Chapter 55, The Upper Basin Chronicles

Chapter 55

I Can Be A Scientist

Imagine a fourth grader, a skinny black kid with burnished skin and hair the color of dark ocher, sitting in a winter classroom in St. Paul, Minnesota, in a desk by the window where soybean seeds are beginning to sprout in twin rows of white cardboard cups on the sill.

Imagine the boy longing to read, turning the pages of a book with wonderful pictures of a man with a large white mustache and short white hair, covered by a long white apron, standing in a laboratory, smiling out at him. The boy, Antonio, stares at the large text on the page and silently tries to wrap his quietest voice around the words that too often seemed turned around, out of order to what he hears in his head. He looks again at the beans getting bigger, recalling his great success of last year, marking each day's growth as a dot on graph paper, and connecting each dot with a line, day after day, with those before. The lines were shiny and crisp from a sharp pencil running beside his ruler. The lines told the story of the bean's growing. Antonio looks beyond these beans to the row of trees in the distance that marked the Mississippi River. In his mind, he could see his mother in her little plot of community garden.

"Antonio?" asked Mr. Augustan, "Long division. What are the four steps? Please tell us."

The child looked up at his teacher blankly for just a moment. Then he spoke.

"Ah, um. Fit - the - number… I forget." Antonio stared at his desk.

"OK, good start. Long division. Fit the number in. Multiply around. Subtract. Bring the number down. That's it. Now, let's get going on these exercises."

The class of black and Hmong children, a few whites, and three Hispanics bent their heads to the task. Their teacher worked his way among the kids flagging him with their hands up, all the while heading to the desk of Lee, whom he knew was struggling most.

Antonio, meanwhile, had returned to the book about George Washington Carver, the agricultural chemist, botanist, inventor, researcher, and teacher. "A Weed Is a Flower: The Life of George Washington Carver," by Aliki, is a beautiful piece of work, nonetheless, one that many kids read as second and third graders. From the infant George's kidnapping by slave raiders less than 150 years ago to his innovative Jessup Wagon rolling schools at Tuskegee, the book inspired young minds.

Yet, Antonio was dyslexic. In an urban school, even in St. Paul, the capitol of the State of Minnesota, in 2004, there were not enough resources, not enough supplies, not enough staff, not enough money to meet all the needs of every child. A bad economy, lagging revenue, a state deficit, and budget cuts to education meant that not enough well-meaning people connected with Antonio as often as he needed.

"Hey, Antonio." The fourth grader was suddenly eye-to-eye with his teacher. "Who's this?" Mr. Augustan asked, pointing at the figure in the book.

"George Washington Carver," replied the child. "He's a scientist."

"Do scientists need math, Antonio?" Mr. Augustan pressed.

"I guess so," answered the boy.

"Then you do, too, Antonio. If you're going to be a scientist like Dr. Carver, you've got to have long division. Let's hit it."

Antonio took up his pencil again and forged into the first exercise. Yet, by then, many of his 27 classmates, but not all, had nearly finished. More than one young face stared away from the work undone with glazed expression. Mr. Augustan was outnumbered with no assistant in sight.

Later, after soup and bread for supper in a worn apartment with water stains on the ceiling, Antonio's mother, Rosa, turned the pages of a colorful new seed catalog, while Antonio studied the pictures of George W. Carver.

"What's your homework, child?" she asked.

"Long division," said Antonio. "Mr. Augustan said I can be a scientist, but I have to have long division."

"Then, you better get at it, son, it's near bedtime," said Rosa.

Rosa McNally reached over and hugged her only child, a bright boy with dyslexia, whom she was raising alone on fast food wages and stubbornness. She had a dream too, once, before Antonio was born -- to be a landscape designer, to find a good job crafting beautiful gardens. But that was before Antonio's father had left without saying goodbye. She refused now to speak the man's name.

"Tell me. How do you do it?" she asked.

"First you write the number you want to divide here. Then, you draw a bracket this like, I mean, like this. Then you put the number to divide by over here. Then you fit that number into this number. That's the hard part. You have to figure out how many of those can fit inside this one. Two, no, just one." Antonio took a deep breath, erasing the two and replacing it with a one.

"That looks good, Antonio!" exclaimed his mother. "What's next?"

"Then you multiply that number by this number and put the answer down here," Antonio narrated each step. "Then you subtract this one from, mmmm, that one, aaa-nd put the answer down he-re. Then, you bring the next number down beside that one, and start over. That's how you do it!" Antonio beamed at his mother.

"I think I can be a scientist, Mom," he said, suddenly serious.

"Keep on, honey, you just keep on. You're right. You can be a scientist!"

Rosa hugged Antonio once more, and felt her eyes well up with tears.

# # #

Next... Chapter 56.

Thanks for these resources:

Honoring King from perch of experience
By Phil Santoro, Boston Globe, 01/18/2004
http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2004/01/18/honoring_king_from_perch_of_experience/

Pair shed light on small black community
By Scheri Smith, The Louisville Courier-Journal, 01/19/04
http://www.courier-journal.com/localnews/2004/01/19ky/wir-front-cole0119-13758.html

Put Martin Luther King Jr. on the $20 bill
Editorial by Michael Shellenberger and Tommy McDonald
San Francisco Chronicle, 01/19/03
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/01/19/EDG644BTUO1.DTL

USDA, Black Farmers Settle Bias Lawsuit
By Michael A. Fletcher, Washington Post, 01/06/99
http://www.fs.fed.us/people/aasg/correspondence/wp_farmers.html

Memorandum of Understanding between the National Black Farmers Association, the USDA Forest Service, and the USDA Coalition of Minority Employees, 02/04/98
http://www.fs.fed.us/people/nbf-mou.html

George Washington Carver
American Visionary, National Park Service
http://www.cr.nps.gov/museum/exhibits/tuskegee/gwcoverview.htm

Dr. George W. Carver Tribute
Tuskegee University
http://www.tuskegee.edu/Global/story.asp?S=1107203

The Booker T. Washington Era
American Memory, The Library of Congress
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/aaohtml/aopart6.html

Voices from the Days of Slavery: Former Slaves Tell Their Stories
American Memory, The Library of Congress
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/vfshtml/vfshome.html

Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938
American Memory, The Library of Congress
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/snhtml/snhome.html

Who Owns the Land: Agricultural Land Ownership by Race/Ethnicity
By Jess Gilbert, Spencer D. Wood, Gwen Sharp, University of Wisconsin-Madison Social Science Computing Cooperative, from Rural America, Winter, 2002, Volume 17, Issue 4
http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~wood/Who_Owns_the_Land_Final_Published_Version.pdf

Black Farmers And Agriculturalists Association
http://www.coax.net/people/lwf/bfaa_org.htm

Your comments are invaluable. Please email feedback to the author via (mailto link) The Upper Basin Chronicles, Chapter 55.

John Gabbert writes and edits The Upper Basin Chronicles.

The characters presented here are purely fictional, and neither bear resemblance to persons living or dead, nor represent the views or opinions of Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota.