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 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