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Chapter 5: Leona
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
Sam crosses the street to join a group of people who are standing around and watching something. An inmate crew is clearing garbage from the vacant lot. The woman next to Sam says that the land is for anyone who wants to grow a garden, which Sam finds unbelievable. Without thinking, he says, “paradise.” The woman gives Sam an odd look. He looks around at the three buildings surrounding the lot and a garden coming up beautifully next to the sidewalk. Sam tells the woman that the word paradise comes from a Persian word and means “walled park.” This time, the woman smiles at Sam and he smiles back.
It seems like a miracle to Sam that the city has finally agreed to clear the garbage in the vacant lot. It’s significant that Sam explains the etymology of the word paradise, noting that the word in its original form referred to a garden or a park of sorts. This reiterates the novel’s insistence that nature, and gardens in particular, are superior to the city—gardens are a form of paradise.
Themes
Just like fishermen mend rips in their nets, Sam tries to “patch up” people. He spent 36 years working with groups that promoted world government and pacifism. Sam hasn’t given up now that he’s retired, but he’s refocused his attentions to his neighborhood. Sometimes it seems like he’s been able to do more good since retiring. Most of what he does is smile at people, especially Black people and those from other countries. He gets people to look up at him and not down. Sam starts conversations everywhere to get people to see that he’s friendly, no matter what they might have heard about white people or Jews. Ideally, he gets people to talk to each other.
Here, Sam seems to imply that if people ignore each other in small ways—like not saying hello when they pass one another on the street—this can lead them to ignore each other’s humanity, which is a serious problem. When he notes that he’s had more success pouring out his efforts in his neighborhood than he did on a global scale, Sam suggests that it’s perhaps more effective to work at the community level. Especially given who he targets most with his kindness, Sam shows that he’s doing his best to make Cleveland a more welcoming place for immigrants—and in this small but significant way, he works to counteract the city’s neglect.
Themes
Sam hasn’t had a garden since he was a kid, but he wants one now. He’s 78 and too old to dig, so he hires a Puerto Rican teen to dig up the soil for him. The teenager does a great job and works the soil until it’s silky. In addition to paying him, Sam offers the teen a row of his own to cultivate. The teen wants to grow marijuana to sell, but Sam talks him into growing pumpkins instead. Selling pumpkins will earn him some money at Halloween and keep him out of jail.
Being too old to do the manual labor involved in gardening means that Sam has to ask for help from others in the community. This actually helps everyone involved: Sam gets his garden, this Puerto Rican teenager gets to make money and a mentor in Sam, and everyone gets to know their neighbors a little bit better.
Themes
Sam and the teenager chat as they plant their seeds. The teen is new to the neighborhood. There are a few other people working in the cool evening while a robin sings. To Sam, it seems like they’re in Paradise, or a small Garden of Eden. In the Bible, there’s a river in Eden. But here, there’s no way to get water to the lot. People haul their water in milk jugs and soda containers all through June. June is a dry month; there are only four days of rain. Sam hires a third-grader with a wagon to haul his water, and later, Sam starts a contest.
Here, Sam revisits the idea that the community garden is a paradise. This time, he takes a biblical angle by suggesting that the community garden is specifically akin to the Garden of Eden. According to the Book of Genesis, God created a perfect, lush, paradisial garden for the first humans, Adam and Eve, to dwell in. Adam and Eve lived here in perfect harmony until they sinned (eating forbidden fruit), at which point they were cast out from Eden. This biblical reference thus suggests that Sam sees the garden as having the potential to be a perfect place where there is harmony among the gardeners. Of course, the garden isn’t literally perfect, or at least not yet—the extreme difficulty in lugging water to the lot is one example of this.
Themes
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Word soon spreads about the lot, and at this point, there are plenty of available plots. Newcomers take spots next to their friends or family members. One Saturday, when the garden is full, Sam takes a moment to look around. He notices that garden is divided into quadrants with Black people together in one corner, white people in another, and Central American and Asian people in the back. It’s a copy of the neighborhood. Sam doesn’t think he should be surprised at this arrangement, but he is. The groups keep to themselves, speaking their own languages and growing their own special crops.
The community garden may provide a place where all these different people come together and work alongside each other, but this doesn’t mean that there aren’t still factions and divisions. This saddens Sam, as he realizes that the garden isn’t doing a good job of healing the divisions in the neighborhood. On another note, this passage implicitly celebrates the garden for giving immigrants a place to grow their “special crops” from their home countries and cultures. People who may feel homesick or unwelcome in the U.S.—like Tío Juan—can connect with home by planting traditional vegetables.
Themes
Garbage is another issue. A few people who live in the surrounding buildings still use the lot as a trash can, emptying ashtrays out of their windows and tossing out other trash, too. One day, someone throws a bottle into the garden. A man throws it back into the window it came out of—and the person inside the apartment hurls five more bottles out. Sam is sure that gunshots will come out of the window next, but fortunately, the people in the apartment just shout at the man in the garden.
Sam’s fear of gunshots further validates Kim and Ana’s fears in previous chapters, reinforcing how violent and dangerous this neighborhood can be. This passage also emphasizes that change is slow to take root in the neighborhood. Even though the garden is now flourishing, not everyone immediately respects it as a sacred space worth nurturing and protecting.
Themes
The “crazy homeless man” who used to sleep on a couch in the lot is also upset that it’s not a dump anymore. When he sees that the couch is gone, he starts ripping out plants in anger. People have to call the police. After this, people start worrying about strangers ruining their gardens. A man puts chicken wire around his plot, while another person builds a fence. Finally, someone puts up barbed wire. Sam muses that God may have made Eden, but he also destroyed the Tower of Babel by dividing people. The garden was once Paradise, but now it’s becoming Cleveland again.
The Tower of Babel is another biblical reference. The Book of Genesis recounts that in ancient days, all of humankind spoke the same language. During this time, the Babylonians sought to make a name for their city by building a tower that could reach Heaven: the Tower of Babel. But before the Babylonians could complete their lofty project, God scattered new languages among the workers, which caused confusion, permanently halted the project, and eventually caused people to disperse and divide. Sam sees a similar kind of divisiveness brewing here, as people are becoming increasingly protective of their own separate plots rather than being dedicated to the larger project of revamping the lot and creating a flourishing community garden. Similar to how the Babylonians wanted to work together to make a name for their city, the residents of this neighborhood wanted to work together to beautify and improve their neighborhood. But just as the Babylonians succumbed to divisiveness, the residents of the neighborhood also begin to divide by walling off their own separate plots. The physical barriers people construct are also representative of the steep language barriers that separate them.
Themes
