Carver and God's Little Workshop

The train from Alabama had shaken the crates the whole way north, and by the time we hauled them up the marble steps of the House building on the morning of January 21, 1921, I was more worried about broken jars than about anything the congressmen might say. I was carrying two wooden boxes of peanut samples — oils, milks, a paste the color of clay, some kind of dye Professor Carver had cooked up the week before — and my hands ached from the cold. He walked ahead of me in his old suit, the one with the shine at the elbows, a fresh flower pinned crooked in the lapel because he never could get it straight without a mirror. He looked, if I am honest, like a man who had wandered into the wrong building. Ten minutes, the clerk told us at the door. Ten minutes for a colored professor from a peanut growers' association nobody on that committee had bothered to look up beforehand.

I set the boxes on the table at the front of the House Ways and Means Committee room and stepped back against the wall, because that was where a Tuskegee assistant belonged, and I watched the members settle into their chairs with the bored patience of men who had already decided how their day would go. One of them, early on, made a remark about whether the professor had brought along a watermelon to go with his peanuts. I remember the small laugh that went around the table. I remember Professor Carver's face did not change at all. He said he had not thought to bring one, and he opened the first jar.

He had been opening jars like that for twenty-five years by then, ever since a letter came to him at Iowa State in the spring of 1896 asking him to give up money and position and fame he did not have yet, in exchange for hard work at a school in Alabama that could not even pay him what he was worth. Booker T. Washington had written it plainly, no flattery in it, just an offer of degradation and poverty and waste to be turned into something like manhood, and Carver had written back within days saying he was glad to cooperate in doing all he could. I did not know him then. I only know what the older hands at Tuskegee told me, how he arrived to find no laboratory at all, just an idea of one, and how he sent students out to the town dump with wheelbarrows to bring back broken bottles and rusted pots and bent wire, because a school built to lift men up from nothing could not afford new equipment for the man meant to teach them how to do it.

He called that room his little workshop, though nobody else would have called it a workshop at all. It sat behind the dairy building, cluttered with jars nobody could name and instruments cobbled together from the scraps his students dragged in. He was up before the sun most mornings, walking the fields around Tuskegee alone before class, and he told people once that a man cannot draw close enough to God to hear what God wants to say to him if there are other men around making noise. Whatever he found on those walks, he carried it back into that clutter of broken glass and made it answer to a burner flame.

The soil was the trouble, and everybody in Macon County knew it before Carver ever said a word about it. Cotton had eaten the land for a hundred years, and the boll weevil was crawling up from Mexico to finish what the cotton had started, and the farmers around Tuskegee, black and white both, were staring at fields too tired to grow anything worth selling. Carver told them to plant peanuts. He told them to plant sweet potatoes. Both crops gave nitrogen back to ground that cotton had stripped clean, and for men with nothing, that seemed at first like advice from a man who did not understand hunger — until it worked, until the soil came back, and the farmers found themselves standing in fields thick with peanuts and no earthly notion what to do with all of them.

Carver said later he took that problem to God the way he took everything, out loud, walking, alone. He liked to tell it almost like a joke on himself — how he had asked his Creator what the whole universe was for, and been told to ask for something smaller, more suited to so small a mind. So he asked what man was made for, and was told again to cut the request down further. Finally he settled on the peanut alone, and even that, he said, seemed almost too large a thing to hand a man, until Genesis came to his mind, the line about every herb bearing seed given for food, and he understood that the answer to his prayer was not going to be spoken to him. It was going to be handed to him in a basket of peanuts and left for him to work out at a bench.

That was the workshop's real business, for years nobody outside Macon County paid attention to. He would take a handful of peanuts and break them down to their parts — water, fat, gums, sugars, starches, the long chemical names he could rattle off without looking anything up — then recombine what he had taken apart, sometimes with heat, sometimes with pressure, sometimes just by leaving two things together on a shelf to see what they made of each other overnight. Milk came out of that bench. Butter, though a Canadian chemist had beaten him to that particular trick years before and Carver never claimed otherwise. Shampoo. Shaving cream. A dye. A kind of glue. By the time I was old enough to be trusted near his equipment, the shelves in that little room held better than three hundred small jars, each one a use for a crop that southern farmers had been calling hog feed a generation before.

None of that mattered to Washington, though, not the political Washington, not in the way that would put a tariff wall around a farmer's peanut crop and keep cheap imports from undoing everything Carver had spent a quarter-century building. That was why we had come — because the United Peanut Growers Association needed somebody who could stand in front of men who had never touched a peanut plant and make them understand why the crop deserved protection, and there was no one else to send.

He had been given ten minutes. He opened his mouth and the ten minutes disappeared somewhere in the first few jars.