A BOY WHO WAS TRADED FOR A HORSE by JAMES SAXON CHILDERS The stooped old Negro trudged along through the dust of an Alabama road at a curiously rapid rate. He was carrying an armful of sticks and wild flowers. The sticks I could understand-he would use them for kindling- but I had never before seen an old black man ambling along a road at nine o'clock in the morning with swamp roses, wild geranium, and creeping buttercups mingled with a lot of dry sticks. When I got a little closer to him I saw that he was wearing a saggy coat which originally might have been a green alpaca, but which the sun had faded until I couldn't be sure about the color; there were so many patches that I couldn't even be certain about the material. The old man was walking towards a large brick building, one of the buildings of Tuskegee Institute, the famous school for Negroes at Tuskegee, Alabama. His thin body bent by the years, his hair white beneath a ragged cap, he seemed pathetically lost on the campus of a great modern educational institution. At the entrance of the building toward which we were both walking, the old Negro turned in. "He's probably the janitor," I told myself, "and I'm sincerely glad that they've given him a job of some kind." I stepped into the hallway. I saw a trim little secretary hurry toward the bent old Negro. I heard her say to him, "That delegation from Washington is waiting for you, Doctor Carver." Dr. George Washington Carver, the very man I had come to see! Fantastic and unbelievable as it seemed, this old man with his armful of sticks and wild flowers was none other than the distin- guished Negro scientist of Tuskegee Institute. A discoverer renowned far and wide for his chemical wizardry in creating useful new products from such stuff as peanut shells and fallen leaves which most of us waste and throw away. An inventor acclaimed for his genius in transforming such common things as peanuts, sweet potatoes, and even the clay of the earth, into things of uncommon value for our everyday needs. That saggy alpaca coat covered a Bachelor of Science, Master of Science, Honorary Doctor of Science, winner of the Spingarn Medal for Negro achievement, member of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce of Great Britain. Yet as I looked at him, studied his kindly face, and recalled what I had heard of the story of his life, I saw that the figure of the man himself was not half so fantastic or unbelievable as is the record of his achievement. Dr. George Washington Carver started with nothing. He never had anything. Yet out of nothing he has created inestimable wealth for fellow human beings to whom he has devoted his life. Born a slave child, he began life without even so much as a name. He never knew his father. He never knew his mother. To this day he doesn't know just when he was born, though he figures his age at somewhere close to seventy. Without a red cent he worked out his own early schooling, then his higher college education, then the postgraduate work for his Master of Science degree. All his life he has been joyously at work with common, everyday things, making something out of nothing, or next to nothing. During the thirty-six years in which he has been Director of Agricultural Research at Tuskegee Institute, that has been his work. And out of it have come scientific marvels: From wood shavings he has made synthetic marble. From peanut shells he has made insulating walls for houses. From the muck of swamps and the leaves of the forest floor he has made valuable fertilizers. From cow dung he has made paint. From the common, ordinary peanut he has made 285 useful products, including milk, butter, cheese, candies, instant coffee, pickles, sauces, oils, shaving lotions, wood stains, dyes, lard, linoleum, flour, breakfast foods, soap, stock foods, face powder, tan remover, shampoo, printer's ink, and even axle grease! From the lowly sweet potato he has made 118 products, among them flour, meal, starch, library paste, vinegar, shoe blacking, ginger, ink, rubber compound, chocolate compound, dyes, molasses, wood filler, caramels. From clays of the earth he has made nonfading paints and pigments. From worn-out sandy soil he has produced paying crops. Something from nothing. And this is only a portion of his work. Experts say that he has probably done more than any other living man to rehabilitate agriculture in the South. And more still. Doctor Carver is also an artist, especially skilled in painting flowers. His paintings have been exhibited at world fairs, and at least one is going to the Luxembourg Gallery in Paris after his death. He makes all his own paints, using Alabama clays. The paper he paints on he makes from peanut shells, and the frames for his pictures he makes out of corn husks. His work in embroidery and crochet has won prizes in various exhibits. He has woven gorgeous rugs with fibers he had made from cotton stalks. He is a skilled musician, too-once he toured the Middle West as a concert pianist. And last, but not least, he is an expert cook. His recipes are used today in some of the leading hotels of the country. All this does sound a bit incredible, doesn't it? I confess that when I set out for Tuskegee to see and talk with Doctor Carver, I was more than skeptical of many of the stories I had heard about him. And so, after he had entertained the visiting delegations from Washington, I returned to see him, in his office in the big brick building, with many doubts lingering in my mind. He was sitting behind a desk cluttered inches high with letters and papers. On top of the papers were the sticks and wild flowers that I had seen him carrying that morning. As I went in, he was looking through a microscope at the stems of a wild rose. "I beg your pardon," I said. The old man raised his head and looked at me; then, taking hold of the edge of the desk to steady himself, he pushed himself up from his squeaky swivel chair. He wore a long canvas apron that was splotched and stained. His gold rimmed spectacles rested far down on his nose. Standing there so tall despite his noticeable stoop, he peered over the tops of his spectacles and smiled at me. "Good morning," he said and the quiet tone of his voice blended with the gentle sincerity of his smile. In slight confusion, then, I explained why I had called on him. "People tell me that I couldn't possibly write a story about Tuskegee unless I wrote a lot about you," I added. The old Negro grinned with the genuine shyness that has kept him so long bidden from the public. "People are too kind to me," he insisted. "I'm really a very small part of this institution. Won't you sit down?" I was touched by his gentleness, and by an unmistakable spiritual quality in the glow of his face. Frankly, I was confused. To open the conversation, I remarked on the numerous Maxfield Parrish paintings that hang on his office walls. "Somehow they seem a little out of place in the office of a scientist," I said lamely. "But can't a scientist be a lover of the beautiful?" he asked. "There is no one of the moderns who uses blue half so well as Maxfield Parrish uses it." And then he was off. For forty-five minutes he walked about his office, showing me how Maxfield Parrish uses blue, and telling how the ancients used the color. Quietly he told how the Egyptians loved it, how they had adorned their homes and tombs with it. Then he led me from his office across the hall into his laboratory, a room about thirty by twenty feet. It was filled with racks and shelves and tables, bottles and tubes. He picked up a jar and carried it to the window. "See"-and he held it to the sun. And I saw the richest, the purest blue that I have ever seen. Doctor Carver was talking quietly as he tilted the jar one way and the other, giving the sun its full chance to mate with the glorious color. "I believe," he went on, "that it's a rediscovery of the old Egyptian blue. A number of chemists have come to see it, and they agree with me. At present I'm working on the Egyptian purple; I believe that soon we shall have that, too. "I get my dyes," the old man continued, "from Alabama clays. You remember what the Bible says"-Doctor Carver has built his life on what the Bible says-"you remember that the Bible says, 'Look to the hills from whence cometh your help. I did it; I looked to these Alabama hills, and I made these dyes from the clays that I found there. All these dyes and paints"-he waved toward thirty-six boards, each of which was colored differently-"all of them were made from Alabama clay-all," he added, "except this one; it was made from rotten sweet potatoes; and this one, which was made from cow dung; and this one, a much finer paint, was made from horse dung." After I had been an hour in Doctor Carver's laboratory, after I had seen rope made from okra fiber, baskets from wisteria, and dyes from dandelion, black oak, wood ashes, sweet gum, swamp maple, sweet potato, pomegranate, peanut, Osage orange, muscadine grape, onion, velvet bean, and tomato vine-after I had seen those discoveries, among a few hundred others, I was willing to believe almost anything possible to this kindly man to whom apparently brick without straw would be a simple problem. "When you do the common things of life in an uncommon way," Doctor Carver once said to his students, "you will command the attention of the world." In that sentence lies the secret of his own achievement. He was born in a rude slave cabin on the farm of Moses Carver near Diamond Grove, Missouri. Moses Carver owned his mother, and a neighbor owned his father. When he was a baby six months old, night riders swooped down on his master's plantation and carried away a number of slaves, among them the baby and his mother. In their flight, the raiders took no care of the child; he developed whooping cough and was dying when emissaries sent out by Moses Carver arrived from Missouri to buy back the stolen slaves. But the mother had already been disposed of; no one ever learned what became of her. Indeed, there is only one thing of hers that is left: In Doctor Carver's room in one of the dor- mitories at Tuskegee is a battered old spinning wheel on which his mother spun flax when she was a slave. A friend of Doctor Carver's said to me, "I've seen him touch that wheel; he touches it like a priest reverently touching an altar. I sometimes feel that if I could be in his room when he retires, I should hear the old man say 'Good night' to that wheel." The emissaries sent to ransom the stolen slaves finally struck a bargain with the night riders. The baby was evaluated and traded back to his owner; he was traded for a broken down race horse worth about $300! The Carvers reared the sickly child, and from them he took his surname, according to the practice common among slaves. It is told that they bestowed the given name "George Washington" upon him because of his youthful honesty and industry. Because he was a frail and undersized lad and could do no heavy work, he performed household chores, getting in the wood, tending the fires, and helping Mrs. Carver with the meals. He became an excellent cook and also learned to sew and mend clothes. When the chores were done, his favorite playground was in the woods near by, where his companions were the birds, the flowers, the trees, and the small animals. As a boy he had only one book. It was Webster's blue-back speller. "With that book," he said to me, "I began my education. Even as a boy I realized that life requires a thorough preparation; there is no short cut to achievement; veneer isn't worth anything. And so I studied that book until I knew every word of it." When he was about ten years old, having mastered the speller, he determined to get further schooling. He heard of a school in the village of Neosho, Missouri, eight miles away. The Carvers wanted him to have an education, but offered him no money. So, without a cent in his pockets, he set out over the hills for Neosho. Arriving there, alone among strangers, he slept at first in an old horse barn. Soon he picked up odd jobs about the village and entered the school. It wasn't much of a school an old log cabin equipped with hard, high benches for the pupils. Within a year he had mastered all that the teacher could tell him and more. But he had learned enough to be eager for more knowledge. One day, while walking along the road, he met a mule-team outfit headed for Fort Scott, Kansas. In true hitch-hike fashion, he asked the travelers if he could go along with them. After several day's journey they reached Fort Scott, where he got a job in a home as cook, dishwasher, and all-round housekeeper. In this way, and by washing clothes, he earned his keep while he attended classes in high school. Still frail in physique and small for his age, he was continuing to make something out of nothing. Seven years passed, and he completed his high school course. He was now in his early twenties. And, almost miracu- lously, he began suddenly to grow in body. Within a year or so he developed from a weakling into a strapping six-footer. Without accepting financial aid, he had struggled through his schooling; now he determined to make his way through college. But first he paid a summer visit to his old home with the Carvers back in Missouri. They gave him his mother's spinning wheel, which he carried back with him to Fort Scott. In the fall he mailed an application to a college in Iowa, and by mail he was accepted. But when he arrived at the college, they refused to admit him because he was a Negro. He had spent most of his money for railway fare, and there was not enough left to take him out of town. But he was undismayed. Again he worked at odd jobs-cooking, cleaning carpets, and doing other chores. Before long he had accumulated enough money to open a small laundry, which was patronized by college students and townspeople. For a time he worked as a hotel cook. The next year he entered Simpson College at Indianola, Iowa. After he had paid his entrance fee he had ten cents left, which he invested in five cents' worth of corn meal and five cents' worth of suet. On this fare he lived for nearly a week. For three years he worked his way at Simpson; then in 1890 he enrolled at Iowa State College. Four years later he was graduated, taking his degree in agriculture, having earned every penny of his expenses. Two years after graduation he won his Master of Science degree. His work in agricultural chemistry so impressed the authorities of the college that they appointed him to a place on the college faculty-this boy who only a few years before had been traded for a horse! While Carver was teaching at Iowa State College, the late Booker T. Washington, the great Negro educator, heard of him and asked him to come to Tuskegee. "He asked me to come here and to let down my bucket" Doctor Carver told me one day as I watched him busy in his laboratory. Turning from his work, he looked out of the window, and I saw that he was looking back through the years. "I did come here. I did let down my bucket. And every time I've pulled it up, it has been brimful and running overrunning over," he repeated. In accepting Doctor Washington's call, Carver saw a great opportunity to serve his own people in the South, an opportunity for which he had fully prepared himself by his work in agriculture and chemistry. He saw that the valuable cotton lands of the South, where for years cotton had been the chief paying crop, were wearing out through neglect of simple scientific methods of farming, such as proper fertilizing and rotation of crops. He saw small farmers overburdened by debt and facing poverty. He saw a way to help lift their burden. Carver's first job when he arrived at Tuskegee in 1896 was to create an efficient department of agriculture, which had barely been started in the school. The department was housed in an old building and was almost entirely lacking in laboratory equipment. At once he put into practice what he had learned about making something out of nothing. He and his students went out into back alleys and searched trash piles collecting old bottles and jars, bits of rubber and wire and other odds and ends. Out of these he built laboratory apparatus-later to be replaced by new equipment. His next big job was to take over and work nineteen acres of the worst land in Alabama. He used this plot of ground as an experiment station, where he proceeded to prove to the Alabama farmers that coarse sand, fine sandy loam, and clay loam could he worked profitably. If crops could be developed successfully on this patch of land, he argued, they certainly could be grown in any part of the South. In 1897, when Carver began this work, the best methods of farming, combined with abundant use of fertilizer, had produced a net loss of $16.25 an acre on this land. Within a year he had treated the soil until it showed a net gain of $4 an acre. Seven years later he produced eighty bushels of sweet potatoes on an acre of sandy loam; and that same year he produced another crop on the same acre. The profit was $75. The next year he raised a 500- pound bale of cotton on that acre, and in Alabama there aren't many acres that will bear a 500-pound bale. Profits out of barren soil. In these experiments in crop rotation during his first twelve years at Tuskegee Institute, Doctor Carver demonstrated something of inestimable value to the farmers-that by intelligence and industry and simple understanding of the ways of Nature it was possible to make a great deal out of nothing and turn waste and loss into gain. One of the incidental results of the experiments, he pointed out, was to prove that the world allows to go to waste an almost unlimited supply of valuable fertilizer that most soils need-the muck from swamps and the leaves from forests. Carver's third big job, which continues unceasingly to this day, was to serve as a scientific pilot to the Southern farmers in the face of disaster. That disaster was the coming of the boll weevil, the insect pest which attacked and devastated the cotton fields. Thirty years ago Carver witnessed the arrival of the boll weevil in Alabama. He saw the almost total destruction of the cotton crop. He set himself to two tasks: He would assist in fighting the pest, and he would preach a gospel of native money crops other than cotton. After study, and thought, and experiment, he decided that the Southern farmer could get his money with more surety, and with less damage to his soil, by growing peanuts and sweet potatoes than by attempting any other crop. Doctor Carver began to write bulletins proving his contentions. He made speeches arguing his beliefs. After a time, a number of Southern farmers increased their peanut and sweet potato acreage. And then, suddenly, and sadly, Doctor Carver awoke to what he had done. He had increased the supply without increasing the demand. The peanut and the sweet potato were rotting; the Southern farmer was not only losing the money that he had hoped to make, but he was losing the cost of production and the cost of labor as well. Almost fiercely the Negro scientist set about the work that the centuries will probably declare to be his greatest contribution to knowledge. He had made a great mistake. He felt that he had done a great personal injustice. Days and nights he spent in his laboratory, seeking to develop new commercial uses for the peanut and for the sweet potato. Slowly, one product at a time, this man forced Nature to give up her secrets; and as each of them was learned, Doctor Carver gave them freely to the world, asking only that they be used for the benefit of mankind. "He cares nothing about marketing his products," I was told. "He merely discovers them, then gives them away to anyone who wants them." Inevitably Doctor Carver's work in agriculture, in chemistry, and in other sciences brought him offers to leave Tuskegee and go elsewhere. One of these offers was made by Thomas A. Edison. On the walls of Doctor Carver's office are two autographed pictures from Edison. "He sent me one of them when he asked me to come to his laboratory and work with him," Doctor Carver explained. "He sent me the other, the larger one, when I told him that my work was here in the South, and that I didn't think God wanted me to leave it." Another offer tempted the old Negro-him who once had been valued and traded for $300-tempted him with an annual salary of $100,000. He refused it. He stayed in Tuskegee, where his meager salary is quickly consumed in anonymously paying the bills of worthy boys, both white and black, who are trying to get an education. He stayed in Tuskegee and continued to wear the old alpaca coat which he himself has so often mended, the black trousers which he has so frequently patched, the old shoes which are just a little too large for him, and which he has patched until the patches overlap. Neckties, too, are expensive: so he knits his own out of fibers that he makes himself. "Money means nothing to him," a friend told me. "Some wealthy peanut growers in Florida were suffering terribly from a diseased crop. They sent Doctor Carver some specimens. He told them what was wrong and how to cure it. After his diagnosis and treatment had proved correct, they sent him a check for $100, promising that they would send him the same amount monthly as a retainer's fee. He sent back the check, telling them that God didn't charge them anything for growing the peanut and that he shouldn't charge them anything for curing it." I had known Doctor Carver for two days when, at ten o'clock one morning, he took off his spectacles, put the cover on his microscope, and said, "I should he greatly honored if you would come to my rooms with me. I should like you to see some of my pictures." On the morning that Doctor Carver and I started out to walk to his rooms, we were interrupted by an eight-year-old boy who had caught a fluffy young wood thrush and brought it to Doctor Carver. The old man took the bird, soothed it, and with long black fingers stilled its feeble fluttering. Once the bird no longer darted its little yellow-marked head about, Doctor Carver began to describe its habits, telling the lad how the bird lived, the things it ate, where it loved best to sit and sing; the old man softly whistled the song of the bird. "And now take it back and turn it loose, my boy; take it back to its mother. It's terrible when a young bird is taken from its mother. You wouldn't want to be taken from your mother, would you?" The lad shook his head. "That's right"-the great scientist looked away-', of course you wouldn't-none of us would." When at last we arrived at Doctor Carver's rooms, he unlocked the outer door and bowed me in. "I'm just a little crowded here," he admitted, waving his arm toward a living-room that is in reality a confused combination of library, picture gallery, hothouse, and museum. There are bookshelves from the floor almost to the ceiling- books on geology, agriculture, botany, chemistry, physics, astronomy, butterflies, mushrooms, frogs; books in English, German, and other languages. In the corners are stacks of scientific journals. In the center of the room and almost filling the place is a table on which are piled rocks and stones and stalactites and stalagmites and scores of other formations known only to the trained geologist. Outside the window is a great shelf on which stand fifty pots of plants and flowers with which Doctor Carver is constantly experimenting. On one wall of the room is a glass case four feet wide and six feet high. It is filled with embroidery, tatting, and crochet work. Even an absolute layman can recognize their exceeding delicacy and beauty. "But how do you find time to do it all?" I asked. "Chiefly because I've made it a rule of my life to get up every morning at four o'clock. Winter and summer, I wake at that hour; and I get up. I go out into the woods. Alone there with the things I love most, I gather specimens and study the great lessons that Nature is so eager to teach me. I return to my laboratory at nine o'clock, and I work there all day. Every night, and regard- less of what kind of entertainment or celebration is going on, I go to bed at nine o'clock." He hesitated a moment, then went on: "But don't talk as if I had accomplished very much. What I've done may seem a lot, though "he shook his head sorrowfully as he turned away-"though I know that it's mighty little when compared to all that I should have done, all that I want to do." Doctor Carver's belittlement of his own achievements is an unobtrusive indication of his sincere humility. A few years ago he made a trip to Washington. After he returned to Tuskegee, he said nothing about what had happened. "A week passed before we learned what he had done," an official of the institute told me. "We heard about it first from some newspaper clippings that were sent us." When the Hawley-Smoot tariff bill" was being considered, Southern farmers sent plea after plea to Congress asking that the peanut he named as an article on which import duty was to be charged. Congress saw no reason for acceding to the pleas; but the Ways and Means Committee granted a hearing, and named a day. On that day, a dozen men appeared before the committee, each man in his turn consuming his allotted ten minutes. In the background, standing alone, Doctor Carver, with his trembling hands, awaited his time to speak. Last on the list of speakers, he finally came forward to address congressmen who were thoroughly tired of harangues about the peanut. The old man took his place behind the table, where stood scores of bottles and cases containing products that he had made from the peanut. Smiling his humble smile, he explained that he had been brought to Washington by a group of Southern peanut growers; he apologized for taking up the time of his hearers; he thanked them for listening. Then simply, and with an occasional reference to God, he told the tired congressmen the story of the peanut. He told the congressmen merely of how he had asked, "God, what is a peanut and why did you make it?" Then he told how he had sought the answer to his question, and how in his searching he had discovered products ranging from face powder to chocolate wafers. As he talked, he pointed to each product that he had made in his Alabama laboratory. Exactly at the end of ten minutes, Doctor Carver thanked the committee for allowing him to appear before them. But the congressmen would not let him go; they demanded that he continue his story. He spoke for one hour and forty-five minutes before the most important committee of Congress. And when he finished, the committee adjourned to the next room and wrote the peanut into the tariff bill of the United States. No one can adequately report the strange feeling of spiritual betterment that one constantly feels while with this unusual man; nor can one even intimate one's regret at the time of saying good- by-when Doctor Carver, his smile itself a God-speed, places his trembling hand on your shoulder and says, "Good-by, my boy, good- by. And may God bless you...... it is a benediction from a simple, a kindly, a noble heart.