There are some rumors that Carver was castrated. Harley Flack and Edmund Pellegrino's book
African-American Perspectives on Biomedical Ethics (1992) reports that Carver was castrated by a physician at age 11 at the request of his white master. A friend of Carver's was told by the autopsy doctors — according to Carver's biographer Peter Burchard, who told this to Iowa Public Radio in 2010 — that Carver had only scar tissue instead of testicles.
[49] If it is true that he was castrated before puberty, it would explain his high voice, but it would also suggest that he should not have been able to grow his beard.