89 pages • 2 hours read
Paul FleischmanSeedfolks
Fiction | Novella | Middle Grade | Published in 1997A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: “Gonzalo”
Gonzalo and his father moved to Cleveland from Guatemala. Within two years, Gonzalo learned English, mostly from the playground and watching cartoons. He explains Garcia’s Equation, which states that the older a person is when they emigrate from their home country, the younger they become in the United States. He figured this out when his father, who took a job at a kitchen with Mexican and Salvadoran Americans, did not learn English and so required Gonzalo’s help with tasks like making phone calls. Because his father speaks English at a kindergarten level, Gonzalo observes, he also acts like one, with his fear of judgment keeping him from improving.
Gonzalo later observed a similar phenomenon when his younger brothers, mother, and mother’s uncle, Tίo Juan, moved to their apartment. Tίo Juan is Indigenous Guatemalan. He was a farmer in Guatemala but cannot find work in urban Cleveland. Tίo Juan does not speak Spanish or English, and Gonzalo observes that he has become like a baby since moving. Gonzalo recounts a time when his uncle wandered off and was found staring at a woman getting her hair done in a salon. It is now Gonzalo’s job to babysit Tίo Juan after school.
One afternoon, Gonzalo realizes that Tίo Juan is missing and then spots his white straw hat at the lot. When Gonzalo arrives there, Tίo Juan is gesturing at a man working in a garden. Gonzalo pulls Tίo Juan’s hand, but Tίo Juan makes him wait while he looks around. Later, Tίo Juan speaks to Gonzalo’s mother, who finds Tίo Juan a packet of seeds and a trowel and instructs Gonzalo to take him back the next day. In the lot, Tίo Juan shows Gonzalo how to plant. Watching Tίo Juan work without even referring to the seed packets for information, Gonzalo realizes that he knows nothing about growing food and that Tίo Juan knows everything. Gonzalo witnesses a miracle: Tίo Juan transforms from a baby back into a man.
Chapter 5 Summary: “Leona”
Leona remembers her grandmother, who drank big cups of goldenrod tea with nutmeg, which doctors swore would kill her. Instead, her grandmother had a big book of obituaries for all the doctors she outlived; she lived in Atlanta into her nineties. While walking home and thinking about her grandmother, Leona spots three people working separately in the trash-filled lot. She first thinks they are searching for money but soon realizes they have made paths through the trash to garden plots. Looking at the surrounding apartments, she notices many people watching. Leona decides the high piles of garbage are keeping others from participating. She decides to pick a plot and plant goldenrod, but first something must be done about the garbage. There is so much that only the city could clear it.
Because Leona’s son attends a high school with gun troubles, Leona is an expert at making the complaints necessary to create change. The next day, she drinks a tall glass of water, puts on Miles Davis, and starts calling—first the city of Cleveland, then Cuyahoga County, then the state of Ohio, and finally the US government. In six and a half hours, she discovers that the city of Cleveland owns the lot. The next day, she calls city workers, who tell her to call the health department, where workers tell her to call someone else. The following day, she takes a bag of garbage to the public health department and opens the bag in the reception area. People notice and invite her for a meeting about the lot. She keeps the trash bag open throughout the meeting to make sure they work out a deal.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Sam”
A retired world peace activist, Sam notices city workers cleaning the lot in June. Leona tells him that there are plots for anyone who wants a garden. Being 78, he hires someone to help him break ground—a Puerto Rican teenager who tends the soil so well that Sam offers him his own row to grow pumpkins.
Sam, who is Jewish, considers himself a peacemaker and hopes to heal the neighborhood. He looks upon the growing garden as a paradise not unlike the garden of Eden, though he notes that Eden had a river. The garden does not even have a spigot, so everyone hauls water from their apartments. He also notices that the planters have separated their plots by race or ethnicity. Sam does not want the garden to perpetuate the neighborhood’s divisions.
Perhaps out of habit, people also still throw trash into the garden. On one occasion, a bottle flies from a window, and Sam watches as one of the gardeners throws the jar back through the window. This leads to further thrown trash and a screaming match, but no shooting. The unhoused person who used to sleep on an old couch in the garden returned once and tore up many of the plants. Sam is saddened that people responded by putting up fences, padlocks, and warning signs. Sam associates these divisions with the Tower of Babel, but he is sure the garden will bring people together if he can just get people talking.
Chapters 4-6 Analysis
These chapters focus on the garden’s benefits beyond the individual, teasing its potential to heal and reconnect the neighborhood. Gonzalo, Leona, and Sam each have faith that there is magic in the garden but also learn that magic requires open-mindedness, hard work, and devotion. Gonzalo is the first to witness what he considers an outright “miracle” in the garden, but Leona and Sam each have a vision for what the garden could mean to the neighborhood.
Saddled with the adult responsibilities of translating for his father and watching out for Tίo Juan, Gonzalo feels a mixture of frustration, pride, and sadness. Tίo Juan’s wanderings interrupt his cartoons, but Gonzalo is even more troubled by a sense of jaded boredom; his responsibilities have caused him to lose his sense of wonder. Watching Tίo Juan gardening, Gonzalo discovers something new that his uncle can teach him. This allows Tίo Juan to “chang[e] from a baby back into a man” (22), but it also allows Gonzalo to be a boy again, still open to the teachings of his elders. His experiences reveal gardening’s healing, transformative magic.
When Leona sees the lot, she has a vision of many neighbors joining in wholesome work, with the trash that previously littered the lot gone. Digging into her hard-earned skills and the determination passed on to her by her grandmother, Leona performs the story’s next “miracle” by making the neighborhood’s problem real to city officials. Like faith moving a mountain in the Parable of the Mustard Seed, Leona’s actions and ingenuity heal and transform the lot, getting the mountain of trash moved.
Sam also recognizes the garden’s miraculous potential but knows that the Eden he envisions is not guaranteed. Like the garden in the Bible, the miracle is for the worthy. In the garden fences he sees the neighborhood’s ruin, and knowing that real miracles require work and effort, Sam works to “sew up the rips in the neighborhood” (31). His way of doing so—getting everyone invested in solving the challenge of inadequate water—further develops the theme of Overcoming Separation With a Shared Purpose. Like the bean plants Kim planted, which first grow separately and then intermingle, the community begins to form from disparate seeds of effort.
Through Sam, this section contains some of the novella’s most overt allusions to the Bible. These references shape the multi-perspective novella and help the disparate parts function as a modernized parable of community building and prosperity. Direct allusions (e.g., to the Garden of Eden) not only provide individual points of comparison but also underscore the work’s structural connection to biblical parables. Another of Sam’s observations—that “God, who made Eden, also wrecked the Tower of Babel, by dividing people” (35)—provides a direct instructive message, indicating that though the garden could be a paradise, the divisions in the community might lead to ruin instead.
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