Occasionally, George and his older brother Jim were allowed to go with Moses to Neosho , the county seat, about eight miles from Diamond Grove. Once, to George 's surprise, he saw a line of colored children straggling into a log schoolhouse. When the door closed behind them, he crept up to it and listened. They were reciting lessons, just like the white children at Locust Grove. He peeped through a knothole. The Negro teacher was reading to the pupils just like the white teacher at Locust Grove. It was, truly, a school for Negro children. George , who was 11 at the time, knew he had to attend that school.
        Back at the Carver house, the boy told Moses , Susan and Jim that he was going to move to Neosho so he could go to school. They asked him where he would sleep and how he would eat. He replied that he would find a place where he could sweep and wash clothes and do the other things Susan had taught him in exchange for his board. They did not try to stop him, and early one morning they watched him start, alone, down the dusty road toward Neosho . He carried the best of his rock collection and a clean shirt in a bundle slung over his shoulder, and a package of food -- loaves of baked corn bread and strips of home-cured fat meat sandwiched in the middle -- under his arm. He turned once and waved a skinny arm, and then he was gone, driven by a deep yearning for the education that would help him find answers to all the questions buzzing in his mind.
        George 's courage wavered after he got to the county seat, and he wandered up and down the streets until dark without speaking to anyone. Then, exhausted, he crawled into the loft of a barn near the schoolhouse, nestled down into the hay and fell asleep. At dawn the next morning, he ventured from the loft and crawled atop the woodpile in the yard behind a neat frame house next door to the school. The yard was grassy and had flowers in it, and that, to George , made it a good place to wait for the schoolhouse to be opened.
        Suddenly, the back door of the house opened and a Negro woman came into the yard. She asked the big-eyed, frightened boy who he was and where he had come from. He stammered that he was Carver's George and he had come from the Moses Carver farm to Neosho to go to school so that he could find out what made snow and hail, and whether the color of a flower could be changed by changing the seed. The woman, Mariah Watkins , told him she doubted if he could find out those things in Neosho , or even in Joplin or Kansas City , but that she had a feeling he would learn them somewhere. She had him scrub at the pump, and then took him inside and served him breakfast along with her husband, Andrew .
        Mariah was a midwife and washerwoman, and Andrew was a hard-working odd-jobs man. They were a religious couple, well thought of in the county seat. They told George they had no children and that he could stay with them and go to school if he'd work. Overjoyed, the boy began listing all the household chores the Carvers had taught him to do. "That's fine," Mariah interrupted. "You call us Aunt Mariah and Uncle Andrew , and listen now, don't ever again say your name is Carver's George . It's George Carver . Now run to school, and come back at noon for a bit of lunch."
        With his keen, retentive mind and restless curiosity, little George was soon making faster progress than any of the other seventy-five pupils packed in Neosho's Lincoln School for Colored Children. And he was the happiest. He didn't join in the rough-and-tumble play in the schoolyard, but he was blissfully satisfied sitting alone in a corner, drawing pictures on his slate, while the other youngsters played. At home, he had a reader or speller propped in front of him even while he scrubbed cloths or washed dishes. He became expert at ironing -- even though he read while doing that, too.