Гарвардские исследователи раскрыли полную родословную последней жительницы Tuttleville, оставшейся в единственном доме

In a confidential Harvard database, Joyce Barber is identified as A-01258. In Hingham, she is known as the keeper of her neighborhood’s history. She lives in a formerly Black enclave named after her ancestor, James Tuttle. The houses were once passed down through generations of shoemakers and shipbuilders. But over the past 40 years, the other families moved away. Now Barber is the last Tuttle in Tuttleville. She keeps a 4-foot-long family tree she inherited from her mother in her living room. It is extremely detailed, but still incomplete. At 78 years old, she wants to fill in the tree’s missing branches, to find all of her distant relatives who are, like herself, descendants of Native Americans, of enslaved peoples, of civil rights activists, and of veterans of nearly every major American war since the Revolution. “I’m yearning to find out what happened to the other family members,” she has said. So it came as a shock when a Globe reporter walked up to her driveway recently and told her that the answers she sought had already been found. Without Barber’s knowledge, Harvard University had spent years conducting extensive research into her genealogy. As the university’s researchers mapped her family tree, they had entered her name into their database and assigned her an identifying code. Listed nearby are her mother (A-01247), daughter (A-01266), and granddaughter (A-01267). Harvard had learned that they are all direct descendants of a man named Asher Freeman, a Revolutionary War veteran who had been held as a slave by a member of Harvard’s Board of Overseers. But no one told Barber about the research, or that the wealthiest university on earth had said that it owed something to people like her — and the hundreds of other descendants identified in the database. “It’s news to me,” she said. The research into Barber’s family is part of Harvard’s long-running and controversial effort to investigate its ties to slavery. The project began in 2022 — in a very different political moment — with lofty rhetoric and promises. Harvard “benefited from and in some ways perpetuated” slavery, then-president Lawrence Bacow said. Now it had “a moral responsibility” to make amends. It pledged $100 million for the effort, which also includes research grants, partnerships with Historically Black Colleges, and a planned memorial. The initiative’s core promise was that Harvard would find the direct descendants of people who were once held as slaves by Harvard leaders and try, somehow, to help them. But four years on, the initiative has become a magnet for criticism and intramural disputes. Harvard hired a team of researchers, and then fired them. Advisers have quit and accused the university of losing its nerve, or worse, hiding what it now knows. Harvard, for its part, says its commitment to its Legacy of Slavery Initiative has never wavered and acknowledges that it has not yet begun contacting the hundreds of direct descendants it has identified. A spokesperson, Jonathan Swain, said Harvard will provide public updates on its research “as it takes steps to prepare for initial engagement with living direct descendants.” In May, Harvard released a spreadsheet with the names of 1,613 people enslaved by Harvard officials, but no information about descendants. The university has faced criticism from inside its walls and from without for waiting so long to contact the descendants it has already identified. After the Globe informed Harvard of its reporting for this story, Swain said that eventually the university will provide “family trees that have resulted from this work.” Meanwhile, the university’s genealogical findings about hundreds of people and their families, including Barber’s, have languished in the confidential database, which was obtained by the Globe. The gap between Harvard’s promises and the results so far is a measure of the difficulty, perhaps the impossibility, of the task it set itself. “There is no right way to do this,” said Monique Trusclair Maddox, who runs a foundation that serves descendants of people enslaved by North American Jesuits. But Trusclair Maddox also questioned the university’s decision to withhold from descendants what it has learned. Slavery, she said, makes it virtually impossible for some Black Americans to reconstruct their family trees, to fill in the gaps in their ancestry that can still feel like unhealed wounds generations after abolition. “So when you’re not sharing that information,” she said, “it feels like there’s a leaf missing from my tree. … It feels like you’re hiding something.” Four years ago, when Harvard launched its Legacy of Slavery Initiative, the university only knew the names of around 70 people who were enslaved by Harvard leaders. The number of known descendants was even smaller. So Harvard hired Richard Cellini to expand the search, a decision it would come to regret. Cellini, who lives in Cambridge and Vermont, made his name by identifying thousands of descendants of slaves tied to Georgetown University. In 1838, Maryland Jesuits had sold approximately 300 enslaved people to Louisiana plantation owners and used the proceeds to save Georgetown from financial ruin. In 2015, the university renamed two campus buildings that had been named in honor of Jesuits involved in the sale. That was an honorable act, Cellini thought. But it was also purely symbolic. What about those people’s descendants? Didn’t Georgetown owe them a debt? Shouldn’t it pay reparations? Cellini is a Georgetown alum, a Catholic, and a self-described “Eisenhower Republican.” The idea that his alma mater would not seek out and help descendants rankled him. So he founded a nonprofit, hired researchers, and identified thousands of living descendants of the approximately 300 enslaved people. His work reshaped Georgetown’s reckoning with slavery. Today, it has a special “legacy” admissions program that gives descendants a boost in the application process, similar to what it does for the children of faculty, alumni, and staff. “Richard’s stroke of genius,” said Adam Rothman, a Georgetown historian of slavery, “was simply to ask the question, ‘Can I find them?’ And then, once you ask the question, answers follow.” In 2022, Harvard hired Cellini to undertake the same kind of research in Cambridge. But this time, he would not be working in his own self-funded nonprofit, but on the university’s payroll and inside its bureaucracy. The arrangement went sideways almost immediately. By Cellini’s account, Harvard leaders began to realize that the university’s ties to slavery were far greater than they had understood and panicked. The myth of the North’s arms-length relationship to slavery may have led them to underestimate their own institution’s role. He claims they tried to scale back the project so fewer descendants would be found. “Over the past 6 months, several high-ranking officials at Harvard have been exerting direct pressure on me to radically curtail the scope of the … research program,” he wrote in an email to Harvard’s in-house lawyers in the summer of 2023. “I’ve been expressly told on multiple occasions that I ‘shouldn’t find too many descendants’ and also that I ‘shouldn’t do my job too well,’” he claimed. Harvard has always denied these claims. “No one is trying to minimize the count of descendants,” Sara Bleich, a Harvard vice provost and public health expert who leads the slavery project, wrote to Cellini in 2024. In Cellini’s view, Harvard had launched the slavery project with good intentions. But they’d also been naive, Cellini came to believe. Harvard leaders hadn’t reckoned with what they had committed themselves to: They had essentially sought out a new constituency, a group of people possibly numbering in the tens of thousands who would have a special moral claim on the university. “Descendants (and potential descendants) can and will proactively contact Harvard,” Cellini wrote. “And they will do so in very large numbers.” For Lucy Hornby, a former member of Cellini’s research team at Harvard, the university wasn’t prepared for that outcome. “This is a story of hubris and liberal guilt,” she said. “They got this going and never defined the end goal.” Inside Harvard, some administrators and faculty members came to see Cellini as the slavery project’s biggest roadblock. His critics saw him as self-righteous and conspiratorial, always imagining the darkest possible motives in anyone he clashed with. In one skirmish, Harvard leaders considered excluding past board members from the scope of the slavery research. The premise, when the project began, was that Harvard would take responsibility for the actions of all of its past presidents, treasurers, deans, faculty members, administrators, and members of its two governing boards. Part of Cellini’s job was to trace the lineage of all people enslaved by those Harvard officials and locate their living direct descendants. If board members were no longer included, descendants of people they enslaved would no longer count. That could reduce the number of descendants by as much as 70 percent, Cellini estimated, because board members enslaved far more people than administrators and professors. Harvard leaders approached the question as moral and philosophical. “To what extent should modern-day Harvard voluntarily undertake acts of repair for the slaveholding activities of [board members] that occurred in their personal homes?” Bleich wrote in an internal memo summarizing the debate. To Cellini, the whole thing was outrageous. “[E]nslaved people didn’t get to pick and choose precisely who enslaved them for the benefit of the University,” he wrote to Bleich. As Cellini’s fight with Harvard leadership simmered, the research team he built — a dozen or so genealogists, researchers, and historians — kept searching for descendants. They researched in the archives of local churches, town halls, and Harvard itself. They pored over digitized records from southern plantations and Caribbean islands. One of the enslaved people they identified was Asher Freeman. He had been born into slavery in 1754. When he was young, he was sold or given to Nathan Cushing, a Massachusetts judge who served on Harvard’s Board of Overseers. He later fought in the Revolutionary War. Some of Freeman’s great-grandsons fought for the Union Army in the Civil War. Freeman was interesting to Cellini’s team not just because of his biography, but also because of his family tree. His granddaughter, Eliza Freeman, had more than a dozen children, many of whom had children of their own. Two centuries later, the researchers realized, the number of Freeman’s descendants could number in the hundreds or even the thousands. Cellini’s team, and their collaborators at American Ancestors, a Boston-based genealogy nonprofit, began painstakingly tracing Freeman’s lineage from the early 19th century to the present. By the summer of 2024, they had followed one line of Freeman’s descent through five generations, until they reached a woman born in southern Massachusetts in 1896 named Mabel Tuttle. She was Joyce Barber’s grandmother. For most of the 20th century, the heart of Tuttleville was the Tuttle family’s barn on Ward Street. During World War II, Mabel Lindsey, née Tuttle, and her husband, Herbert, threw parties for Black service members. The barn was already famous by then. Harlem Renaissance musicians had performed on its little stage, built into a corner beneath the rafters. Notices had appeared in out-of-state Black newspapers advertising nights of music and dancing in Tuttleville. At one party, an Army soldier named Robert Teague spent the evening dancing with Marion, Mabel and Herbert’s eldest daughter. Two weeks later, they married. Robert had been a teacher in Tennessee before being drafted. So after the war, Marion moved south with him, leaving behind Tuttleville, where she had been raised. In the mid-1940s, Marion gave birth to their first child at home because local hospitals refused to treat African Americans. Two weeks later, the baby died. When she got pregnant again, with her daughter Joyce, Marion returned to her family and her home in Tuttleville. “My mom promised that if she went another nine months, she was going to have something to show for that,” Barber said. She was born a few months later in 1948 at South Shore Hospital. Barber grew up between Tennessee and Tuttleville, going to school in the South and spending summers with her cousins on the family land on Ward Street. Her father, a former NAACP leader, used the summer to earn a master’s degree at Boston University, where he met fellow graduate student Martin Luther King Jr. The family moved back to Tuttleville full time when Barber was in middle school. An elderly relative was ill and her mother, Marion Teague, took charge of caring for her. A generation later, when Teague herself was ailing, it was Barber’s turn to do the same. After a career teaching at Brockton High School, Barber sold her house in Randolph and returned to Tuttleville in 2009. Teague, by then, had long been the unofficial historian of Tuttleville and the family. She had worked in the archives of historical societies to fill out the branches of the family tree. She discovered that they had Native American ancestry and then helped the family join the Chappaquiddic tribe. She was also trying to keep the family’s property, to continue to pass it down through the generations. By then, the barn had fallen into disrepair. But Hingham property values had soared, and the family’s tax bill had climbed along with them, growing beyond what they could afford. Earlier generations had already sold portions of their land — one parcel went to a real estate developer who lumped it together with other properties and built a country club and mansions. But Teague and Barber wanted to hold onto the few acres they had left, including the family home and the historic barn, however they could. Barber understood their limited options like this: They could sell like the others, they could hand over their land to the government, or, as town officials informed her, she could work off the tax bill through unpaid labor. Barber chose the third option. Twice a week, she shuffles out of her house with a walker and drives to Hingham Town Hall. There, she spends her mornings filing paperwork in the building department for free. She calls the work “volunteering,” which is not precisely what it is. A descendant of enslaved people, she is still working off the land inherited from her ancestors. She has another job, which she inherited from Teague, the role of family historian and genealogist. “My mother dumped this in my lap,” Barber recently said. In the final years of her life, Teague told Barber and Barber’s daughter, Veronica Hodges, the stories of their family and of Tuttleville again and again. How Barber’s great-great-grandmother Henrietta Simpson Tuttle had brought children from Boston to give them a taste of country life. How white neighbors had complained about seeing so many Black children in the neighborhood. How one of those neighbors burned down a Tuttle home, leading two of their ancestors to become volunteer firemen. “I want you to make sure that you can keep this going and that you let people know the history,” Hodges recalls her grandmother saying. It was unfinished work. Teague had spent years tracing the family’s lineage back through the generations. She had made it as far as the early 1800s, but there the family’s story got hazy. The ties to their Colonial-era ancestors were unclear. After an uncle complained that the family members only saw each other at weddings and funerals, Barber started advertising their family reunions online. Some unknown relatives saw the listings and reached out, adding branches to the family tree by happenstance. She enlisted one of her college sorority sisters to help with genealogical research and, in doing so, they discovered they were cousins. Hodges said these serendipitous discoveries sometimes feel like divine interventions. But they are one-offs. Barber didn’t know, couldn’t have known, that Harvard researchers were systematically building a database containing the missing branches of her family tree. By the spring of 2024, the known direct descendants of Asher Freeman were multiplying. Harvard’s researchers had entered more than 100 of the family’s relatives into their database. Some of them lived only a few miles from Tuttleville, unaware that their lost family members lived nearby. Barber’s mother would never find out. She died that May. A few months ago, Harvard and American Ancestors released the first big tranche of information from their years of research. They published the spreadsheet listing 1,613 people who had been enslaved by Harvard officials, including board members. The spreadsheet contained no information about descendants. Harvard officials said the spreadsheet was a work in progress. They expected to eventually identify thousands more enslaved people. The total number of their living descendants remained unknown, they said, and the university had not yet begun the process of contacting the descendants it had already identified. “That’s very intentional,” Bleich told the Globe at the time, “because we are waiting till we’re at a point in the research where it really makes sense for us to do that.” Eventually, she added, “We will have family trees that we are able to share with direct descendants.” At the time of the spreadsheet’s release, Cellini was no longer involved. His relationship with Harvard leaders had deteriorated to the point that last year, they fired him, laid off his staff, and shuttered his office. Harvard could point to various provocations as the cause. Once, Bleich had asked him to turn over his research materials and he had resisted. The final straw was Cellini’s trip to Antigua, where a major Harvard donor had run a sugar plantation based on slave labor. Cellini said the trip was for research, but while he was there, he met with the island nation’s prime minister. To some Harvard leaders, he was now carrying out unsanctioned international diplomacy in the university’s name. Cellini’s firing also coincided with President Trump’s second inauguration and the university’s efforts to recalibrate politically — away from its perceived focus on social justice and equity and toward an image of apolitical neutrality. Cellini remains outraged about what he views as Harvard hoarding and concealing information about family histories. He said many people in Massachusetts know they are descended from Asher Freeman, the man enslaved by Harvard Overseer Nathan Cushing. “What they don’t know, because no one has told them, is about their connection to Harvard University,” he said. Barber takes a dim view of Harvard’s decision to wait to inform descendants of what the university already knows. “Procrastination is the name of the game,” she said. “If we wait long enough, we won’t have to do anything.” In conversations in her living room recently, she said that her mother would have liked to know about her family’s connection to the university. She would have wanted to know about her ancestor Asher Freeman’s life, and the conditions of his enslavement. “It’s so hard to put your mind around the concept of being enslaved,” Barber said. Allowing time to pass, Barber said, has practical consequences too. While Harvard conducted its research behind closed doors, her mother died. Barber herself will turn 79 next year. The family’s historic barn is decaying and the costs to repair it are mounting. Barber and Hodges recently asked the town of Hingham for a grant to restore it, but the application was denied. What could Harvard do for the family? “Pay for the taxes for the rest of my life,” Barber said with a chuckle. Hodges, her daughter, focused on Harvard’s as-yet undefined promise to offer descendants “educational support.” Hodges’ own daughter had wanted to study in Massachusetts to become a doctor, but ended up majoring in allied health at the University of Tampa instead. If “educational support” had meant a scholarship, or “legacy” admissions status at Harvard, or some kind of continuing education, it would have been good to know sooner, she said. One morning this summer, Barber and Hodges went to the Hingham senior center to give a presentation on the history of their family and Tuttleville. Fifty or so people showed up, many of them longtime Hingham residents. One woman said she was shocked by how little she knew about Tuttleville, even after attending Hingham Public Schools. Barber said that she and her daughter give these presentations so that the history isn’t forgotten. She and Hodges also hope that speaking in public about their family will help them find other relatives, descendants of the people from the most distant branches of their family tree. “Where all of these descendants are at this moment,” Barber said, “we have no idea.” Mike Damiano can be reached at [email protected].