related subjects, Carver held Bible study classes. He was somewhat nontraditional both in his manner of presenting information (often theatrically) and in his beliefs. Accord- ing to Holt, Carver once said, “Nothing is more beautiful than the loveliness of the woods before sunrise. At no other time have I so sharp an understanding of what God means to do with me as in these hours of dawn. When other folk are still asleep, I hear God best and learn his plan.”
Holt wrote further of Carver’s Sunday morning talks: “For Professor Carver no conflict existed between religion and science; science confirmed the Scriptures rather than opposed them, and God and the spiritual world were closely united to the natural world.” Later in his life, Carver was the object of some suspicion for his poorly understood and often misquoted religious views, but he held fast. As far as he was concerned, God was to be found not only in church but also in the very dirt beneath our feet.
Carver the Scientist
With this subject—dirt—Carver was deeply concerned. After all, he was charged with making money via crops to help support the mission of Tuskegee. Tuskegee had some
benefactors, but the goal was to be self-supporting, and in this effort, student tuition was not much help. Students were never turned away from Tuskegee, and many of them worked their way through. They worked in the fields, baked bricks from clay soil, built badly needed new structures, dug ditches to route water. They cooked, they cleaned, they sewed, and they did laundry. But they often did not pay tuition. As a result, the school badly needed to show a profit in the form of crops, and mak-
ing money from the land surrounding Tuskegee was no small task. Like most of the land in the South, Tuskegee’s grounds had been completely wasted by cotton—a deep feeder that had blanketed the land for over a century. Carver knew that the soil must be enriched, and he imple- mented new practices to do so. While established practice
said that plowing should be shallow, he plowed deep so that the plants could reach fertile soil. While established practice said that last year’s growth should be burned off, Carver tilled dead stalks back into the ground. While es- tablished practice said that kitchen waste was garbage, he mined garbage heaps for their rich soil, tilling it back into the fields. He also began a compost pit, adding all of the school’s organic waste—paper, leaves, rags, grass, weeds, kitchen waste, street sweeping—anything that would rot. Over time, Tuskegee began to make money from the land. “The loss from the Station the first year was $2.50 an acre. The next year also the ledger read $2.50, but in black instead of red. In seven years, with no com- mercial fertilizer whatever, it profited $75 an acre.” (Holt)
New Crops and New Products
One of the ways that Carver increased the yield (and the profit) at Tuskegee was to diversify the crops. Among the crops he planted were legumes—chiefly cowpeas and peanuts. (He also experimented with a new crop from Asia, which we now know as the ubiquitous soybean). Carver knew that legumes add nitrogen to the soil, and he knew that Southern soils were in desperate need of this vital nutrient. For similar reasons, he also encouraged the planting of sweet potatoes. (Sweet potatoes, a member of the morning glory family by the way, do not actually add ni- trogen to the soil, but they don’t exhaust it either.)
Peanut
Carver knew that the crops he championed were good not only for the health of Southern soils but also for the health of Southern people. Carver was deeply concerned with what he observed to be an unhealthy diet of cheap meat and starch purchased in the stores of white landholders. He knew that if Southern black farmers diversified their plantings, both their health and their wallets would be improved.
Cowpeas (better known, by
me at least, as black-eyed peas) had long been grown as livestock feed, but Carver encouraged people to add them to their own diets. He also knew that “Pound for pound the peanut topped sirloin for proteins, the best potatoes for carbohydrates, and the best butter for fat.” (Holt) And he knew, as most nutrition-conscious people today know,
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