Carver

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Carver Page 3

by Marilyn Nelson


  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.

  With identical gestures they remove

  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.

 

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