Seedfolks Family

All his life in Vietnam my father had been a farmer. Here our apartment house had no yard. But in that vacant lot he would see me. He would watch my beans break ground and spread, and would notice with pleasure their pods growing plump. He would see my patience and my hard work. I would show him that I could raise plants, as he had. I would show him that I was his daughter. (1.7)

But my father, he worked all day in a kitchen with Mexicans and Salvadorans. His English was worse than a kindergartner's. He would only buy food at the bodega down the block. Outside of there he lowered his eyes and tried to get by on mumbles and smiles. He didn't want strangers to hear his mistakes. So he used me to make phone calls and to talk to the landlady and to buy things in stores where you had to use English. He got younger. I got older.

Then my younger brothers and mother and Tío Juan, her uncle, came north and joined us. Tío Juan was the oldest man in his pueblo. But her he became a little baby. He'd been a farmer, but here he couldn't work. (4.3-4)

Watching him carefully sprinkling them into the troughs he'd made, I realized that I didn't know anything about growing food and that he knew everything. I stared at his busy fingers, then his eyes. They were focused, not far-away or confused. He'd changed from a baby back into a man. (4.9)

Mama believed in doctors, but not Granny. Not even if they were black. No, ma'am. I grew up in her house, back in Atlanta. She drank down a big cup of goldenrod tea every morning with a nutmeg floating in it, and declared she didn't need no other medicine. […]

I was thinking about her one day, walking home from the grocery store on Gibb Street. Then I came to the vacant lot and saw three people in different parts of it. I thought maybe they were looking for money. Turned out they had shovels, not metal detectors. When I saw they had little gardens going, I said to myself, "I believe I'll plant me a patch of goldenrod right here." (5.1-2)

"Actually, madam, only this very first area here is ours," he said. […] "The others we have planted at the request of relatives who have no tools or who live too far." [...]

He pointed at the closest squares of land. "My brother Antoine. My auntie, Anne-Marie."
My eyes opened wide. They both lived in Haiti. I stared at my father, but he just kept smiling. His finger pointed farther to the left. "My Uncle Philippe." He lived in New York. "My wife's father." He died last year. "And her sister." My mother didn't have any sisters. I looked at my father's smiling face. I'd never watched an adult lie before. (7.8, 10-11)

I quick go to store. Buy three funnels to make easier filling containers. I put one by each garbage can. That day I see man use my funnel. Then woman. Then many people. Feel very glad inside. Feel part of garden. Almost like family. (8.7)

She had a serious thing for tomatoes. […] Always talking about eating 'em out of her aunt's garden when she was a kid and how she wanted to grow 'em someday. (9.4)

Yet we were all subject to the same weather and pests, the same neighborhood, and the same parental emotions toward our plants. (10.8)

When the eggplants appeared in August they were pale purple, a strange and eerie shade. When my wife would bring our little son, he was forever wanting to pick them. (12.3)

My great-grandparents walked all the way from Louisiana to Colorado. That was in 1859. They were both freed slaves and they wanted to get good and far from cotton-growing country. They went over the mountains, just to be safe, and homesteaded along the Gunnison River. Which is how my grandfather and my father and my sisters and I all came to be born there, the first black family in the whole county. My father called them our Seedfolks, because they were the first of our family there. (13.1)