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  • George Washington Carver: A Life by Christina Vella
  • Thomas E. Reidy
George Washington Carver: A Life. By Christina Vella. Southern Biography Series. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015. Pp. xii, 422. $38.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-6074-9.)

In dozens of interviews and speeches before his death in 1943, the celebrated scientist George Washington Carver offered several conflicting accounts of the seminal moments that shaped his life. Since his passing, Carver has remained an enigmatic subject to biographers. Christina Vella attempts to untangle some of the inconsistencies in George Washington Carver: A Life. Her lively book is a panoramic sweep: the story of a man whose life began as a kidnapped slave in Missouri during the Civil War. It is the tale of a peripatetic teenager who moved from town to town, cooking for board, and doing laundry for money, who somehow managed to save enough to obtain a formal education. Miraculously, he gained acceptance into Iowa State College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts where his genius was finally recognized.

Vella is a masterful storyteller. Her prose entertains as it informs, such as when she describes Carver as “a special fool, credulous as the birds that smashed themselves against his window and guileless as the chickens in [his] poultry farm” (p. 141). She directs some of her most colorful barbs toward Carver’s boss at Tuskegee Institute, Booker T. Washington. Vella describes Washington’s “feral tactics” and “simple-minded jealousy”; Washington played the role of bête noire to the underfunded and underappreciated Carver (p. 125). Despite his differences with Washington, Tuskegee became home to Carver, and his meager laboratory was the birthplace of countless agricultural innovations and scientific discoveries. Imaginatively and with great detail, Vella recreates Carver’s world: from the idiosyncratic Tuskegee community for whom Carver once famously provided a five-course luncheon using peanuts in every dish, to the school where he became every student’s favorite professor.

Of her sources, Vella is especially interested in Carver’s correspondence with ex-assistants, friends, and admirers. Prominent among this cache were letters between the scientist and a younger white student with whom Carver [End Page 953] may have been physically intimate. “Don’t give me credit for loving you,” Carver wrote to the young man, “I could not help it if I tried” (p. 215). While their correspondence may titillate some readers, it actually reveals little about Carver, other than that the relationship blossomed during a period when Carver was experiencing an intense religious awakening. Vella’s narrative relies heavily on letters, and other examples prove equally frustrating in terms of getting to really know the man.

That may be because Carver, for whatever reason, was not comfortable sharing his thoughts about the important topics of the day in politics, society, or the economy. For the most part, he stood mute on race relations, even though he claimed to have picked Tuskegee Institute because it gave him the best opportunity to do “the greatest good” for those whom Carver described as “my people” (p. 58). One is left to wonder whether Carver was a ready or reluctant disciple of Washington’s philosophy of accommodation. Did Carver push back against the idea of training southern African Americans to accept their lowly station in society in exchange for greater, short-term economic gain? What exactly were the terms of his commitment to his “people”? Moreover, why Carver stayed at Tuskegee with the dictatorial Washington and all his broken promises—they worked together for twenty years, until Washington died in 1915—is a question that undoubtedly has a more nuanced answer than Vella offers.

Ultimately this colorful and well-written biography lacks a unifying theme. In spite of the strong narration, we do not learn what drove Carver or what demons haunted him. We learn about the discoveries that created his celebrity but not about the moments that revealed his character. George Washington Carver remains an enigma.

Thomas E. Reidy
University of Alabama Huntsville
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