In Which I Go On A Pilgrimage To George Washington Carver's Hometown

And I am really, really, really super chill about it!

Lol, you KNOW that's not true, if only because I have never ever been chill about a single thing in my entire life ever. Much less that it is objectively impossible to be chill about George Washington Carver, THE MOST PROFOUND GENIUS OF OUR TIME, WHO SPENT LITERALLY HIS ENTIRE LIFE BEING THWARTED AND DIMINISHED AND STIFLED, WHO WAS NEVER ALLOWED TO REACH HIS FULL POTENTIAL AND YET STILL CREATED WONDROUS THINGS, WHO LIVED SOLELY TO SERVE HIS PEOPLE AND LIFT THEM UP AND DID SO UNDER IMPOSSIBLE CONDITIONS THAT WOULD HAVE CRUSHED ANY OTHER PERSON, WHO LOVED HANDICRAFTS AS MUCH AS I DO BUT WAS QUITE A LOT BETTER AT THEM THAN I AM, AND WHO. WAS. QUEER!!!

Anyway, this warning sign on the front door of the visitor center of the George Washington Carver National Monument amused me:

I hadn't ever thought about it, but I guess you cannot conduct place-based, experiential learning at the monument for the guy made famous by peanuts if you've got a peanut allergy!

Bonus point: this was my fourth national park site that I visited over Juneteenth weekend (which was on a Friday this year), and yet this was the only Juneteenth programming that I encountered. And it was really good!

As part of the program, the park ranger gave a rundown of every national park site that honors a Black person or has an emphasis on the Black experience. It was very helpful!

In other news... Okay, I'm just going to come right out and tell you right away that I have mixed feelings about George Washington Carver's national park site being located at his birthplace. 

On the one hand, I do think that the site does all it can, considering its location, to carefully classify the relationship between George and his older brother, Jim, and their former slaveowners with whom they lived until George left them at about the age of 9 or 10. George himself, while writing a short biographical sketch in his old age, referred to them as "Mr. and Mrs. Carver," said that they were "very kind" to him, and thanked them for his "home training." In signage, the site mainly refers to them as the children's "guardians," which is objectively correct. The children were allowed to live in the former slaveowner's cabin with them, there are no accusations or even oblique suggestions in any primary source material that I can find that the children were ever mistreated, and although they were required to work, there also don't seem to be any accusations or suggestions that the children were worked like servants, and not like boys of that time period whose labor was assumed and required. 

However, I feel like placing George Washington Carver's memorial on the site of these former slaveowners' land, where he lived for only a decade at most but where they lived for most of their lives, centers them shamefully in a story that they have no business being more than a couple of paragraphs in. Sure, his childhood home is where he learned to love nature and handicrafts and first discovered his knack for music and art and learning, but that is nothing to the credit of these former slaveowners. They did not birth him. They did not nurture him as parents would. They trafficked and enslaved his mother, then enslaved her children. Moses Carver gave George his mother's spinning wheel and her bill of sale, but he did not give him her wages or any percentage of whatever profit her labor had allowed him. They didn't pay for his education or help him obtain it. George spent the latter half of his childhood unhoused in search of that education, paying for it himself, getting occasional help from total strangers but none from these former slaveowners.

George himself didn't center these people or seem to hold them close emotionally. This is a man who wrote weekly letters for his entire life to people he'd met once (and sometimes never!), who gave handmade Christmas cards and answered every letter he ever received, who wasted his affection on countless people who did not deserve it, but who did not write his former slaveowners, nor did he visit them more than a couple of times. He even lost track of Moses entirely later in the man's life. If he had an emotional attachment to Moses' farm, it must have been a complicated one, perhaps more centered on his brother and the mother he couldn't remember and the place itself than the people who started his life as his enslavers.

But having George's national monument on this land implicitly centers Moses and Susan Carver. It was THEIR land! The visitor center looks out into what was once their cropland that George's mother, Mary, and then George and Jim after her, were required to work for free:

I guess we're being super neutral in this signage, but George didn't have "to build his own lab equipment from scratch, working with what others saw as trash" because Tuskegee Institute itself was poor, which is what I think the signage implies; he did that because Booker T. Washington himself, the head of Tuskegee Institute, literally would not give him the money to buy a single thing. The Institute had the money to equip his lab--they just wouldn't do it.

The hiking trail passes, and you can walk around in, their house that was built after George left them (again, at 9 or 10 years old!) and so he never even lived in it:

The trail also passes the cemetery where several Carvers are buried with their headstones. There are likely at least two of George's siblings also in that cemetery, but their graves are unmarked and can't be pinpointed. Jim, George, and Mary are not buried here:

I don't like it.

Here's as good a place as any to also add my own personal conspiracy theory that I am VERY suspicious of how a childless couple who were not slaveowners made one, and only one ever, purchase of an enslaved person, and that one enslaved person that this childless couple thought it was important enough to purchase was a thirteen-year-old girl. That thirteen-year-old girl went on, while still a child, to have two children who lived past infancy, and each child had a different person named as their father, and each time, the person named as their father was someone who happened to have already died. 

Since George and Jim, as far as we know, were as childless as Moses and Susan, I guess there's no way to figure it out now, but again: I DO NOT LIKE IT.

Okay, that's all I'm going to say about these people. Also, I am trying to limit how crazy I sound on a daily basis, and this has definitely put me beyond my per day limit for today.

Instead, please look at the footprint of the cabin where George Washington Carver was born, and where he lived with his mother for a very, very short amount of time:

George Washington Carver had no memories of his mother, and never saw her again or knew what happened to her (nor do we!), but as an adult he kept her spinning wheel with him in his home, where friends said it was treasured.

Okay, just let me make this one last comparison: holding onto and treasuring a keepsake from a parent you never even knew vs. never visiting and even completely losing track of the person who supposedly raised you for the first ten years of your life. Moses and Susan Carver did not do right by those children.

Here's a sketch George made of the cabin in which he was born:

The museum at the visitor center states that this sketch was made "later in life," but interestingly, I recently read a biography that claimed the sketch must have been made when he was a child, since it's a bit rough and George quickly grew later in childhood to become an incredible artist. That biography also discussed how ill he was for several years at the end of his life, however, including how he lost strength and mobility in his limbs, so I reckon that the visitor center is probably correct. Even later in life he was still a wonderful artist who wielded his medium, and his tools, as well as he was physically able to wield them.

The national monument has turned much of its land into a peaceful, beautiful native meadow, and I think this, more than anything else on the site other than his mother's spinning wheel, is the perfect memorial to George Washington Carver:

I also loved walking through the woods he explored and played in as a child:

There's a sweet statue of a young George in a clearing in the woods, although by all accounts, including his own, he was very much a scrawny, sickly little fellow and so likely did not very much resemble this healthy, hale child. We'll just say it's a statue of young George's spirit of determination, then:



Although one day I want to go to the George Washington Carver Museum at the Tuskegee Institute National Historic Site, there are numerous examples of George's handicrafts and work projects here, as well:

He had a huge collection of specimens that he could have used for pedagogy, but Booker T. Washington never gave his department the space to display them, and the storage allocated for them was vulnerable to the elements and pests, so much of it was ruined.

Labels and annotations in his own hand!

I walked through a lab clearly set up so that the museum could conduct educational programming, and found what would probably have been George Washington Carver's favorite thing here:

He still gets to teach.

In other news, next year I am 100% figuring out how to grow my own peanut plant in the garden. Peanuts are SUPER nutritious, did you know? And super versatile--you can do SO many things with them, like peanut milk!

You should also keep pigs. They're very gentle, eat lots of scraps, and if you can bring yourself to have them slaughtered they're pound-for-pound very much worth the investment in their upkeep.

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!