Carver Read online

  his colors lucent, almost transparent;

  sometimes a square inch of his canvas

  is enough to break your heart.

  He paints with such lostness

  I’ve had to remind him

  that you gave us brushes

  because they do some things

  better than fingertips.

  Father, this semester I’ve seen

  an unequivocal exception

  to what has always seemed to me to be

  your cockamamie sense of justice.

  Now I see the chosen really are

  the cornerstones the builders toss aside.

  All the battles the Israelites fought

  to come home, all that wandering.

  The poor women.

  And Jesus.

  A Negro artist.

  Father, give me greater gifts,

  so I can teach this master.

  Miss Budd’s art class, Simpson College. Carver is on the far right.

  1890

  Carver enrolls at Simpson College, Indianola, Iowa, majoring in art.

  The Last Rose of Summer

  The paper shakes so

  the words are hard to read,

  but what good is a singing range

  from high D to three octaves below,

  what good the bold step to a larger canvas

  for the yucca on the easel now,

  what good piano lessons paid for

  with paintings, what good

  a rosebud boutonniere if Jim

  your brother

  smallpox

  Four a.m. in the Woods

  Darkness softens, a thin

  tissue of mist between trees.

  One by one the day’s

  uncountable voices come out

  like twilight fireflies, like stars.

  The perceiving self sits

  with his back against rough bark,

  casting ten thousand questions into the future.

  As shadows take shape, the curtains part

  for the length of time it takes to gasp,

  and behold, the purpose of his

  life dawns on him.

  Carver at Iowa State

  Cafeteria Food

  Iowa State College of Agriculture

  and Mechanic Arts, 1891

  Even when you’ve been living on

  wild mushrooms, hickory nuts,

  occasional banquet leftovers sneaked

  out of the hotel kitchen by a colored cook,

  and weeds; even when you know it feeds you,

  mind and body, keeps you going

  through the gauntlet

  of whispered assault

  as you wait in line;

  even when it’s free

  except for the pride

  you have to pay by eating

  alone in the basement;

  even when there’s a lot of it,

  hot meat or chicken and potatoes

  and fresh baked bread and buttery

  vegetables; even when there’s dessert;

  even when you can count on it day after day;

  even when it’s good,

  it’s bad.

  1891

  Carver transfers to Iowa State Agricultural College, Ames, Iowa, believing that in this way he can better serve the Negro people.

  Curve-Breaker

  for Mrs. W. A. Liston

  What broke the ice?

  Was it his G.P.A.? The prayer group

  he joined and sustained? The Agricultural

  Society he founded, his writing

  the class poem and painting the class

  picture? His good accent in German Club?

  Was it the Art Club? Was it his balancing

  an unspilled glass of water on a hoop

  to raise funds for new football uniforms?

  Was it his soft guitar? His impermeable

  arguments in debate? Was it the way

  he transformed the cafeteria with vines

  and autumn leaves for Welsh Eclectic

  Society banquets? Was it his

  sidesplitting renditions there

  of humorous poems? How the hell

  should I know? Maybe it was that white

  lady who took the train to Ames to eat

  at his table. They both laughed

  when she said she was his mother.

  Anyway, way before Christmas

  we were calling him Doc.

  The Nervous System of the Beetle

  No, I can top that one. Today

  in my Intro to Invertebrates,

  we had midterm review.

  I asked one of the men

  to describe the nervous system

  of the beetle. He stood and pronounced,

  “The nervous system of a beetle begins

  with a number of ganglions

  on either side of the thorax

  and extends entirely down

  on either side of the backbone …”

  What happened? Well,

  the class was silent, taking it in.

  Then Carver started in to laughing.

  He laughed so hard he cried,

  until all the others laughed with him,

  shaking their heads and exchanging shrugs.

  I had to ask him

  to explain the joke. By then

  the boy who’d said it

  had blushed from red to despair

  and stumbled from the room.

  Carver? He just sat there

  wiping tears from his eyes

  when I let the class go.

  Green-Thumb Boy

  Dr. L. H. Pammel

  Hybridization, cross-breeding, evolution:

  He takes to new theories

  like a puppy takes to ice cream.

  We whisper that our Green-Thumb Boy

  is the black Mendel, that Darwin

  would have made good use of Carver’s eyes.

  So clear his gift for observation:

  the best collector I’ve ever known.

  I think we have an entirely new species

  of Pseudocercospora.

  And always in his threadbare lapel

  a flower. Even in January.

  I’ve never asked how.

  We had doubts

  about giving him a class to teach,

  but he’s done a bang-up job

  with the greenhouse. His students

  see the light of genius

  through the dusky window of his skin.

  Just yesterday, that new boy,

  what’s-his-name, from Arkansas,

  tried to raise a ruckus when Carver

  put his dinner tray down.

  He cleared his throat, stared, rattled

  his own tray, scraped his chair legs

  in a rush to move away. Carver

  ate on in silence. Then the boys

  at the table the new boy had moved to

  cleared their throats, rattled their trays

  and scraped their chair legs as they got up

  and moved to Carver’s table.

  Something about the

  man does that, raises the best

  in you. I’ve never asked what.

  I guess I’ll put his name next to mine

  on that article I’m sending out.

  Cercospora

  Iowa State College, 1895

  He smooths a square of butcher paper,

  licks his pencil stub, looks up, and loses

  himself in the cool of deep woods,

  mossy watersong over stones. This species, with

  conidial scars on the conidiogenous cells …

  Puffballs, Calvatia gigantea, curd-white melons

  among the leaves. Boletus edulus scattered

  like gumdrops under the trees: sliced and sautéed

  in some sweet butter, with a little bit of chopped onion …

  The door bangs open. White hands,

  a blindfold. But he knows that laugh,


  and that. But they are white men’s

  voices, whiteman laughter. But

  they are his classmates, his friends.

  But they are white men.

  White. Pushed and dragged down the street,

  into a doorway, hearing the door close behind him,

  in whom

  does he place his trust?

  Standing alone in a hush

  of whispers, rustling paper,

  in whom can he trust?

  He does.

  Eyes unbound see,

  then do not see

  the new suit, shirt, hat, and tie

  thrust into his trembling hands.

  A Charmed Life

  Here breathes a solitary pilgrim sustained by dew

  and the kindness of strangers. An astonished Midas

  surrounded by exponentially multiplying miracles: my

  Yucca and Cactus in the Chicago World Exposition;

  friends of the spirit; teachers. Ah, the bleak horizons of joy.

  Light every morning dawns through the trees. Surely

  this is worth more than one life.

  Carver painting “Yucca and Cactus”

  1893

  Carver’s paintings are exhibited at the Chicago World’s Fair. Yucca and Cactus wins honorable mention for Oil Painting.

  1894

  Carver gets his B.A. degree.

  Called

  Tuskegee Institute, 1896

  Washington yammers on about his buckets.

  Under the poorly pruned catalpa trees

  the children of slaves slave on in ignorance.

  For what but service is a man thus gifted?

  (The set jaw, the toward-distance-looking eyes:

  from the fly in the buttermilk, the butterfly in the cave.)

  … your salary, duties, the school of agriculture

  you will establish, your office key … A flash

  twenty years ahead: this mecca,

  this garden. Good Christ, a whole Africa

  to save, right under my nose.

  Carver at Tuskegee

  1896

  Carver gets his M.A. degree and accepts Booker T. Washington’s invitation to join the faculty of Tuskegee Institute. There he starts a new department and becomes the first Negro director of a U.S.D.A. Agricultural Experiment Station.

  My People

  Strutting around here acting all humble,

  when everybody knows

  he’s the only one here

  got a master’s degree

  from a white man’s college.

  Everybody knows his salary

  is double ours. He’s got two singles

  in Rockefeller Hall; the rest of us

  bachelors share doubles. The extra room

  is for his “collections.”

  A pile of you-know-what,

  if you ask me.

  All that fake politeness, that white accent.

  He thinks he’s better than us.

  Wears those mismatched suits every day, too:

  white men’s castoffs with the sleeves too short,

  the trousers all bagged out at the knees.

  His ties look like something

  he made himself.

  Always some old weed in his lapel,

  like he’s trying to be dapper.

  It makes you want to laugh.

  Talking all those big words,

  quoting poems at you

  in that womanish voice.

  So high and mighty,

  he must think he’s white.

  Wandering around through the fields

  like a fool, holding classes in the dump.

  Always on his high horse, as if his

  wasn’t the blackest face on the faculty,

  as if he wasn’t a nigger.

  The faculty at Tuskegee. Carver is in the top row, far left.

  Odalisque

  Listen to this: Now he’s asking for

  laboratory space and a painting studio!

  Says his work “will be of great

  honor to our people.” The

  unmedigated gall!

  “I beg of you to give me these,

  and suitable ones also.”

  Accent on the suitable.

  “I greatly desire to do this that

  it may go down in the history

  of the race.” Can you believe it,

  Mr. Washington?

  At the feet of every listener who hears

  the promise of dawn in the wilderness,

  the peach-luscious, unashamed curves

  of naked ambition.

  Chemistry 101

  A canvas apron over his street clothes,

  Carver leads his chemistry class into

  the college dump. The students follow, a claque

  of ducklings hatched by hens. Where he

  sees a retort, a Bunsen burner,

  a mortar, zinc sulfate, they see

  a broken bowl, a broken lantern,

  a rusty old flatiron, a fruit jar top.

  Their tangle of twine, his lace.

  He turns, a six-inch length of copper tubing

  in one hand. “Now, what can we do with this?”

  Two by two, little lights go on.

  One by hesitant one, dark hands are raised.

  The waters of imagining, their element.

  Dawn Walk

  The Institute’s twenty acres of crops,

  its orchards and beehives,

  its ten hogs, its dairy herd,

  the poultry yard. Landscaping the campus,

  testing the wells, overseeing the sewage system.

  Directing the first U.S. Agricultural Experiment Station

  at a Negro institution, headed by a colored man

  (and underfunded).

  Chairing the Agricultural Department. Committees:

  surely a waste of precious time. Advising.

  Students whose toes stick out of their shoes.

  Students whose parents were slaves.

  Teaching. Their killing ignorance. Heifers

  poisoned by dishwater, poisoned by

  pruned foliage left on the ground;

  bloated ewes scalded to death

  by incorrectly mixed dip.

  (You’d think they would have stopped

  when the first one screamed.)

  Their stare of incomprehension.

  Our first free generation,

  the seeds of our promise.

  And only two arms, two hands, two legs,

  two eyes, one brain, the time allotted,

  and Thee.

  From an Alabama Farmer

  Dere Dr. Carver, I bin folloring

  the things I herd you say last planting time.

  I give my cow more corn, less cottonseed

  and my creme chirns mo better butter. I’m

  riting to you today, Sir, jes to tell

  you at I furtulize: 800 pounds

  to the acur las March. Come harves, well

  it were a bompercrop. How did you found

  out you coud use swamp mock? I presheate

  your anser Dr. Carver by mail soon.

  What maid my cotton grow? It do fele grate

  to see the swet off your brow com to bloom.

  I want to now what maid my miricle.

  Your humbel servint, (name illegible)

  Laboratory at Tuskegee

  Coincidence

  15 February 1898

  In Wakefield the night train

  screeches to a neck-wrenching halt.

  Last, the explanation reaches

  the Colored compartment,

  where Dr. Carver guards in a valise

  his jars of Before and After soils

  and of compost, his giveaway

  bags of raw peanuts.

  Hearing down the cars-long voice brigade

  a cry for help,

  he wonders what in all creation

  could make a whole
family

  sit on the tracks

  to try to kill themselves.

  He gives thanks

  for the engineer’s honed eyes.

  He looks down at the brown road map

  printed in his yellow palms.

  Your life may be the only Bible

  some people will know.

  He rises.

  The train arrives only two hours late.

  Bedside Reading

  for St. Mark’s Episcopal, Good Friday 1999

  In his careful welter of dried leaves and seeds,

  soil samples, quartz pebbles, notes-to-myself, letters,

  on Dr. Carver’s bedside table

  next to his pocket watch,

  folded in Aunt Mariah’s Bible:

  the Bill of Sale.

  Seven hundred dollars

  for a thirteen-year-old girl named Mary.

  He moves it from passage

  to favorite passage.

  Fifteen cents

  for every day she had lived.

  Three hundred fifty dollars

  for each son.

  No charge

  for two stillborn daughters

  buried out there with the Carvers’ child.

  This new incandescent light makes

  his evening’s reading unwaveringly easy,

  if he remembers to wipe his spectacles.

  He turns to the blossoming story

  of Abraham’s dumbstruck luck,

  of Isaac’s pure trust in his father’s wisdom.

  Seven hundred dollars for all of her future.

  He shakes his head.

  When the ram bleats from the thicket,

  Isaac …like me … understands

  the only things you can ever

  really …trust …

  are …

  the natural order …

  … and the Creator’s love …

  spiraling …

  out of chaos …

  Dr. Carver smooths the page

  and closes the book

  on his only link with his mother.

  He folds the wings of his spectacles

  and bows his head for a minute.

  Placing the Bible on the table