he forgets again at first, and blows at the light.
Then he lies back dreaming as the bulb cools.
Carver’s glasses and case
Poultry Husbandry
Tuskegee, 1902
Raising chickens is a
dawn-to-dawn,
no-Sabbath proposition.
Carver is a botanist.
Yet, bowing before Mr. Washington’s mandate,
Carver is named Superintendent of Poultry Operations,
in addition to teaching seven classes,
testing seed, examining soils, running
the Agricultural Experiment Station,
preparing bulletins,
overseeing the dairy’s one hundred four cows,
and maintaining a laboratory,
with the assistance of the two or three
work-study students the budget allows.
Washington requires daily
Poultry Yard Reports,
writes from Ithaca
that it doesn’t make much sense
to have twenty-seven roosters
for forty-nine hens.
He writes from Syracuse
that there should be twice as many
chicks, given the number of eggs set
and incubated. He writes from Boston
to suggest chicks be purchased.
He telegraphs from New York City
to point out that thirty-nine eggs
are unaccounted for.
Carver answers, “I have faith in the chickens.”
But he watches twenty roosters
weed themselves down to ten.
He sees a pecking order established
by ruthless omnivores, by cannibals.
He sees chickens kill each other
out of sheer boredom. He learns
that if you don’t stop them,
chickens will peck their pariahs
to ribs and drumsticks.
Slowly, he learns a new vocabulary.
Blackhead: general weakness, unthriftiness,
sulphur-colored droppings. Mortality high.
Sorehead: wart-like nodules covered by black scabs
on bare parts of the head, the feet, and around
the vent. Mortality high.
Coccidiosis: unthriftiness, diarrhea. Mortality high.
Epidemic Tremor: loss of balance,
wobbling gait, prostration, kicking.
Mortality high.
Cholera: Mortality high.
Bronchitis: Mortality high.
Newcastle: Can wipe out
your whole flock.
Toward the end
of one of his daily pre-dawn rambles,
Carver stops at the poultry yard.
He notes the unlocked latch, the gate ajar.
Old Teddy Roosevelt gives the man a beady look,
flaps his wings, stretches
his scrawny, good-for-nothing neck,
and again, hope bleaches the horizon.
Carver working in a lab
1905
Looking out of the front page, a wild-haired,
gentle-eyed young German man stands
before a blackboard of incomprehensible equations.
Meanwhile, back in the quotidian,
Carver takes the school to the poor.
He outfits an open truck
with shelves for his jars
of canned fruit and compost,
bins for his croker sacks of seeds.
He travels roads barely discernible
on the county map,
teaching former field-slaves
how to weave ditch weeds
into pretty table place mats,
how to keep their sweet potatoes from rotting
before winter hunger sets in,
how to make preacher-pleasing
mock fried chicken
without slaughtering a laying hen.
He notes patches of wild chicory
the farmers could collect
to free themselves from their taste
for high-priced imported caffeine.
He and his student assistants bump along
shoulder to shoulder in the high cab,
a braided scale of laughter
trailing above their raised dust.
Today, Carver is explaining,
as far as he understands it,
that fellow Einstein’s “Special Theory of Relativity.”
He’s hardly gotten to Newtonian Space
when a platoon of skinny dogs
announces the next farm.
As they pull up,
a black man and his boy straighten,
two rows of shin-high cotton apart.
straw hats, wipe their foreheads with their sleeves.
Their welcoming glance meets Carver’s eyes
at the velocity of light.
The Jesup wagon
1906
Carver initiates the Jesup wagon, outfitting a horse-drawn wagon to take his agricultural teaching to the rural poor.
Clay
“Beauty is the vocation
of the earth.”—William Bryant Logan
God’s breath on a compound of silica,
alumina, and various oxides—
primarily iron—gave Adam life.
There is a primal, almost mystical
connection between humankind and clay,
from the footed, bellied first receptacles
to frescoed Renaissance cathedral walls.
To Carver’s eye, the muddy creek banks say
Here, to be dug up, strained, and painted on,
is loveliness the poorest can afford:
azures, ochres … Scraps of discarded board
are landscapes. Cabins undistinguished brown
bloom like slaves freed to struggle toward self-worth.
Beauty is commonplace, as cheap as dirt.
Carver in the field
Egyptian Blue
From red clay spotted on a hillside
Carver came up with a quadruple-
oxidized pigment the blue
of a royal mummy’s innermost windings,
an Egyptian blue
no artist or scientist had duplicated
since the days of old King Tut.
It’s the bluest blue,
bluer than lapis.
Paint factories and manufacturers
of artists’ materials
begged him for the formula,
offering the top floor of Fort Knox.
He sent it
for the cost of the two-cent stamp
it cost him to mail it.
It’s an indescribable blue.
You see it every day
on everything from shutters
to a child-sized flowered dress.
We’ve learned to live with it
without loving it, as if it were
something ordinary,
that blue the world sought
for five thousand years.
Look around with me: There it is
in the folder on my desk,
in my close-up photo of a fairy tern,
in the thumbtacks in my corkboard
holding up photos, poems, quotes, prayers,
a beaded ancestral goddess juju doll
(it’s the blue of the scarab in her hand).
It’s the blue of that dictionary
of American Regional English,
of the box of eighty standard envelopes,
the blue of that dress waiting to be ironed,
the blue of sky in that Guatemalan cross,
it’s the blue of the Black Madonna’s veil.
Paint sample that includes a miniature landscape painted by Carver
The Sweet-Hearts
Sarah Hunt, rumored suicide
Bright as I was,
I knew Mama would suck her teeth
an
d shake her head with disgust
if she knew we were courting.
He came to the schoolyard
toward the end of every day,
patted the children’s heads as they passed,
let them find the roasted peanuts
hidden in his pockets.
Then he would turn to me,
his tawny eyes grow golden.
He’d hand me a flower.
He in his mismatched
secondhand suits
with the top button always buttoned,
always some kind of a flower
in his faded lapel.
He took my books,
offered his arm,
and as we walked
told me about my flower.
Every day a different Latin name.
I flirted.
He talked about the lilies of the field,
about feeding the multitudes with the miracle
of the peanut and the sweet potato.
My invisible, disapproving family.
With him, I could never again ride
in the white car, or sleep in a decent hotel.
He told me of the vision
he’d had on his first day here:
That the school would flourish,
that Tuskegee was the place for him
to be God’s instrument.
I straightened his ties,
told him when
his sleeves and collars
needed turning,
suggested he give away
his baggiest trousers,
that there’s such a thing
as too much mending.
How he trembled
the first time I took his hand.
That gold light so fierce my shame
was almost burned away.
But our children would be dark,
they might have his hair.
For three years
people smiled at us.
We knew there were whispers:
“The Sweet-Hearts.”
He helped my fourth graders
start a garden, talked to them
about growing things.
I wish I’d kept his little notes.
The last one said something like
“Miss Sarah, I believe you care
more about my clothes
than you do about me or my work.”
He stopped coming around.
How the children missed him.
I left at the end of the school year
and started a new life. Started you.
Children, you are almost grown,
and I have saved you from Negro shame.
But the man in this clipping
might have been your father.
Charles. —
I can live no longer
this life of a fool.
Dear ones,
forgive me.
c. 1905
Carver meets Miss Sarah Hunt.
A Patriarch’s Blessing
1905
Luke 1:68–79
All night the train chug-chugs
toward Missouri. In the last car,
Carver tries to sleep
with his head against the glass.
A few hours later he’s showed in,
the thin white face,
white beard to the waist,
and Uncle Mose’s right hand
is saying Come near.
Carver, his eyes lowered,
kneels beside the rocker.
In Moses Carver’s face
the unveiled radiance of Moses’ face
when he came down from the mountain.
George, he says. Carver’s George.
Carver says he’s just come back
to get some of those paw-paws
from his favorite tree.
Uncle Mose says if he does,
he’s in for a hiding.
Them paw-paws ain’t ripe yet.
Moses caresses the stubbly cheek,
cups the bristly chin.
Never could keep you boys away
from my paw-paw tree. Where’s my switch?
He pats the soft-crinkled hair
with remembering fingers.
God bless you, my boy.
“For you will go before the Lord
to prepare the way for him.”
Unwiped tears
disappear into his beard.
Moses Carver
The Lace-Maker
for P.L.E.
Late Sunday morning gilds the pins and needles,
strokes the wall ochre, blanches the white collar.
He bends, intent on detail, his fingers red
in sunlight, brown in shade. Light calls
through the open to April window directly
into his illumined invisible ear,
like, elsewhere, the trumpet
whisper of an angel.
Carver made time to crochet, knit, and do needlework. He found these activities satisfying and they enabled him to make useful gifts for his friends.
Chicken-Talk
1909: So many chickens were missing,
and Washington so hounded Carver’s heels,
that Carver bought replacements secretly
and smuggled them into the poultry yard.
In 1910, seven hundred sixty-five
were unaccounted for, and Washington
sent Carver almost daily telegrams
tallying all the missing. Folks in town
said they were “being liberated by ol’ John.”
They told about how “back in slavery days …”
The night was as dark as a barracks
on Goree Island. John stepped to the doorway,
and stepped back. Mariah held the baby close,
her soft palm over his mouth. “He out there?”
John leaned into the night, his face
tasting its breezes. He looked back
and shook his head. He clutched his juju,
looked at his woman, and clenched his eyes
in a prayer to the Ancestors. He ran out.
The gate hinge creaked, but John slipped in
through an inches-wide gap. No feather stirred
as he entered the sleeping coop, until
a stupid biddy squawked warning
and the flock burst with alarm.
John stood, shushing.
“It ain’t the fox, fool; it’s me, your friend.”
The melee fell to murmuring.
John’s fist was under a fat warm hen
when a voice rose in the yard.
“Yes, I did remember to load it. Will you
get on back in the house?
(That damned fox!)”
Uh-oh, John, you in bad trouble.
He gone to get you this time.
You say no?
As Master’s boots crunched toward the door,
a faint voice trebled inside.
“Who’s in there?”
Master took another step.
He heard the voice again.
Then another, another.
“I say who’s in there?”
He cocked his shotgun, stepped again.
Ain’t nobody here but us chickens.
Master just went on home,
according to John’s children and John’s
children’s children and their children and theirs. And John
never told on Brer Fox.
The Joy of Sewing
First the threading of the needle,
that eye nearly invisible
held nearer and farther away,
so the tip of the thread
is a camel through a keyhole,
a rich man
carrying all of his belongings
through the Pearly Gates.
But at last, near cussing,
you thread the filament
into the orifice. Aha!
The cloth lies on your
lap
like an infant in a christening gown,
as smooth under your palm
as your mother’s lost skirts.
The needle slow at first,
jackrabbits straight and true.
The making.
The focus.
The stitches your fingers’ mantra.
The finished products of contemplation:
the ties Carver always wears
with his secondhand suits.
And the snickers behind his back.
Veil-Raisers
Sometimes one light burned late
in The Oaks, the stately home of the great
Principal, Booker T. He sat and wrote
note after note, controlling faculty,
philanthropists, and family
with spiderweb reins.
When a plank broke and he plunged
into white hopelessness,
he shook himself
and rang up to the third floor,
where a student exchanging service
for tuition sproinged to his feet.
The breathless summons reached
Carver’s cluttered rooms
down in Rockefeller Hall,
where he dozed in his easy chair.
He still had lab notes to write,
tomorrow’s classes to prepare,
letters, and his Bible reading.
He’d been up, as always,
since that godliest hour
when light is created anew,
and he would wake again
in a few more hours.
Roused, he nodded,
exchanged slippers for brogans.
You saw them sometimes
if you were sneaking in past curfew,
after a tête-à-tête on a town girl’s porch:
shoulder to shoulder
and dream to dream,
two veil-raisers.
Walking our people
into history.
Booker T. Washington
The Year of the Sky-Smear
1910
That smear among the stars:
Science may call it Halley’s Comet,
but backwoods farm folks say
it’s an iceberg headed for a ship’s hull,
a chomping mouth trailing its hunger.
They say it’s a millennial sign.