From These Roots: My Fight with Harvard to Reclaim My Legacy
Tamara Lanier's memoir compels readers to confront challenging questions about American history and the profound, lasting impact of slavery on our society.
From These Roots: My Fight with Harvard to Reclaim My Legacy by Tamara Lanier, Crown
I come from a family of storytellers. Every time I get together with my extended family, we exchange stories, a unique tradition only families share. I grew up listening to stories of my grandma and grandpa, my aunts and uncles, and my mom and dad countless times. My dad still has fun at family gatherings asking questions to the younger kids about how certain members of the family are related to us. An ongoing version of this game has to do with a distant family member named Chris. To this day, I’m still not exactly sure how she’s related to us even though I’ve heard the story dozens of times. And I don’t think I want to know, my willing ignorance an excuse to hear the story again and again, to see the smile on my dad’s face when he asks the question and I am unable to give an answer, to hear the jokingly stern inflection of his voice when he says, “Pay attention.”
In From These Roots: My Fight with Harvard to Reclaim My Legacy, Tamara Lanier details the oral tradition alive in her family, passed down to her and her daughters through her mother Mattye Pearl Thompson-Lanier. Her childhood was filled with the lyrical renditions of her ancestors’ past, including her great-great-great-grandfather Renty, affectionately called Papa Renty in her household. From the perch of her floral-patterned chair, Lanier’s mother instilled in her daughter and granddaughters the life of Papa Renty as an enslaved man who taught himself how to read despite the hardships of slavery using the Blue Back Speller. And after telling the story for decades, her mother left her with one last request on her death bed: “Write it down. Write it down.”
Unsure where to start, Lanier began searching wherever she could for the story of her Papa Renty. She struck gold when speaking to an ice cream truck driver by day, genealogical whiz by night, who pointed her in the direction of an article entitled Black Bodies, White Science. In it, displayed in harrowing detail, was a picture of a stoic African man with glazed-over eyes. Underneath, a caption: Renty, Congo. Plantation of B.F. Taylor Esquire. Congo Renty. From the moment she saw it, she knew. She was looking at her Papa Renty.
Invigorated, she continued to research all she could about the image to find that it was in the possession of Harvard Law School, at their Peabody Museum. Not only that, but the image was commissioned in 1850 by Louis Agassiz, a famed genealogist and Harvard scholar, to aid him in his study of polygenism, the idea that different races come from different species. To her horror, she discovered that the daguerreotype of her Papa Renty was used to prove a racist theory that touted black people’s inferiority despite the fact that Lanier had grown up hearing the opposite: Papa Renty was a smart man who cared for his children and not, as Agassiz claimed, a chattel slave with the cognitive function of a 7 month old fetus still in a white woman’s womb. As Lanier attempted to contact Harvard and inform them of her relation to Papa Renty, she was shut down, ignored, and silenced. But this abuse only further lit a fire beneath her and, with the image of Papa Renty’s pain-filled eyes burned into her memory, she vowed to restore dignity and identity to her ancestors.
From These Roots is a deeply personal and emotional memoir cataloging Lanier’s excitement, sadness, anger, and resilience as she unearths the true nature of the daguerreotype of Congo Renty that she discovered that day. She asks the reader to confront uncomfortable questions about the unlit pieces of American history we often ignore and the lasting impacts of slavery on our country. Because of a lack of documentation and a dismissal of slaves as human beings during America’s inception, many African Americans living today are unaware of their ancestry and are unable to find out. Furthermore, the story of their ancestors is often told through a white perspective found in textbooks and the disconnected voices of scholars.
Event programs, textbooks, and Harvard’s own historical records often refer to Renty as someone who was photographed for these commissioned daguerreotypes and then faded into invisibility, lost to history. But Lanier grew up hearing about a man who was the opposite of invisible. Her family's story asks pressing, relevant questions about who owns history and who has a right to tell it. In Harvard’s insistence on keeping the photos of her Papa Renty and his daughter Delia, Lanier raises difficult questions about possession of historical artifacts and the normalized abuse of them in academia. If Harvard believes that Congo Renty was a unique individual who took part in Louis Agassiz’s experiment unwillingly, why would they continue to exploit his image in textbooks and event programs? Why would they continue to deny Lanier her lineage?
History is often told by the powerful, that same opportunity denied to the powerless. Oral traditions, like the one practiced in Lanier’s family, are some of the only pieces of the history of enslaved people that exists outside white American hegemony. Yet, these traditions are discredited by institutions like Harvard who claim that oral history lacks the validity intrinsic in written documentation. Lanier challenges this claim at all angles, highlighting the importance of oral tradition in Black American history and breaking down Harvard’s persistent claims that they can tell Papa Renty’s story better than she can.
Lanier challenges the American people to consider and understand the importance of modern-day reparations for slavery, a topic often testy in certain political and cultural spaces. She wonders aloud about the ways American society can continue to right the wrongs of slavery through uplifting black history, returning remains and historical objects to descendants of enslaved people, and openly talking about the ways institutions are continuing to profit off slave labor 200 years later.
My family reunions do not contain stories as epic or revolutionary as the story of Tamara Lanier’s Papa Renty, but it has made me rethink my relationship with my own family’s oral tradition. I possess a kind of privilege in not needing to remember how my great-aunt Chris is related to my family. When my dad tells me, “Pay attention,” he doesn’t fully mean it because he doesn’t have to. Many Americans do not have that same luxury. While writing down family history is important to some people, it is a political and defiant act of survival for others, something they can point to and say, “Here I am. You cannot erase me.” That is a very powerful statement to be making in the current American political climate.
As Americans, we possess a kind of burdensome knowledge of the past; of the good pieces of this country’s history and the bad, coupled with our own experiences and the forever-changing world around us. But it has always been and will always be generational love and perseverance that pushes us through the hard times and gives us the courage to continue forging on. The American ethos is, at its core, a belief in the equality of all people. And, again, it is a kind of burden, but a beautiful, significant, profound burden that falls on our shoulders to continue to carry this bright torch with us into the uncertain future and strive to make up for the times when our forefathers failed to keep that promise.
