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week
of 4/10/02
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Poetic
compilation honors the life of a different hero By Jeff Minick Carver: A Life in Poems by Marilyn Nelson. Front Street; Asheville, 2001. $16.95 — 103 pp.  As
a child, I admired many figures from history. These heroes tended
to be warriors and explorers, adventurous souls who either fought
bravely in battle, discovered new lands or cured diseases.Always near the top of the list of these heroes was a man whom I still admire and love. He wasn’t one of my usual heroes. He didn’t lead charges against the Yankees or hunt buffalo or discover an island in the Pacific. He didn’t plant a flag at the North Pole or parachute into France behind German lines. What he did do was “invent” peanut butter. Peanut butter is one of the great yet unsung creations of the last hundred years. Peanut butter has sustained children who are daily faced with the agonies of eating school cafeteria food. Peanut butter brings to adults a feeling of childhood comfort. Elvis used to eat fried peanut butter sandwiches. I tried making one and was unimpressed. People eat peanut butter on celery, on apples, and on ice cream. People eat peanut butter on bread with butter, jelly, mayonnaise, onions, and bananas — not altogether, of course. Little children delight in peanut butter sandwiches with faces made from M&Ms, jelly beans, and other delectables. Peanut butter and Saltine crackers surely played as much a part in building modern America as our highway system or space program. The man who helped make and market peanut butter was, of course, George Washington Carver. Born into slavery, raised by a beloved childless white couple who had owned his mother, Carver left home at the age of 13 to seek more education. Eventually, Booker T. Washington asked Carver to work for the Tuskegee Institute, the black college in Alabama. Here, Carver’s achievements as a botanist gained him national, and then international, renown. Especially interested in helping the poor farmers of Alabama, he devised different crops — cowpeas and sweet potatoes — to help replenish the soil and to help turn the market from failing King Cotton. He also helped in the development and manufacture of items using the peanut, including, of course, peanut butter. As a kid, probably chomping my peanut butter sandwich with strawberry jam, I loved to read about George Washington Carver; even saying his name brought a sort of sweetness to my mouth. As a young adult, I visited Tuskegee one hot summer afternoon, and I swear that all around me the air felt haunted and hallowed by the presence of this great American. Now Marilyn Nelson has given us a book of poetry about George Washington Carver. Simply titled Carver: A Life in Poems, this book is a biography of Carver in verse, following his life from his enchanted childhood when he explored nature to his time as an adolescent and young man when he washed clothes to make ends meet to the days at Tuskegee when he helped pull Southern agriculture out of its rut while providing counsel and spiritual advice to the students around him. Nelson’s book about Carver shines in many ways. First, there is her absence of any sort of racial hatred or bitterness — not only toward whites, but toward Carver himself, who has occasionally been regarded as an Uncle Tom in the last 50 years. Here in this book is captured the greatness of Carver, which was his goodness, his vision not just for agriculture and not just for black people, but for all people. Nelson also brings us Carver’s Christianity. He was a devout man, an inveterate reader of the Bible who referred frequently to scripture. Here is a poem in the form of a letter to Jim Hardwick, a college athlete, a young white man who became one of Carver’s soul mates:
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