Seedfolks

Curious, observant, and something of a busybody, Ana is the oldest resident of Gibb Street and could serve as the block’s resident historian. She spends her retirement in the apartment where she grew up, left to her by her immigrant parents whom she cared for until their deaths. She likes watching the neighborhood’s daily dramas unfold like a soap opera. This habit of watching leads her to observe Kim burying her lima beans.

Ana is suspicious, and her long years in the working-class neighborhood (many of them spent working as a secretary for the parole board) have left her cynical. Born in 1919, she has seen constant change in the neighborhood, much of it negative, and she keeps herself aloof from those around her. Her internal conflict centers on her curiosity and desire to participate versus the isolation and cynicism that keep her shut inside. Kim is the catalyst who finally moves Ana from observer to actor. In Kim’s beans, she finds something positive to watch over, providing a chance for her to nurture and participate and Overcome Separation With a Shared Purpose.

Wendell is as lonely as Ana, his only companion and someone he looks out for because he sees her as not just one of the only other white people left in the building but also a kindred spirit. A caretaker at heart, Wendell dreads telephone calls, as he associates the ringing with news of his wife and son’s deaths; he pessimistically fears Ana might also be dying when she phones him and asks him to come to her apartment. Aside from his loneliness, Wendell also struggles with apathy. He could not help his wife and son, and he cannot help himself.

When Ana first enlists him to save Kim’s beans, Wendell feels put out. As a janitor, he must often take orders, so deciding what to do and when in his personal life is the only bit of control he has. He stalls while filling a pitcher and taking it out to the beans, but when he arrives, he encounters a miracle. A son of Kentucky planters, he is amazed that the warm-weather plants survived the spring cold but then realizes the shelter of an abandoned refrigerator allowed the beans to sprout. The improbable trash shelter allows Wendell to see the lot with new eyes. Kim’s garden makes him hope that there are still things he can change in the world, beginning with the lot. The garden heals Wendell’s inner apathy, brought on by loss and loneliness, and feeds his core need as a caretaker by providing him with something to nourish and support.

Gonzalo, an eighth-grade boy, is smart, observant, and quick-witted. He is a Guatemalan immigrant who learned English from school and cartoons and who has a personal theory about immigration that he names after himself. According to “Garcia’s Equation,” the older a person is when they arrive in the United States, the younger they become. Conversely, the younger a person is when they immigrate, the older they become. In his own family, Gonzalo is the “oldest” by virtue of the responsibilities his language skills confer: He must make all the important phone calls and translate for his parents.

Gonzalo thinks he knows everything but also feels burdened by adult responsibilities. The garden is a chance to step away from his role as teacher, interpreter, and caretaker to his Tίo Juan and be humbled by a mystery. Watching Tίo Juan plant seeds from memory, Gonzalo returns to a childlike space of wonder where he can be led instead of leading. This shift in perspective toward both the world and Tίo Juan, whom he once viewed with pity, transforms his attitude. In the garden, he witnesses two parallel miracles: the miracle of nature and the miracle of reversing Garcia’s Equation. 

Though a secondary character in Gonzalo’s story, where Tίo Juan is described as baby-like and incapable of understanding his new life in the United States, he reappears later in others’ stories as the wise old man, toothless and wearing a straw hat. An Indigenous Guatemalan man, Tίo Juan cannot speak Spanish or English. Nevertheless, he has much to teach the gardeners: Tίo Juan was formerly the oldest man in his village, respected as a wise elder. He arrives in urban Cleveland with no outlet for his agrarian knowledge, so Gonzalo just sees him as someone to mind. The garden provides Tίo Juan with a wordless way to tap into his wisdom and share it not just with Gonzalo but also with others. Within the garden, he is valued, and people begin to seek him out for help. By finding a way back to his roots, Tίo Juan creates a place where he belongs and a purpose in his new life.

Leona is a strong community organizer with skills she learned from her grandmother back in Atlanta. When Leona sees Kim, Tίo Juan, and Wendell working in the trashed lot, she wants to plant goldenrod in honor of her grandmother, who drank goldenrod tea daily. However, she also understands what the lot could mean for the community if only the trash were removed. Knowing the immediate neighborhood does not have to means to remove the dumped furniture and old tires, Leona resolves to make the necessary calls and complaints to get the lot cleared.

Like goldenrod, which digs in, spreads, and withstands hostile conditions with ease, Leona is tenacious, firm, and unrelenting in her efforts to clear the lot. She is also methodical, knowing exactly when and how to change tactics. Intuiting that she is too easy to ignore over the phone, she takes a bag of the garbage directly to the authorities. In only two days, she secures a promise from the city to clear the lot and open it up to anyone who wants a garden.

For Leona, the garden is a way to honor her roots. Like Kim, she uses it to recapture a connection with a deceased loved one, but unlike Kim, she also uses it to honor her own values and convictions as a community activist, knowing that what is good for her will also benefit others.

Sam is the neighborhood philosopher and scholar, a Jewish man newly retired from his job promoting world peace. Sam struggles to continue his life’s work after retiring, but when he sees the cleared lot, Sam finds a tangible way to carry out his personal mission of goodwill. The garden provides him with a place to mingle with regulars and nudge people toward building deeper connections with one another.

Observant, scholarly, and working from his own big-picture view of the world, Sam first names the potential that Leona intuited exists with the garden: paradise. Though he knows paradise literally means “walled-garden” in Persian, he sees in this garden something of the Garden of Eden. However, he recognizes that the garden is not perfect yet. He takes the voluntary segregation of people within the garden as a sign that a shared goal is not enough to unify the diverse and isolated people of the neighborhood. He begins to organize interactions between people, first by talking and asking questions, like a bee pollinating from flower to flower, and then with a contest for children to solve the issue of water access. Though it is not solely his work, the garden gives Sam a way to foster the peace he once hoped to establish between nations.

A recent fifth-grade graduate, dreamy Virgil idolizes his entrepreneurial Haitian father almost as much as he dreams of an 18-speed bike. When his father decides to use their garden plot to get rich, Virgil sees a quick path toward that bike. Though he would rather spend the summer relaxing, he agrees to help, trusting his father’s meticulous planning. Virgil has faith that his father’s hard work and industriousness will pay off because that is the American Dream.

However, Virgil is not prepared for the toil and heartache of growing lettuce, nor is he ready to watch his father fall from grace. At first, Virgil is merely annoyed by the work, but he feels betrayed and disappointed when his father lies by saying that they are using extra space for relatives Virgil knows still live in Haiti. When the lettuce wilts and succumbs to insects, it further tests Virgil’s faith in both his father and the American Dream. At first, Virgil believes it is divine punishment for his father’s lies. He resents being caught up in it, knowing that without the lettuce, he will never get his bike. However, Virgil loves his father enough to forgive him. Reaching deep inside himself to find his faith, Virgil prays for the lettuce and continues to tend it. By the end of the summer, Virgil’s father is selling the lettuce as planned. For Virgil, the garden is an act of love and labor that reaffirms his faith in his father and his sense of order and fairness in the universe.

A minor character who appears in Virgil’s and Maricela’s stories, Miss Fleck is the stereotypical strict teacher whose students dread her. She is a stickler for rules and a busybody, and both Virgil and Maricela describe her brusque and probing nature. She questions Virgil’s father’s use of space and is sarcastic and incredulous when Virgil’s father lies by saying that he is overseeing his family members’ plots. However, despite her attempts to appoint herself the garden’s supervisor, she has no real power in the egalitarian space: As Virgil puts it, “[W]hat principal could she send him to?” (42). Similarly, Maricela resents Miss Fleck’s nosy questioning but reveals the benefits of her strong personality when she describes Miss Fleck scolding someone for littering. Even people who seem difficult have a role in the garden and the community.

Middle-aged Sae Young experienced a robbery two years before the story begins. This left her afraid of people, compounding the loneliness she already felt: She misses the large family she remembers from her youth in Korea, and her husband—with whom she was unable to have children—died suddenly of a heart attack. The garden provides a safe place for Sae Young to reenter the community and heal.

While voice is important throughout the novel, Fleischman characterizes Sae Young in particular through her speech. She is not fluent in English, often dropping prepositions in her monologue and allowing sentence fragments to stand. This interior monologue hints at the loneliness Sae Young must feel not only due to the tragedies she has endured but also due to language barriers. As it does for Tίo Juan, the garden provides a way for Sae Young to connect with others meaningfully without needing to speak English fluently: It is Sae Young’s funnels that solve the problem of pouring water from barrels to jars. When she sees how useful her contribution is and how many hands her funnels pass through in a day, Sae Young knows she has found belonging and family right there in the garden.

Curtis initially seems vain, his monologue opening with a catalogue of his sculpted muscles and all the women who have found them attractive enough to touch. However, if Curtis still values his body and looks, he has returned to the neighborhood to be more than an attractive bodybuilder. His ex-girlfriend, Lateesha, broke up with him because he sought attention from other women, and he now wants to show her he is mature and ready to commit.

His plan to do so plays out through the external challenges posed by the garden. At first, his friends tease him, replacing his manly nickname, ‘Ceps (short for biceps), with Tomato, the plant he now tends with unwavering devotion because it is Lateesha’s favorite. The old Curtis might have teased or pushed back, but gardener Curtis sees the nickname as reaffirming his dedication to Lateesha. Next, the drunken vagrants hanging around the boarded-up pharmacy beneath Lateesha’s apartment hurl racist insults at him, but instead of physically confronting them as he might have before, he directs his energies toward his plants. His treatment of the young runaway, Royce, confirms that Curtis is no longer self-interested but committed to others. By helping Royce and tending the garden, Curtis reveals his capacity to nurture.

Fifteen-year-old Royce is a minor character, a shy, soft-spoken boy with a stutter who has been sleeping in the garden since running away from his abusive father. Because he is tall, muscular, quiet, and Black, people in the neighborhood are at first prejudiced against him. Curtis, seeing something of himself in Royce, reaches out to him, and soon the other gardeners begin to help in their own ways, showering him with produce from their gardens. In return, Royce provides covert acts of service, secretly building pathways or spreading mulch—acts he often denies when confronted.

Royce illustrates the reciprocal nature of giving. Just like the garden, which bears fruit when it is tended and nourished, Royce thrives when he is accepted and included, and he uses this newfound energy and purpose to help others. Royce brings disparate elements of the garden together, literally building pathways, and the interconnections result in a far more successful environment. Though his life is far from ideal, the garden provides Royce with an important role and supportive community connections.

Nora is an outsider, a British-born nurse who comes to Gibb Street to take care of the resident Mr. Myles. Nora wants to get her charge outside more and is frustrated that she knows so little about Mr. Myles; she feels that if she knew more, she could get him involved in activities that would stimulate his traumatized brain. A good caregiver, she worries as he seems to sink deeper and deeper into himself, to the point where he often naps even during walks.

Nora provides an outsider’s perspective on the garden. Because she only visits the neighborhood, Nora’s awe appears more objective, reaffirming the miraculous quality residents attribute to the garden. Nora involves herself in the garden to improve Mr. Myles’s quality of life and only secondarily marvels at the sense of community that she also ends up feeling. Observant and intuitive, Nora provides a quasi-scientific perspective on the therapeutic nature of gardening for both the individual body and the community at large.

A minor character without a monologue, Mr. Myles illustrates the garden’s therapeutic benefits. Mr. Myles has had two strokes and is first described as nearly dead, his eyes dim and his face slack and unresponsive. He often falls asleep during walks, worrying his caregiver, Nora. When he sees the garden for the first time, he perks up and finds a reason to communicate with his caregiver.

Though the garden is not a cure-all for Mr. Myles, repeated visits and involvement improve Mr. Myles’s condition. He is more alert and attentive on walks because he has a goal and a purpose in the garden. Though he generally struggles with manual tasks, he steadies his hands to sow rows of flowers, the work healing damaged areas of his brain. His physical healing symbolically parallels the experience of the neighborhood: Just as the garden begins to knit Mr. Myles’s neural pathways together, it reconnects people and places once separated by trauma.

Maricela is the most skeptical and cynical of all the characters. She is a pregnant Mexican American teenager so overcome by the stigma of her situation that she pulls away from everything, including the garden. She only visits the garden because the caseworker for her pregnancy and GED support program, Penny, insists she volunteer there. Except for Royce, the other characters are in the garden by choice, but Maricela’s presence there, like her pregnancy, is an accident. Caught in her own misery, Maricela can only see negatives wherever she looks, and her monologue initially fixates on everything she hates. Instead of seeing paradise, neighborly bonds, or even dreams of getting rich, Maricela sees radishes that she hates, squash that spreads out and intrudes on others’ plants, Swiss chard that she doesn’t know how to eat, backbreaking labor made more difficult with a seven-month pregnancy belly, and people she wants only to hide from, like her overbearing former teacher, Miss Fleck.

Over time, Maricela becomes friendly with Leona, the only person she feels is not trying to ignore her in embarrassment or force her to be happy about her reality. When Leona gives Maricela the healing goldenrod and some advice about the natural seasons and rhythms of life, Maricela’s perception of the garden changes, and her attitude toward herself grows more complex. Feeling newly connected to the garden and nature, Maricela shifts her perception of her own shame and stigma.

As a recent immigrant, Amir reflects on the differences between his life on Gibb Street, where no one knows each other, and his life in India. In Amir’s opinion, the norms that govern American life lead to separation and loneliness. Unlike Sae Young, a first-generation immigrant who attributes her loneliness to misfortune, Amir knows that the isolation of people on Gibb Street stems from American culture and history. Amir sees the garden as building authentic community by breaking the “rules” that create isolation: minding one’s own business and remaining stubbornly self-sufficient.

Observant and introspective, Amir is also a businessman and a deep thinker who can also easily chat with people. He shrewdly plants eggplants, the only purple plant in the garden, and their beauty draws the gardeners to him, creating a web of conversation and shared knowledge. It is deep-thinking Amir who notices that admiration of a gardener’s plants naturally turns to admiration of the gardener’s own uniqueness and wisdom. Amir, like the other gardeners, also gives his bounty away freely despite generally adhering to the adage that one should never give away one’s goods for nothing; while the gardeners each come with their own beliefs, cultures, and experiences, they all recognize the values of community shared responsibility and mutual care. The garden allows Amir to overcome the conflict of being an outsider and to reconcile his own beliefs about what a neighborhood should be with those of the diverse people around him.