Carver Read online

The old ones who remember the last

  Year of the Sky-Smear,

  deep in the birthing throes

  of a nation conceived in slavery,

  tell of portents they’ve heard of

  since childhood, portents they’ve seen,

  prophecies come true.

  They know that history

  is a jetsam of stardust.

  Back from an afternoon on the road,

  elated by the faint glimpse, over dark trees,

  of the comet in the twilight,

  Carver inhales the homecoming aroma

  of his cluttered digs.

  He’ll have to remember to mail

  that parcel to Uncle Mose:

  a new pair of long johns.

  And those inquiries about soils:

  He’ll answer them tomorrow.

  He turns on the light,

  hangs his jacket on his desk chair,

  loosens his tie, and sinks in.

  He sorts the new mail.

  A couple of letters from manufacturers,

  a note from Mr. Kellogg in Battle Creek.

  A couple of thank-yous. Offers to pay

  for answers the Creator gives

  him for nothing. A note

  from the school treasurer:

  Will you please deposit your paychecks

  so I can balance the books?

  And a letter from Mrs. Goodwin, whose father,

  Moses Carver’s grandnephew, Thomas,

  was a boyhood chum, almost a cousin.

  The joy of rattling the pages open. The joy

  Oh my God, Uncle Mose has passed.

  1910

  Moses Carver dies.

  The New Rooster

  Tuskegee Poultry Yard, 1902–1913

  Carver’s right hand ached for a week

  after he met his new assistant, George

  R. Bridgeforth. From then on, the feathers flew.

  Or rather, memos flew. Carver had had

  a vision of the meaning of his life:

  the work he’d be forgotten for, the dream

  that would live on. He knew he bore a seed

  whose flowers would bear many seeds. Bridgeforth

  dreamed of becoming Principal. His work

  was excellent, and Washington was torn

  between two favorites.

  Bridgeforth, if he’d been

  a rooster, would have been a Leghorn, tall,

  meaty, handsomely plumed. And Carver was

  some weird, mutant Sicilian Buttercup,

  a doily-making lover of flowers.

  I wish to say that you perhaps made an error.

  A dozen chickens dead of cholera.

  I beg to suggest that we quarantine the sick chickens.

  Another nine. And disappearing eggs.

  I understand that they are laughing at our ignorance.

  But five more peanut products! Two today!

  Let us be men and face the truth.

  The bulletin on cowpeas: twenty-five

  taste-tested cowpea recipes, for soup,

  coffee, pancakes, pudding, croquettes; advice

  on cultivating cowpeas; a simple

  lesson on how legumes repay the soil

  the nutrients King Cotton takes, and are

  an inexpensive protein for the poor.

  It seems to me from what I have seen

  of the work that it lacks organization.

  “Carver’s Hybrid”: a new high-yield cotton.

  One manly order would save

  all trouble and hard feeling.

  Two broken incubator thermostats.

  You must do business like a man.

  Chickens and eggs vanished without a trace.

  I am here to work as a man,

  and I expect to be treated as such.

  A ten-year battle over the Poultry Yard.

  Carver submits his resignation, stays,

  resigns and stays, resigns again but stays.

  Washington juggles titles, finally

  divides Carver’s responsibilities

  in two, and separates the men, making

  each Head of a Division. Carver gets

  a real laboratory. Bridgeforth gets

  the Poultry Yard.

  And the new rooster crows.

  1902

  George R. Bridgeforth joins the Tuskegee faculty as Carver’s assistant.

  How a Dream Dies

  It was 1915, the year

  of trenches and poison gas,

  when Booker T. Washington

  rushed home from New Haven

  to die in his own bed.

  For the first days after the funeral

  Carver sat and rocked, sat

  and rocked. For months

  he could not teach,

  would not go into the lab.

  He sat in his room, he rocked.

  His duties were reduced

  to supervising the study hall,

  where he sat at the front of the room

  staring into his hands.

  In a vision the first time they met,

  Carver had been shown a lifelong partnership.

  He paced the campus. He rocked.

  He had seen Washington and Carver together

  winning back the birthright of the disinherited.

  This is how a dream dies.

  In the news Europe’s tribal feuds

  spread to the colonies,

  a conflagration of madness.

  As if fifty thousand shot and bayoneted men

  strewn in an unplowed field

  could make right any righter.

  As if might

  made wrong any less wrong.

  All of the dead are of the same nation.

  His presence turned laughter down

  to whispers. “He acts like he’s lost

  his best friend.” Uh-uh: He acts

  like he’s lost his faith.

  Portrait of Carver

  1915

  Booker T. Washington dies. The monument erected at Tuskegee in his honor depicts him lifting a veil from the eyes of a male slave who is rising from a kneeling position.

  Out of the Fire

  First came the dream.

  Washington’s daughter-in-law

  told Carver in passing she’d dreamed

  dear Mr. Washington had said

  Carver will carry on for me.

  I have faith in him.

  Soon after Mrs. Washington’s dream

  awoke him, Carver is invited to serve

  on the Advisory Board of

  the National Agricultural Society.

  Shortly after that, the British name him

  a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts.

  A Negro. With a growing list of firsts.

  The school’s administration commends his work

  and honors him with a new title: Professor.

  And wartime shortages

  find him frequently called

  by the government to demonstrate

  his sweet-potato flour, his ersatz eggs,

  his method of dehydrating foods;

  or to decipher the composition of

  and make visible the enemy’s

  secret-code inks. At last,

  his products and processes

  are being used. Discovered

  by the war machine.

  The Professor is humbled.

  He sees how disaster

  is seeded with triumph, how

  a man is purified by despair.

  Carver painting as an old man

  1916

  Carver is elected a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts.

  The Wild Garden

  c. 1916

  Genesis 1:29

  The flowers of Cercis cadensis,

  ovate Phytolacca decandra leaves,

  the serrate leaves of Taraxacum officinale,

  Viola species and Tifolium pratense flowers,

  a handful
of tulip petals,

  a small chopped onion, a splash of vinegar,

  a little salt and pepper and oil, and voilà!

  Would you like a second helping?

  The Creator makes nothing

  for which there is no use.

  There are choice wild vegetables

  which make fine foods.

  Lepidium species, a common dooryard pest,

  can be cooked up as greens.

  Circium vulgare stems,

  harvested with gloves and scissors

  in a roadside ditch

  and stripped of thorns,

  can be steamed, drizzled,

  and pulled through the teeth

  so the delicious heart

  oozes to the tongue.

  Mmmmmmm … Oh, excuse me.

  If all crops perished, the race could survive

  on a balanced diet of wild vegetables.

  The homeliest, lowest,

  torn out by the roots, poisoned;

  the “inferior,” the “weeds”—

  They grow despite our will to kill them,

  despite our ignorance

  of what their use might be.

  We refuse to thank them,

  but they keep on coming back

  with the Creator’s handwritten invitation.

  Another Hemerocallis fritter?

  Try some of this Potentilla tea.

  Carver in the field

  The Dimensions of the Milky Way

  Discovered by Harlow Shapley, 1918

  Behind the men’s dorm

  at dusk on a late May evening,

  Carver lowers the paper

  and watches the light change.

  He tries to see earth

  across a distance

  of twenty-five thousand light-years,

  from the center of the Milky Way:

  a grain of pollen, a spore

  of galactic dust.

  He looks around:

  that shagbark, those swallows,

  the fireflies, that blasted mosquito:

  this beautiful world.

  A hundred billion stars

  in a roughly spherical flattened disc

  with a radius of one hundred light-years.

  Imagine that.

  He catches a falling star.

  Well, Lord, this

  infinitesimal speck

  could fill the universe with praise.

  Ruellia Noctiflora

  A colored man come running at me out of the woods

  last Sunday morning.

  The junior choir was going to be singing

  at Primitive Baptist over in Notasulga,

  and we were meeting early to practice.

  I remember wishing I was barefoot

  in the heavy, cool-looking dew.

  And suddenly this tall, rawbone wild man

  come puffing out of the woods, shouting

  Come see! Come see!

  Seemed like my mary janes just stuck

  to the gravel. Girl, my heart

  like to abandon ship!

  Then I saw by the long tin cylinder

  slung over his shoulder on a leather strap

  and his hoboish tweed jacket

  and the flower in his lapel

  that it was the Professor.

  He said, gesturing,

  his tan eyes a blazing,

  that last night,

  walking in the full moon light,

  he’d stumbled on

  a very rare specimen:

  Ruellia noctiflora,

  the night-blooming wild petunia.

  Said he suddenly sensed a fragrance

  and a small white glistening.

  It was clearly a petunia:

  The yellow future beckoned

  from the lip of each tubular flower,

  a blaring star of frilly, tongue-like petals.

  He’d never seen this species before.

  As he tried to place it,

  its flowers gaped wider,

  catching the moonlight,

  suffusing the night with its scent.

  All night he watched it

  promise silent ecstasy to moths.

  If we hurried, I could see it

  before it closed to contemplate

  becoming seed.

  Hand in hand, we entered

  the light-spattered morning-dark woods.

  Where he pointed was only a white flower

  until I saw him seeing it.

  Carver’s specimen case

  Professor Carver’s Bible Class

  After Alvin D. Smith

  I’d always pictured God as a big old

  long-bearded white man throned up in the sky,

  watching and keeping score. I had been told

  we get harps or pitchfork brimstone when we die.

  Superstitiously, I watched for “signs,”

  living in fear of a Great Master’s wrath.

  Professor Carver’s class gave me the means

  to liberation from that slavish faith.

  He taught us that our Creator lives within,

  yearning to speak to us through silent prayer;

  that all of nature, if we’ll just tune in,

  is a vast broadcasting system; that the air

  carries a current we can plug into:

  Your Creator, he said, is itching to contact you!

  Carver’s Bible and pocket watch

  1913

  At the request of students, Carver offers the first of his fifteen-minute Sunday evening Bible classes. The classes meet weekly for the next thirty years.

  Goliath

  for J.B.

  Another lynching. Madness grips the South.

  A black man’s hacked-off penis in his mouth,

  his broken body torched. The terrorized

  blacks cower, and the whites are satanized.

  His students ask, in Carver’s Bible class:

  Where is God now? What does He want from us?

  Professor Carver smiles. “God is right here.

  Don’t lose contact with Him. Don’t yield to fear.

  Fear is the root of hate, and hate destroys

  the hater. When Saul’s army went to war

  against the Philistines, the Israelites

  lost contact, fearful of Goliath’s might.

  “When we lose contact, we see only hate,

  only injustice, a giant so great

  its shadow blocks our sun. But David slew

  Goliath with the only things he knew:

  the slingshot of intelligence, and one

  pebble of truth. And the battle was done.

  “We kill Goliath by going about

  the business of the universal good

  which our Creator wills, obediently

  yielding to Him the opportunity

  to work wonders through us for all of His children.

  That’s all. Read 1 Samuel 17:47.”

  House Ways and Means

  Protective tariff for peanuts, 1921

  The Chair cedes Mr. Carver ten minutes.

  Mr. Chairman, the United Peanut Growers

  Association wants me to tell you

  about the peanut’s possibilities.

  I come from Tuskegee, Alabama.

  I am engaged in agricultural

  research. I’ve given some attention to

  the peanut, and I plan to give much more.

  I’m greatly interested in southern crops,

  their possibilities. The peanut is

  one of the most remarkable I know.

  If I may have some space to put things down,

  I’d like to show them to you …

  … chocolate-covered peanuts … peanut milk …

  … a breakfast food. I’m sorry that you can’t

  taste this, so I will taste it for you. Mmmm.

  John Tilson (R–Connecticut): Do you

  want a watermelon to go with that?

  Well, if
you want dessert, that comes in well,

  but we can get along without dessert.

  The recent war has taught us that. Now, these

  are dyes that can be made from peanut skins.

  This is a quinine substitute. A food

  for diabetics, low in starch and sugar …

  1921

  Carver appears before the U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Ways and Means, in support of a protective tariff on peanuts.

  Arachis Hypogaea

  Great Creator, why

  did you make the peanut?

  —GWC

  Arachis hypogaea may have been

  smuggled to North America by slaves

  who hid seeds of survival in their hair.

  Despite your nakedness, the chains, the stench,

  if white men did not eat you, you might come

  to a cruel land where, tended by moonlight

  and exhaustion, your seed might grow to be

  your children’s manna in the wilderness.

  Arachis hypogaea, or goober,

  an annual preferring warmth and sun,

  is an attractive plant, resembling clover.

  It bears flowers of two distinct genders:

  the staminate, or “male,” yellow, pretty,

  and the inconspicuous pistillate “female.”

  When fertilized, the pistillate turns down

  and corkscrews six inches into the ground.

  Each corkscrew, called a “peg,” grows one to four

  peanuts in the soil near the mother plant;

  each shell two of her shots at infinity.

  From the laboratory of a slave emerged

  a varied, balanced diet for the poor,

  stock foods, ink, paints, cosmetics, medicines …

  Promise and purpose, the Ancestors’ dream.

  “The Peanut Man,” we say, and laugh at him.

  Lovingly Sons

  Everybody wants a piece of him.

  The letters heap,

  and there are so many

  to pray for.

  But his Boys,

  Carver’s Boys,

  pray for him.

  Dear Dad,

  they write,

  Dearest Father.

  Misspelled, some

  tell of cotton crops, of twelve