laying Plymouth Rocks.
George W. Jones signs his
Your lovingly son.
The Blue Ridge Boys
write of their studies,
their hopes to improve the world.
But some letters
are from Boys he picked
out of lecture hall crowds
in Iowa, Pennsylvania,
Alabama, Tennessee,
or after banquets of tribute
whose fêted guest,
with his cap on his knee,
waited in the hall
to be called to the dais
and proclaimed
Genius, Scientist, Saint.
He pointed them out,
asked them to stay.
They always stayed.
Between them,
a five-minute talk
and a lifelong vow
to pray for each other.
They write
My soul’s in communion with yours.
They write You
must have been praying for me.
I felt so near
you and Jesus.
The Professor stoops late over his skritching,
squinting through spectacles held together
by a little piece of copper wire.
A smile, dancing radiance,
plays over his face.
Friends in the Klan
1923
Black veterans of WWI experienced
such discrimination in veterans’ hospitals
that the Veterans’ Administration, to save face,
opened in Tuskegee a brand-new hospital,
for Negroes only. Under white control.
(White nurses, who were legally excused
from touching blacks, stood holding their elbows
and ordering colored maids around, white shoes
tapping impatiently.)
The Professor joined
the protest. When the first black doctor arrived
to jubilation, the KKK uncoiled
its length and hissed. If you want to stay alive
be away Tuesday. Unsigned. But a familiar hand.
The Professor stayed. And he prayed for his friend in the Klan.
Parade of the KKK
1923
The KKK marches in Tuskegee.
Carver receives the Spingarn Medal for Distinguished Service to Science, the first of many such honors.
My Dear Spiritual Boy
Letter to Jim Hardwick, October 1923
Your wonderful letter has just arrived.
It is evening; I have some time alone,
so I’m answering right away.
My friend, I love
you both for what you are and what you hope
through Christ to be. I am by no means as good
as you believe me. I am sorely tried
so often, and must hide away with God
for strength to overcome. I have suffered
to do the job He’s given me in trust
to do. But now He’s given you to me
to give me strength, when I needed you most,
confirming my faith in humanity.
A college athlete. White. And a soul mate.
A lonely man smiles at ironic fate.
Carver as an old man
1923
Carver speaks at the Blue Ridge Conference (Y.M.C.A.), where he meets Jim Hardwick, a student at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and the first of his “Boys.”
“God’s Little Workshop”
A hand-lettered sign above
the room number on the closed door.
“Do Not Disturb”
written in the air.
The Professor had had another vision
of an experiment he should try,
a question he should ask.
The Creator’s small, still voice
asked What would happen
if you made a resin of peanut oil
and added a little bit
of this nitric acid here,
some of that sulphuric acid there,
some alcohol, some camphor,
a little of this, a little of that?
Would the molecules form clusters
tightly bonded into one plastic
which could then be shaped and molded?
A thin, white silence issued
from the door seams,
settled on all who knew
the door was closed again,
made them walk softly,
modulate their laughter,
take themselves seriously.
The Creator asked
What about elasticity?
Is Ficus elastica the only plant on earth
whose sap is a latex?
What about Asclepias syriaca?
What about Ipomoea batatas?
Coagulated and stabilized, vulcanized
and compounded with an inert filler,
would their sap become a half-solid, half-liquid
which deforms under applied stress
yet after stretching recovers completely?
The Professor took his Eurekas on grueling
medicine-show lecture tours.
He spoke softly, holding up
his peanut axle grease,
his peanut diesel fuel,
his peanut gasoline,
his peanut insecticide,
his nitroglycerine,
his plastics,
his rubber,
his sleeping compound,
his iron tonic,
his goiter treatment,
his faith, his science,
his miracles.
Eureka
November 1924
His first time in New York,
as one of several speakers
before a conference crowd,
the Professor is allotted twenty minutes.
He abbreviates his talk,
stops abruptly, adds:
I never have to grope for methods;
the method is revealed
the moment I am inspired
to create something new.
The New York Times ridicules him,
the school at which he is employed,
and the entire Negro race.
Proving its prophecy, it editorializes:
Talk of that sort simply will bring
ridicule on an admirable institution
and on the race for which it has done
and still is doing so much.
Because REAL scientists
do not ascribe their successes
to “inspiration.”
My Beloved Friend
Letter to Jim Hardwick, April 1924
Your letter touched me deeply. How I wish
I was more worthy of the things you say
about me. I love you more dearly because
you are of another race. God is using you
to teach the world the brotherhood of man,
the fatherhood of God. How sweet it is
to let God purge our souls of ego and
bitterness, and to have a little taste
of heaven here on earth. I trust you will pray
for me, that I get rid of my littleness.
I did not have to learn to love you: You
were chosen for me. I knew that the first
time I saw you. It was the Christ in you,
of course.
Driving Dr. Carver
Al Zissler, 1999
Al Zissler’s friend Jim Hardwick offered him
a job. It was Spring 1933,
the Great Depression. So Zissler and Jim
drove Carver through the South for several weeks.
At eighty-eight, Zissler recalls picnics:
ham sandwiches, potato chips, sardines
and crackers; Zissler tinkering with the Buick,
Jim reading, Carver gathering salad greens.
They played pranks on each other. Hardw
ick once
said at a lecture that the Professor was deaf,
and everyone addressed him at the top of their lungs.
But Carver was a genius of mischief:
Later, in his trousers pocket, Jim found a toad.
Falera ha ha they sang along the open road.
Al Zissler, Carver, and Jim Hardwick combined their spiritual and mechanical energies to coax an ailing blue Buick along southern highways on a 1933 lecture circuit.
The Penol Cures
c. 1934
The first wasted child brought to him
for a peanut-oil massage
was carried from the car by his father
and gently laid on a table.
The Professor saw hope
shrink the shadows in their eyes:
Yes, they saw him unalloyed;
they were willing to believe.
He laid on wizened, spidery fingers,
anointing the thin limbs, his eyes closed,
his lips murmuring silence.
After a few weeks of weekly massages
the boy had gained forty pounds
and was chasing pop flies.
Word got out.
The wire services
ran a story about the tentative success
of Carver’s Penol treatment for polio.
Crowds arrived at Tuskegee,
children on crutches, in wheelchairs.
Two days a week Carver massaged
as many as his old hands could bear.
Not to mention his seventy-year-old back,
complaining to him all the time
about bending, leaning, pushing,
when all his old heart had to do
was keep pumping its monotonous prayer.
There were many successes,
but many failures as well.
He refused to massage
one red-faced, insistent man
who finally admitted defeat,
turned his chair away,
and cussed out Carver
and his whole misbegotten
sons-of-the-devil race.
There are souls
too crippled to be fixed.
The results of Carver’s Penol experiments
were unsatisfactory and irreproducible,
the cause of those cures being
unquantifiable
and wholly unscientific.
Peanut specimen
1933
An Associated Press story about Carver’s peanut-oil massages as a treatment for polio brings throngs of polio victims to Carver’s door.
Letter to Mrs. Hardwick
December 1934
My esteemed friend Mrs. Hardwick, I confess
that I have not yet recovered from the shock
of dear Jimmie’s marriage. I feel very sure
the dear boy has done well. I did not know
a thing about it! Bless you for writing.
The Professor contemplates his First Boy’s joy,
his entrance into a world they will never share.
He signs his shaky name and leans back in his chair.
Carver reading
Baby Carver
Austin Curtis, 1935
Potential assistants strode in
and stumbled out,
repacking their paper credentials.
The Professor, grown more stooped
and now white-haired,
stood a moment beside the door,
then the door slammed.
After all these years of crying out
for another pair of hands
he preferred to work alone,
no young whippersnapper
taking notes over his shoulder.
But young Curtis shook his hand
and disappeared into the student lab.
He resurfaced a couple of weeks later
with six products
from the magnolia seed.
A few weeks later
the Professor wrote to Curtis’ father
that Austin seemed to him
more like a son
than an assistant.
Graciously, humbly,
his assistant freed the Professor
from choredom and followed up
on some of his earlier ideas.
Before long Curtis had become
“Baby Carver.”
And his children had acquired
a third grandpa.
Curtis and Carver
1935
Austin W. Curtis becomes Carver’s assistant.
Mineralogy
for the staff of the Carver National Monument,
Diamond Grove, Missouri
The only thing he still wanted
that a millionaire could buy,
Ford’s good friend answered,
was a big diamond.
In Ford’s mind,
on Carver’s long, skinny, wrinkled
anthracite finger,
classification system of eyes.
Ford told how he bought a flawless
many-carat stone, had it set
in a masculine ring,
and sent it off
gift-wrapped.
When next in Tuskegee
to visit Carver and throw
some money around,
Ford asked where the ring was.
Carver lovingly set aside
several dusty shoeboxes of specimens
and opened a box labeled MINERALS.
He showed Ford his phosphate pebble,
found in an Iowa creek bed,
his microcline feldspar, found
in the Alabama woods, his smoky quartz,
kicked up by his boot toe
in a Kansas wheat field, his fluorite,
sent by a Kentucky spelunker, his
marcasite, sent by an English mineralogist
in exchange for a piece of information,
and here it was, his diamond, the gift
of his dear friend, Henry.
Carver held the ring up to the window.
Ford saw by its faceted luster
that Carver’s eyes weren’t black, they were brown—
no, they were sparklets of citrine light.
1941
The George Washington Carver Museum at Tuskegee Institute is dedicated by Henry Ford.
Last Talk with Jim Hardwick
A “found” poem
When I die I will live again.
By nature I am a conserver.
I have found Nature
to be a conserver, too.
Nothing is wasted
or permanently lost
in Nature. Things
change their form,
but they do not cease
to exist. After
I leave this world
I do not believe I am through.
God would be a bigger fool
than even a man
if He did not conserve
the human soul,
which seems to be
the most important thing
He has yet done in the universe.
When you get your grip
on the last rung of the ladder
and look over the wall
as I am now doing,
you don’t need their proofs:
You see.
You know
you will not die.
Moton Field
January 1943
From the airfield a few miles down the road
a new droning crowds out laughter from the lawn,
talk in the corridor, automobiles,
and the occasional crow.
There goes one—no, two, three, four:
Like lost geese they circle in practice runs
from sunup to dusk.
The Professor’s palsied right hand
stutters answers to letters heaped beside his bed.
Behind them the a
maryllis on the sill surrenders
to the cold sky its slow-motion skyrocket.
Beyond the clasped flame of its bud
a P-40 zooms in at five o’clock,
high as a Negro has ever been.
Such a shame, thinks the Professor.
Might-have-been plowshares, hammered
into swords. Sighing, he signs his shaky name
as Nelson tilts the stick to his left, pulls it
slightly toward him, pushes his left rudder pedal,
thumbs-up at the flight instructor, grins,
and makes a sky-roaring victory roll.
1941
The first “Tuskegee Airmen” recruited for an experimental U.S. Army program arrive at Tuskegee.
1942
On December 9, the fighter pilots of the 99th Air Pursuit Squadron, the first graduating class of the Tuskegee Airmen, finally receive their orders to join U.S. combat forces in Europe.
Tuskegee Airman Melvin Moton Nelson (the poet’s father) in July of 1944
Commemorative stamp issued in 1948
Commemorative stamp issued in 1998 as part of the “Celebrate the Century” series.
1943
On January 5, in his rooms in Dorothy Hall, George Washington Carver dies in his sleep.
AUTHOR’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First thanks go to Albert J. Price, Captain, Ret., American Airlines, who suggested I write a book about Carver. Thanks to William Jackson, Superintendent, Curtis Gregory, Curator, and Lana Henry, Park Ranger, of the George Washington Carver National Monument in Diamond Grove, Missouri. Thanks to Peter Burchard, whose as-yet-unfinished biography tells the fuller story. Peter, you were so generous with information: Many thanks. Thanks to Mike Jolly, Curator of the George Washington Carver Museum at Tuskegee University, and to Dr. S. H. Settler Jr. of Tuskegee, who shared his memories of working with Professor Carver. Thanks to Dr. Zoran Petrovic of the Kansas Soybean Check-Off Program at Pittsburg (Kansas) State University, for patiently guiding me toward a partial understanding of polymerization and elasticity. Thanks to my cousin, Dr. David Anderson of the University of Louisville, for sending that terrific article about Al Zissler. Thanks to my student assistant, Alyssa Fresa, for helping me with preliminary research. Thanks to Chancellor Mark Emmert and Dean Ross MacKinnon of the University of Connecticut, and to Vanderbilt University, for supporting my research. Many thanks to Benita and Dana Knight for the quiet time at the lake, and to Abba Jacob for quiet time at the hermitage.