Henry Ford has him to Dearborn for the last time (1942). Carver dies (January 5, 1943), and we consider his connection between death and conservation. The good will around him quickly disintegrates in his absence, but his legacy is deathless.

Chapter 21 - Small Things

Someone once asked him which of all the honors paid him had been the greatest. Falling silent, he put his hand over his eyes and answered, “My mind does not run that way.” He could not compare tributes from rich and poor, humble and august. He had lived among them all, and loved them all. His life had been extraordinary in the breadth of his experience across the spectrum, not only of humanity, but of all of his fellow creatures in all nature’s kingdoms. It had straddled a stretch of history that showed him, in sharp relief, humanity’s potential to be both saving grace and deadly scourge. From its far shore, he counseled younger folks, “How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant of the weak and the strong; because someday in life, you will have been all of these.”

Carver’s body lay in state with a white camellia in his left lapel that a white woman from town had brought in hopes that it might have that place of honor. Many years earlier, she had asked Carver for help with her struggling camellia bush, and he had restored its leaves to shiny dark green health. Each year since then, she had brought him blooms from it. Carver had only once made mention of a favorite plant, and it was the camellia.Flanking his coffin were two students from the army’s training corps on campus, standing guard while visitors filed through, filling the chapel with offerings of flowers that augmented the huge arrangement the Institute had placed there.
It was fitting that his lapel flower in death was from someone who hadn’t missed the opportunity to show her appreciation for him while he was living. He once wrote of someone known, he said, to be “an avowed hater of my race” saying about him, “There is one old Negro… I hope I will be near enough to when he dies so that I can get the finest bouquet and carry it and place it on his coffin myself.” Carver had told the person who relayed this to him “to go back and tell the man… that if he would give me just one little bud out of the bouquet now, it would encourage me to go on, and would help me so much over the many hard places that we all have to pull through to reach the goal of our ambitions. It would be so much better than to have a bushel or so that he was going to give me when they would do me no good at all.”

Carver was immovable by irrational appeals to sentiment, especially where waste was in the picture. Harvey Hill recalled him arriving at a train station in Minneapolis with him, Curtis and a Reverend friend when, he said, “our attention was called to a newly-married couple who were walking ahead of us, followed by… friends. Well-wishers were throwing rice at the bride and groom… When Dr. Carver saw this, he burst into laughter [and] called it a “silly waste of perfectly good rice.”… Several persons standing near the train… heard… his laughter… and… caught his spirit.” After Carver and his friends had boarded a train, been seated in the dining car and ordered lunch, Hill recalled, “Dr. Carver recalled the incident on the… platform and his contagious laughter soon spread to nearly every passenger in the dining car.”

A group of forty black high school students arrived at the Carver museum full of enthusiasm after a bus trip from Chicago in 1972 and had their pictures taken as they stood around a statue of Carver holding a handful of peanuts. Catching the Carver spirit, they began touching the statue reverently and saying, “He is alive.” Harry Abbott, at the news of Carver’s death, had written to Tuskegee of the man he called his “elder brother, counselor and friend,” “He is not dead but, in his own words, he has turned the final dial and is now in tune with the Infinite.” Carver once wrote a letter to his student Martin Menafee saying “Our beloved Booker Washington is greater now than when he lived,” and Menafee wrote back his thorough agreement, adding, “That will be true with you, just as sure as the sun shines.”


May what’s been written here go on to bless
us all. For Carver, we can ask no less.