George Washington Carver—Scientist After God

George Washington Carver—Scientist After God
Wednesday, February 17, 2021 by Susan Lyttek

Today is Ash Wednesday. I mention that because my March posts will be about Lent. But as it is still February, still Black History Month, we have my next favorite candidate.

When I was in middle school, I had two favorite nonfiction books that I checked out, often, from our church library.

The first was about the Ice Age. The second was a biography of George Washington Carver. I think, by googling quite a bit, that it must have been the one by Anne Terry White. The 1962 cover looks right.

If you know anything about me, including anything about me as a preteen, getting me to read anything nonfiction was a struggle. That always seemed too much like schoolwork. If I was going to read for pleasure, it was fiction. The more fantastical the better.

Maybe that was why the biography of George Washington Carver resonated with me. His life, in a way, was fantastical. It was so designed by God that it seemed nearly impossible.

Born just before the end of slavery and the end of the Civil War, baby George seemed to have landed into a good house. The Carvers reluctantly owned slaves because they couldn’t do all the work on their own, nor could they afford paid help. A good Christian family, they tried to treat the slaves as an extended part of that family.

Then the raiders came.

They kidnapped young George along with his mother and sister. (His father had died before he was born and somehow his brother escaped notice.)

Panicked, the Carvers immediately took action and sent friends to find the dearly loved little family. The kidnapped victims were traced to Kentucky where they had been sold, but only George was found.

Heartbroken, the Carvers redeemed George by selling one of their best horses. They vowed to do right by the motherless boy.

In this way, George and his brother were raised right alongside the Carvers children. They were taught to read and write. They were given every opportunity possible for the time.

George’s brother liked farmwork, but George himself was not physically strong. It could have been that the time away from the Carvers malnourished him at a critical time in development. Or it could just have been the way he was from birth. No one knows for sure. But since he couldn’t do physical labor, he exercised his mind instead.

Mrs. Carver taught him all she could. George worked with her in the garden, learned his herbs and how to grow things in a plot. And in that time, George fell in love with growing things. In fact, he was so intuitive as to what made plants healthy, that the community called him the “plant doctor” at the ripe age of 10.

At 11, he went away to school. This began a cycle that continued until he made it to Iowa. A Christian family would host him and he learned more from the family than from the school. So he would seek out a new school. A new Christian family would host him and the cycle would continue. At the time, it just wasn’t expected that a black boy would want to learn so much or be so smart.

Still, God paved the way for him. Each change taught him something new and put him in contact with someone else he would need along the way. George, like I said, learned almost as much from the families who hosted him (and from experiments with their gardens) as he learned from the schools he attended.

Finally, he was admitted into college where he wowed the professors so much that he was asked to stay on to graduate school.

There, he made history as the first black man to earn both an advanced degree and the admiration of his peers.

I urge you to find a biography and read more about the man. I will close this post with two of his quotes.

“The secret of my success? It is simple. It is found in the Bible.”

“When I was young, I said to God, 'God, tell me the mystery of the universe.' But God answered, 'That knowledge is for me alone.' So I said, 'God, tell me the mystery of the peanut.' Then God said, 'Well George, that's more nearly your size.' And he told me.”

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