Seedfolks, by Paul Fleischman - Realistic Fiction

Paul Fleischman is a remarkable writer who has really outdone himself in Seedfolks. He has a way of drawing the reader in and taking you on a ride through different people’s lives that we meet along the way.

In Seedfolks, a young Vietnamese girl, mourning the father that she never knew and who never knew that she existed, plants some lima bean seeds in an old vacant, trashy lot in her downtown Cleveland home. She lives in an apartment complex and on a street with many other people who are just like her; they have problems and are isolated to themselves and their own family, despite being surrounded by many other people. With the growing of these lima beans, many more people enter into the lot and decide to begin growing different plants and vegetation. With the growing of each plant and the changing of each season, the reader is briefly invited into the lives of each person who stakes a claim to a square in the vacant lot, now turned into a garden paradise. This simple task of planting lima beans, and hoping they will grow, has changed an entire community.

As I read Seedfolks, I realized that the people in the story could easily be my neighbors who are living around me. Sure, I don’t live in an urban apartment complex, and unfortunately, Smithfield, Virginia is lacking in a plethora of different races, but they could still be my neighbors. How often I go to work, school, church, and basically about my daily life, only to miss seeing my neighbors and greeting each other on the street. How often I forfeit the opportunity to walk my dogs or ride my bike in the afternoon, to replace the joy of this time with work in front of the computer. Fleischman had many different themes developing within Seedfolks, but one that spoke to me was the idea of enjoying the life that you have right outside your front door. This community of people decided to plant seeds and ended up growing a community of “family members”, all within their reach outside their apartment complex.

The short-story chapters in the book intrigued me. I kept wanting to find out more and more about who was going to enter the garden and how they were going to change it and be changed for the better. The gardening participants, if you will, were seeds themselves. Fleischman quoted Thoreau (our master naturalist and gardener of the past) in saying “I have great faith in a seed. Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders”. Well, I can honestly say that I don’t think Henry David Thoreau would have been disappointed with the characters of Seedfolks. These characters were all seeds, with wonder and greatness just waiting to grow up and out of them. They had all kept to themselves and their little world for so long, but now they were changing not only their world, but their neighbors’, as well. Each person was a different seed in the garden of different flowers and plants. I will add that even in a garden of paradise, there seems to be a bit of evil and darkness. Greed showed itself in this way with Virgil’s father. He seemed determined to achieve greatness and success, even if it meant stepping on someone else’s plants. He, however, only seemed to be the “thorn” in the garden.

Sometimes when I read a realistic fiction book I am always sad to put it down, because I meet friends there between the pages, and when the book is finished, I can no longer talk with my friends. I felt Seedfolks was like that for me, also. I want to know what happened to all of my friends, Maricela (who is going to have a baby at sixteen), Nora (who is caring for a man who is a mystery to her), or Curtis (did he ever convince Lateesha to fall back in love with him?). Still, using my imagination, my “friends” can live on and I can share them with other people, much like the garden afforded the opportunity to share within the community.

I am not a gardener, myself, and my thumb is anything but green. Still, one year I became a bit overzealous and planted tulips, daffodils, and sunflowers. I have fond memories of waiting to see each flower pop it’s little stem from the ground. I was so proud of my accomplishment and felt very much at ease with nature. I learned that you have to dig deep to plant tulips (much like you have to dig deep to get to know some people) and that sunflower seeds are very small, but grow to look like skyscrapers among flowers (much like the children that I am teaching in my classroom each year).