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,
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
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