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Chapter 10: Nora
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Seedfolks, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Gardening and Community
Nature, Mental Health, and the City
The Immigrant Experience
Family, Memory, and the Future
Summary
Analysis
If a person’s Mexican, then Cubans and Puerto Ricans hate them and assume that the person snuck into the U.S. illegally. Teenagers are widely hated, too. And the world hates pregnant teenagers even more. So Maricela, who’s 16, Mexican, and pregnant, wouldn’t care if someone shot her. In a way, she’s already dead. She used to be attractive, but now she’s fat. She dropped out of school, she hasn’t been invited to any parties, and even the guy who got her pregnant hasn’t asked her out. Her parents were mad at first about her pregnancy, since they wanted her to graduate high school, but abortion or adoption weren’t options. Then they started to get excited about the pregnancy and prayed for the baby. Maricela, however, prayed she’d miscarry.
Maricela sees her pregnancy as the end of her life as she knows it. The life ahead of her isn’t the one she’s always wanted as a teenage girl—there are no parties or dates, and it seems unclear whether or not she’s ever going to graduate high school. In this way, she seems much like how Nora described Mr. Myles in the first paragraphs of Nora’s chapter. Like the old man, Maricela has lost her desire to live—and she hopes that her baby’s life will end, too.
Themes
Maricela and two other girls from her high school enrolled in a program for pregnant teens. It provides rides to the doctor and help students earn their GED at home. It seems great, except Penny, the woman who runs the program, got the girls a plot in the community garden. She wants them to practice taking care of something and see “the miracle of life.” Maricela thinks that Penny probably also wants to keep the girls from eating their babies or abandoning them in dumpsters.
Penny seems to want to impress upon her students that being pregnant isn’t the end of their lives—it’s the start of new life. Other participants in the community garden have made the connection between parenthood and gardening (Virgil, for instance, feels like the lettuce’s mother because the crop requires such constant care), and Penny makes the same connection here.
Themes
Since it’s the middle of summer already, Penny has the girls plant fast-growing radishes—even though the girls all hate radishes. A rodent destroys the little leaves as soon as they sprout. Maricela doesn’t share with Penny that she hopes the same thing will happen to her baby. Penny is always so cheerful, but it’s no wonder—she’s not the one vomiting or getting huge.
That Penny has the girls growing radishes despite their distaste for them suggests that liking the produce (i.e., wanting to eat it after harvest) isn’t the point of this project. In fact, it actually seems fitting that Penny has the girls practice tending to a crop they all hate, because Maricela has contempt for the baby she’s growing inside of her, too.
Themes
Penny then has the girls plant squash and Swiss chard. Nobody knows how to eat Swiss chard, and Maricela is seven months pregnant and hates bending over to garden. The girls complain, but Penny just smiles. Working in the garden is a chore, and all the girls hate it. When one of the other girls breaks two of her fancy nails and curses for 10 minutes, another woman comes over to lecture her on proper behavior. Maricela can’t believe it—it’s Miss Fleck, her third-grade teacher. She prays Miss Fleck won’t recognize her, but Miss Fleck does, and she asks all the usual questions. (Maricela thinks to herself that she should get the answers printed on cards to hand out.) A week later, when a man throws a can out the window and into the garden, Miss Fleck goes to the man’s door and yells at him.
Miss Fleck’s reappearance in the narrative indicates that she’s a regular fixture in the garden. Even though she makes her former students feel embarrassed whenever she turns up (as she did previously with Virgil and here with Maricela), it’s clear that Miss Fleck is committed to making the garden into the best place it can be. Earlier in the novel, this took the form of her criticizing Virgil’s father for greedily taking so many plots for himself, and here, she protects and betters the garden by scolding the litterer.
Themes
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People come into the girls’ part of the garden for various reasons. One Puerto Rican kid’s pumpkin plants keep invading Maricela and her classmates’ plants, which gives him an excuse to talk to 15-year-old Dolores, who’s still pretty despite her pregnancy. Maricela can’t wait for her to get big. Sometimes, a big Black man who tries unsuccessfully to grow lettuce tramples through the garden. He always pulls up in a cab, slams on the brakes, and then picks lettuce as fast as he can. People also stop by to give the girls vegetables, as well as unsolicited advice on growing Swiss chard, childbirth, and raising kids. Maricela tunes them out.
Here, Maricela brings up two characters who appeared earlier in the novel: the Puerto Rican teen who helped Sam turn the soil, and Virgil’s father who planted six plots of lettuce. Virgil’s father is clearly acting on his plan to sell the lettuce to restaurants. Despite Miss Fleck’s earlier scolding, he still appears to be selfish and focused on profit, which sets him apart from everyone else in the community garden. As the novel has already shown, sharing advice and expertise and forming connections with others are integral to the community garden. But to Maricela, these behaviors are unwelcome.
Themes
One day in August, it’s just Penny and Maricela in the garden. Leona comes over to chat and gives Maricela some yellow flowers called goldenrod. Supposedly, if Maricela makes them into tea, it’ll help with the delivery. Leona knows that Maricela doesn’t want to be pregnant, and she’s the only person Maricela can talk to about it. Maricela can hear various TVs and radios, as well as an approaching storm. When it hits, the electricity goes off instantly. Everything goes quiet in the neighborhood—but an old man continues to pick cucumbers as though nothing happened.
By giving Maricela the goldenrod for tea, Leona is able to pass her Granny’s knowledge of herbal remedies down to future generations. This is another reflection of how generously sharing expertise and advice is integral to the culture of the community garden. As the only person Maricela can talk to about her unwanted pregnancy, Leona takes on an important mentoring role in Maricela’s life. Like the relationship that forms between Curtis and Royce, this friendship speaks to the way that the gardeners begin to help one another with things unrelated to gardening. While the garden brings people together, their connections grow even deeper roots beyond sharing produce and gardening advice.
Themes
Leona remarks that the city shuts down when the power goes out, but the garden keeps going. She continues to talk about how nature doesn’t run on electricity or clocks; instead, it runs on sunlight, rain, and seasons. Maricela’s body is part of this system. Maricela feels herself fall into a daze as she thinks about being related to dinosaurs and plants. This system, she realizes, is much older and stronger than human civilization. Leona insists that it’s not a disgrace to be part of nature—on the contrary, it’s an honor. Maricela stares at the squash leaves. She can almost see the leaves growing and changing. For just a moment, she stops hoping her baby will die.
It’s significant that Maricela briefly stops hoping her baby will die when she realizes that she’s part of a much bigger, natural system. This speaks again to the way that the novel glorifies the natural world above the manmade world. In terms of the natural system and cycles of life, Maricela has done nothing wrong by becoming pregnant. It’s modern society that looks down on pregnant and makes Maricela feel so miserable—and nature can perhaps provide her some emotional relief.
Themes
