What Is Past
George Washington Carver was fascinated by the yucca, and why shouldn’t he have been? It sends up narrow, sharp-tipped leaves like a ring of swords around stalks as tall as a person, which drip with heavy bells of flowers in early summer. As a teen, he won a prize for his fine watercolor of a yucca in bloom. As a young scientist, much of his early research focused on this plant.
Yucca has long been scientists’ favorite example of obligate pollinator mutualism. Though there are more instances than I could ever list, this is the one illustrating passages in textbooks about plants that can only be pollinated by one creature – the yucca moth, whose mouth and tentacles are all perfectly evolved to fit with a click into the pollen-soaked stamens of a plant that will, in another season, feed their larvae a portion of its seeds. To study this relationship is to come to know an entirely different way of understanding gardening, farming, and belonging to the plants that feed us. Carver devoted his life to finding such ways of being with the land.
These three kids I love were running through the woods of the George Washington Carver National Monument outside Carthage, MO, where Carver had once been a child among these trees. According to the informative plaques that begin in the visitor center and then stretch out dotting the paths, Carver was a moody little boy, always disappearing into the copse beyond the fields to draw plants and write poems.
According to these plaques, his mother died in uncertain circumstances, on the run most likely, but kidnapped, the signs say, at the height of the Civil War. She died in a skirmish with the men the Carvers sent on horseback to “rescue her” the signs say. And then the Carvers took the baby who came back alive to raise as their own. Like parents, the signs say. But the Carvers were slave masters who owned his mother, the signs don’t say, so they took him as their own like slave masters. I don’t know how to fully imagine the hurting fragile confusion of such a childhood inside everything these signs don’t say, but even the glimmer I can see is a terrible ache.
According to the plaque outside the gated cemetery where the white Carvers are buried but George is not, he always spoke well of the people who raised him. Anyone can see what a sinkhole of history the storytellers at this place have created. And yet, the fact he should be named here at all is a rare degree of memory to encounter in rural Missouri. The day before, twenty minutes north of here, we drug the kids to the Joplin History & Mineral Museum. They thought the miniature circus was cool enough until I remarked on the racist caricature of the Man from Borneo and just generally got going about exploitation as the driving force behind the very concept of sideshows. Then they sighed and wandered off to look at the display case full of cookie cutters. It’s so fucked up that my husband is writing a travel guide to a state where the NAACP has issued a travel advisory. It’s so fucked up that I’m here for it.
I asked the woman working the ticket counter about Langston Hughes, who was born in this town. I couldn’t find anything on my first pass through the exhibit hall, but it was a teeming collection, so a photograph or a pair of eyeglasses or a 1st edition of a book of poems would be easy to miss. The woman at the counter said they didn’t put anything of his up because the town “wasn’t so nice” to his family so it didn’t seem right to claim him. That’s how the people here describe the 1903 lynching of Thomas Gilyard and the subsequent flight of nearly every Black family that lived in Joplin then. “Not so nice.”
The path out of the Carver National Monument visitor’s center winds into the cool shade of the woods where a statue of Professor Carver as a child gazes into the trees. He grew up and found over three hundred uses for peanuts, which was the research that made him most famous. During the war, when supply chains made rubber almost impossible to obtain, he worked with Henry Ford on a project to make tires out of goldenrod. When he was a professor at Tuskegee University, he got on Booker T. Washington’s nerves by constantly asking for more money for himself, his lab, his department, insisting his research was more significant than that of his colleagues. The letters read like every pleading email I’ve ever sent a dean, every grant I ever got funded. He embraced the absurd audacity his profession required. In addition to the work with peanuts, he also found over one hundred uses for sweet potatoes.
Now that he’s dead, he is as much the child who painted a beautiful yucca, as he is the distinguished professor whose botany was a balm to hungry sharecroppers scraping at the nutrient-depleted dirt cotton had starved into dust. Now he is his whole life.
One of these children I’m watching is the same age George is in this statue. As the wind rustles through this grove, I’m thinking of how much he must have missed his mother. And whether that hurt too will last forever. I’m thinking of how he was the scientist who realized peanuts are the kind of plant that can replenish barren land because they have a symbiotic relationship with a bacteria that live in their roots and return nitrogen to the soil. Then I hear one of the kids calling. “Come see! We found something poetic!”
When I reach them, they are standing on a rough-hewn bridge across a trickle of creek. The water runs clear as sky over the pebbled bottom. Willows bend down to let the fingers of their leaves trace the water as the sun scatters her little glints across the ripples. It feels like the kind of place where a ghost might sit down and take off his shoes, then rest on the bank for awhile, watching that light.
To reach the yucca, you must keep walking, beyond this woods, across the fields to the ridge where the soil is more rocky and dry, where the sun is so bright you have to shade your eyes to see the moths fluttering to find each other, their pollen, a perfect place among the open blooms, exactly the way George had once painted them.
Kathryn Nuernberger‘s most recent books are The Witch of Eye, an essay collection about accused witches and their trials, and Rue, a collection of poems about plants used for birth control. Her next book, Held: Essays on Belonging, is forthcoming in November 2025. She is a professor of Creative Writing at University of Minnesota.