holocaust victim, I wouldn’t have to sue,” she says. “There are already legal protections.”
Lanier hopes readers will take heart from her story. “Everything that my mom told me, I was able to later substantiate. That’s how accurate our oral history was, and is,” she says. “So many people have these stories and they don’t know what to do with them. Write it down, that’s the first step. This is our history.”
Tamara Lanier will read at 6 p.m. Wednesday, February 5, at Brookline Booksmith.
And now for a few recommendations….
Because we simply can’t squeeze all the books we want to talk about within the limits of these pages, I hope to highlight a few titles you should look for at your local bookstore this week. From “The Buddha of Suburbia” to “My Beautiful Laundrette,” Hanif Kureishi has has spun adventurous and often subversive tales about sex and race set amid English conformity. In “Shattered,” the writer confronts a new challenge and subject: himself, following a fall in Rome that left him badly disabled. The book’s pages, dictated by loved ones, thrum with energy and humor. Another memoir, by the literary shapeshifter Lidia Yuknavitch, dives into the writer’s past to understand what its narrative has to teach her. “Reading the Waves” reckons with pain and abuse, always asking how art can be spun from survival.
A pair of novels draw from history’s inspiration. In “Isola,” Allegra Goodman retells the true story of a 16th century orphan, her strange voyage to the New World, and the survival lessons she learns there. And Virginia Feito distills all the 19th century horror tropes you can remember into one witty and addictive mad-governess tale in “Victorian Psycho.”
Finally, two takes on machines and humanity. From David Hajdu, whose “Positively Fourth Street” turned a new generation into Dylan fanatics, comes “The Uncanny Muse: Music, Art, and Machines from Automata to AI.” There’s nobody I’d trust more to guide readers down the road from the otherworldly sounds of the theremin to the hypnotic, robotic beats of today. “Source Code” is Bill Gate’s most personal autobiography, an account of his childhood, pre-Microsoft fame and riches. Somehow, of all the awkward tech billionaires who have proliferated over the last four decades, Gates has emerged as the most human. Who’d have figured?
Kate Tuttle edits the Globe’s Books section.