Being Born

- Carter, you know a new baby's gonna be comin' to our house, don't you?

- Yes'm, I do. I see the baby a'growin in your tummy. And I felt it a'movin'.

- Well, that new baby is gonna be comin' soon.

- Uh huh.

- Carter, let me look in your eyes and you look in mine, okay?

- Okay. Why, Momma.

- Well, Carter, you do know your Daddy and me love you, don't you?

- Yes'm, you tell me every day.

- I want to tell you again. I love you.

- I love you too, Momma. And I love Daddy, too.

- That's what I want to talk to you about, Carter. I want to talk with you about love. Is that okay,

- It's okay, Momma. I like to hear about it.

- Well, love is a wondrous thing. You know your Daddy and I love you. You might think, "There's only one of me so Momma and Daddy can give all their love to me. But when my brother or sister comes then there will be two chil'ren so Momma and Daddy will only be able to give a half of their love to me."

That kind of thinkin' is right thinkin' when you're talkin' 'bout things, like the peaches that come from our trees in June. If I have two peaches and give one away, then I have only one peach left, don't I?

- Yes'm., you do.

- Well, you might think love works the same way as peaches do. But it doesn't. When you give away love, you don't lose part of...you gain more of it! It would be like having two peaches and giving one of them away and having three! Love is like that...the more you give away, the more you have to give away!

Snow

White and cold. Everything was covered in cold white. The fields that provided for us. The trees that shaded us and gave us lumber to sell. My Poppas hunched shoulders as he trudged his way to the barn to milk the cows. All were blanketed in snow.

It was the coldest stretch of days and the heaviest and deepest of snows that the midlands had seen in a hundred years. Momma had her arm around me as we snuggled close together and watched Poppa disappear into the blinding whiteness of the pouring snow.

- My, my...look at all that snow, Carter...look at all that snow.

- It's turnin' ever'thin' white. It's beautiful.

- Yes, sweetheart, it is beautiful.

- It makes ever'thin' look so bright and clean and new.

- Yes, it does...it does. But, you know what? I like to think about what's underneath the snow.

- But there's nothin' but frozen ground and bare limbs underneath the snow.

- And don't forget there's a Poppa under it, too!

- Ha! So why do you like to think 'bout things like that, things that're frozen and bare?

- Well, it's 'cause of som'thin' that happened to me when I was a little girl about your age. Ev'ry Sat'dy afternoon, my Daddy and Momma would take me and your Aunts and Uncles into town. We didn't own our own farm like your Daddy and I do now, so we lived in what was called a 'sharecroppers shack' on Mr. Wilson's farm. That shack was a dark, bare place that was too small for a family of nine. We all worked so hard on that farm, but on Sat'dy afternoons Mr. Wilson let us outta work to go to town. In town, ev'rythin' looked like it does now under this blanket of snow - white, clean, and new.

The som'thin' that happened that I wanna tell you 'bout is this. We were walkin' down the sidewalk, Daddy in front, Momma behind him, and the seven of us chil'ren all in a row from the tallest to the shortest. My goodness, we did look like ducks in a row, we chil'ren did. A young man and a young woman, a white young man and woman, came a'walkin' toward us arm in arm. As is the custom, we stepped off the sidewalk to let the white folks pass. I looked down at the ground, as I was supposed to do when a white man passed me, and it was then that I saw a sup'risin' thing.

The cement sidewalk had a small crack in it, and out of that broken place grew a flower, a tiny flower. Even though I was a'wearin' my Sat'dy dress, I knelt down on the ground close to the flower so I could cup my hands around it and really see it. It was the most beautiful flower I had ever seen in my life. It's still the most beautiful flower I ever saw. Its petals were red and yella, its stem was green, and the center a'holdin' its seeds was black. The yella was the color of the sun in the early mornin', the red was the color of the sun in the late ev'nin', the green was the color of the april fields at dawn and dusk, and the black was 'zactly the color of black folks like us's skin. And there was that flower, a'growin' through the hard, white concrete that covered the earth!

That's why I like to think 'bout things that are covered up, Carter, 'bout things that're underneath. Oft'times, you cain't see them but they're there and they're beautiful and they're a'waitin' for a crack so they can grow and be seen and make the world a better place.




Now, I like to spend time with my Momma and if I have to choose the best times I spend with her then I'd choose times like this, times when she holds me close and tells me stories. I love to feel her protective arms around me, feel my future brother or sister move around in her belly to the rhythm of her words, breathe in the smells of buttermilk and flour from this mornings biscuits, and see her story as if I were there with her in her mind and in her heart.

Everything' was covered in white. The ground around me was frozen. But everything inside of me was full of color and warm.

Bakary's Snow

Lightning Bugs

A surprising thing happened on the morning my brother Carver was born, a thing that turned life on our small farm in Clarendon County, South Carolina upside down. It was March 16, 1948. The window was open in my Momma and Daddy’s bedroom because spring had come early and Momma appreciated the cool morning breeze blowing through the cotton curtains after her long night of labor. With the breeze came a lightning bug. Did it stay up all night, flashing its light to the sleeping world? Or did it sleep all night, taking flight at dawn, shining its light on the waking world? “You always ‘a askin’ questions,” said my Daddy early to me one morning as I walked my shoeless feet through the freshly turned soil. His hands were on the plow and he was following our old mule Charlie and I was following him. “That’s a good thing, askin’ questions. Did you know questions drive the world forward, like I’m drivin’ ol’ Charlie down the row? Did you know questions can turn the world upside down, like the plow turns the hard, rocky ground into soft, helpful soil? Did you know questions are like the seeds we’re gonna plant in these rows? It takes a long time to get from seeds to fruits and vegetables and it takes a long time to get from questions to answers that can make a difference in the world. But seeds change to food that feeds people and questions change to answers that can make the world a better place. You keep ‘a askin’ questions always, Carter. Always keep ‘a askin’ questions.” I’ve always tried to do just that, to ask as many questions as I can ask.

There are two questions I haven’t had to ask, though, since that morning Carver was born. Here was the surprising thing that happened. My little baby brother was wrapped in a blanket, snuggled by Momma’s side with his wide brown eyes open. He was as still as the water in our farm pond on a mid May afternoon. The lightning bug that came into the room with the breeze lit gently on his nose. I watched in wonder as my brother blinked his eyes four short blinks and the lightning bug blinked its light four short times. He blinked his eyes three long blinks and it blinked its light three long blinks. Was my brother communicating with the lightning bug? Was such a thing possible? To help me see that I could believe my eyes, he blinked one short, two long, and one short blinks and the lightning bug blinked the same. He finished with one short blink and it gave a final short blink before it took flight and went out the window through which it came. It was at that moment I knew the answers to the two questions we all ask deep in our hearts – How can we be useful, of what service can we be? There is something inside of us, what can it be? I was meant to live life with my special brother and write down what was inside of us.

Seeing

My little brother stood quietly beside his desk with a magnifying glass in his hand. I looked at him from the splintered pine frame of our kitchen door where I was standing. He turned around slowly, like a person who is in deep thought, and looked at me through the lens of the glass. His magnified eye was astonishingly big and brown – as big as the world and as brown as the turned soil in the fields around our farm.

- Carver, why you up? It’s the middle of the night.

- I cain’t sleep.

- What you doin’?

- I’m studyin’ a tomato.

- Why?

- Did you know tomatoes come from the Andes Mountains 'round Peru in South America? And they're fruits and not vegetables 'cause they have seeds inside of them and 'cause they come from a flowering plant? And they're good for your heart and can fight certain kinds of cancer?

I walked to him and knelt beside him. I turned his magnifying glass around and looked into his eye. I saw clearly the parts of his eye that my teacher taught to me at school – the colored part that is the iris and the black part that is the pupil. But it was Carver who taught me how these parts work together to help us see. 

His lessons always began and ended with questions and were filled with an amazing assortment of facts he had memorized from the old set of encyclopedias in our house.

- Carter, you know the five senses?

- Yeah. Let me think…seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching.

-Did’ya know if we divided our brains into five parts, a little more than three of those parts would be filled up by seeing?

- There’s a thin layer on the inside of the eyeball. It’s the retina. Nobody could see into the retina until microscopes were invented. When people looked inside the retina for the first time they found millions of these tiny cells called rods and cones. Those rods and cones find rays of light and turn them into signals for these things called optic nerves. The optic nerves send these signals to the brain and it turns them into pictures. ‘Cause of the way lenses work, the picture is upside down. The brain turns it right side up. Idn’ that amazing?

- Yeah, it's amazing. And, you know what? So are you.

He taught me the parts of the eye that helped him see the world as everyone sees it. In that moment, though, deep in the dark of night, I tried to see the parts that I didn’t understand, the parts that woke my brother in the middle of the night to study a tomato while our corner of the world slept, the parts that helped him see the world as only Carver could see it. But those parts remained hidden to me. 

I gently put my arm around his shoulders and held him close to me.

Carter and Carver

My county is a farm county and so I’m the son of a farmer and a child of the deep, rich soil of Clarendon County. Most mornings, just before sunrise, I stand sleepily outside our back screen door and see the world brighten around me to a maizy yellow, the color of corn before it fully ripens underneath the husk of a cob growing on a stalk. In the evening, just before sunset, I wonder wearily outside that same door and watch the tomato-y sun hang on the horizon, the color of a “goliath” the day we pick it off the vine. The long day in between is filled with cow milking, egg gathering, school going, weed hoeing, lesson learning, and cow milking again. The days are good, though, because I have a younger brother named Carver, who, as Momma and Daddy say, is my pea in the pod. He is my best friend.

Carter and Carver