“Nature in its varied forms are the little windows through which God permits me to commune with Him and to see much of His glory, majesty, and power by simply lifting the curtain and looking in.”

Chapter One - Little Windows

 
He had been born, he said, “about the twelfth of July… around 1864.” Claiming not to know his age, he also admitted a few months before his death at seventy-eight to not wanting “to stir up anything that will give me as much trouble as the establishing of a birthday.”

His birthplace had been a fourteen-foot-square cabin a couple of minutes’ walk through woods from the nearest dirt road, its one window a square hole into which a board was fitted in cold weather. Its builder had been Mose Carver, of English and German background, allegedly illiterate, with a watchful expression, a wide, slightly down-turned mouth, sideburns continuous with a bushy-sided beard and a clean-shaven upper lip.
 
On his arrival in the Missouri Ozarks from Illinois in 1838, he had built it to house himself, his new wife Susan, his brother and the brother’s two sons and daughter, but within a year his brother, a widower thirty years his senior, had died of illness. He and Susan had taken on raising the children—then twelve, eight and four—in their constant, undemonstrative way in the birth-cabin-to-be and then a slightly bigger cabin Mose had added next door.

With the help of the Preemption Act, Mose had acquired 240 acres of hilly prairie and hardwood forest cheaply; and by keeping his mouth mostly shut as he sold and traded quarter horses of his own breeding, he had amassed a hoard of gold. Approached for loans, he had granted them, the largest for the astronomical sum of $700 to the neighborhood’s only slave owner. When it had come due, the man hadn’t had the cash to repay and had offered instead thirteen-year-old Mary, later to be George Washington Carver’s mother. Mose and Susan, by then in their forties with their nephews and niece grown and moved away, had badly needed help, so Mose had accepted Mary as payment despite reported objections to slavery. People later spoke of Mary’s excellent visual memory, religious nature and deftness at spinning flax on a small wheel by her fireplace, traits that maybe contributed to her son’s genius memory, easy reliance on God, and dexterity at home crafts.

 
Carver had heard from Mose and Susan that his father had been the slave of a Scotsman from North Carolina who had built the grandest house in the neighborhood just across the road from their property. The younger of that man’s two male slaves, possibly named Giles, had been a year older than Mary, who at George’s conception had been twenty-one with a four-year-old son Jim. If he was the father, George lost him around at birth when the young man was riding on an ox-drawn wagon loaded with lumber, tumbled off the front and was crushed under a still-rolling iron front wheel and then back wheel. The owner moved away, taking the only blacks within eight miles of Mary and her boys.

On a damp, chilly, late afternoon a few days into the spring of 1865, calamity struck George even closer as a gang of raiders reined their horses to a halt outside the door of the cabin where the tiny, very-dark-skinned eight-month-old was alone with his mother. Gangs had been pillaging farms along Missouri’s nearby border with Kansas for ten years, since armed hostilities over whether Kansas would be slave or free had plunged the region into lawless violence, a reign of anarchy worsened in its seventh year by the onset of the U.S Civil War. A gang had seized Mose three years earlier, hung him by his thumbs and held orange-hot sticks from his fireplace against his calves and feet to force him to tell where he hid his gold.



 
In the first light of dawn, Mose saddled a horse, rode eight miles on rutted muddy roads to the county seat of Neosho, much of which had been leveled to a charred ruin by torches of retreating Confederate soldiers, hitched his horse in front of the courthouse where the Union Army’s Eighth Regiment was headquartered, walked in and approached the Sergeant on clerk duty. John Bentley, a local farmer in a blue Union uniform with a massive rectangular face, combed-back hair falling halfway down his neck, large, widely-spaced indifferent eyes and eyebrows in a pale straight line curving down a little near the temples, listened with little show of interest as Mose told him he was looking for a scout who could find Mary and George; but when Mose offered forty acres of timber land and a racehorse for them, Bentley opened his wide, thin mouth beneath a neat mustache to say he would try to track them down.
He found and got them, maybe by swapping a horse of Mose’s. Instead of returning them, however, he agreed to an offer of ready money for them, only to find George’s value ruined as his tiny body began to shake and he gasped for air with the shrill sound that gives whooping cough its name. He made a deal for Mary alone, pulled the acutely ill baby from his frantic mother and returned him to Mose for the promised horse, a black mare worth $300—tens of thousands in today’s dollars.

The Carvers expected George to die but tried an herbal cure that they later told him had saved his life, feeding him the juice of a red onion heated in the fireplace until soft, sweetened with sugar or molasses. A week or so after George’s return to the farm, the outcome of the war ended legal slavery and the boys became foster children, living with the Carvers in their cabin.
Mose searched into Mary’s whereabouts, turning up conflicting reports of her dying from pneumonia fever and “going north with soldiers.” Almost a century later, a story would surface of her working as a domestic servant in a small northern Missouri town, along with speculation about an adult George trying to find her, but he would never see her again.