Marilyn Nelson: Hi, this is Marilyn Nelson, and I'm the author of Carver, A Life In Poems. My book is a biography of the great scientist George Washington Carver, who was born a slave in Missouri about 1864 and raised by the childless white couple who had owned his mother. In 1877, he left home in search of an education, eventually earning a master's degree. In 1896, Booker T. Washington invited Carver to start the Agricultural Department at the all-black Tuskegee Institute, where he spent the rest of his life seeking solutions to the poverty among landless black farmers and all poor people by developing new uses for soil replenishing crops such as peanuts, cowpeas and sweet potatoes. Carver's achievements as a botanist and inventor were balanced by his gifts as a painter, musician, teacher, and I believe, saint.

The poem I will read from this book is about two very important scientific developments, which took place in the same year, 1905. This was the year Albert Einstein published his great, groundbreaking, history-making paper called Special Theory Of Relativity, in which he establishes the speed of light.

When I was doing research for this book, I found a letter sent to the United States National Park Service by Albert Einstein, typed with his signature at the bottom, encouraging the National Park Service to open a museum to honor what Einstein calls, "the great scientist, George Washington Carver". This is a poem called 1905.

Looking out of the front page, a wild haired, gentle eyed young German man stands before a blackboard of incomprehensible equations. Meanwhile, back in the quotidian, Carver takes the school to the poor. He outfits an open truck with shelves for his jars of canned fruit, and compost, bins for his croker sacks of seeds. He travels roads barely discernible on the county map, teaching former field slaves how to weave ditch weeds into pretty table place mats, how to keep their sweet potatoes from rotting before winter hunger sets in, how to make preacher-pleasing mock fried chicken without slaughtering a laying hen. He notes patches of wild chicory the farmers could collect to free themselves from their taste for high priced, imported caffeine. He and his student assistants bump along, shoulder to shoulder in the high cab, a braided scale of laughter trailing above their raised dust.

Today Carver is explaining, as far as he understands it, that fellow Einstein's special theory of relativity. He's hardly gotten to Newtonian space when a platoon of skinny dogs announces the next farm. As they pull up, a black man and his boy straighten, two rows of shin-high cotton apart. With identical gestures, they remove straw hats, wipe their foreheads with their sleeves. Their welcoming glance meets Carver's eyes at the velocity of light.