SEEDFOLKS (12 - AMIR) by Paul Fleischman

AMIR


In India we have many vast cities, just as in America. There, too, you are one among millions. But there at least you know your neighbors. Here, one cannot say that. The object in America is to avoid contact, to treat all as foes unless they’re known to be friends. Here you have a million crabs living in a million crevices.


When I saw the garden for the first time, so green among the dark brick buildings, I thought back to my parents’ Persian rug. It showed climbing vines, rivers and waterfalls, grapes, flower beds, singing birds, everything a desert dweller might dream of. Those rugs were indeed portable gardens. In the summers in Delhi, so very hot, my sisters and I would lie upon it and try to press ourselves into its world. The garden’s green was as soothing to the eye as the deep blue of that rug. I’m aware of color-I manage a fabric store. But the garden’s greatest benefit, I feel, was not relief to the eyes, but to make the eyes see our neighbors.


I grew eggplants onions, carrots, and cauliflower. When the eggplants appeared in August they were pale purple, a strange and eerie shade. When my wife would bring out little son, he was forever wanting to pick them. There was nothing else in the garden with that color. Very many people came over to ask about them and talk to me. I recognized a few form the neighborhood. Not one had spoken to me before – and now how friendly they turned out to be. The eggplants gave them an excuse for breaking the rules and starting a conversation . How happy they seemed to have found this excuse, to let their natural friendliness out.


Those conversations tied us together. In the middle of summer someone dumped a load of tires on the garden at night, as if it were still filled with trash. A man’s four rows of young corn were crushed. In an hour, we had all the tires by the curb. We were used to helping each other by then. A few weeks later, early in the evening a woman screamed, down the block from the garden. A man with a knife had taken her purse. Three men from the garden ran after him. I was surprised that I was one of them. Even more surprising, we caught him. Even more surprising, we caught him. Royce held until the police arrived. I asked the others. Not one of us had ever chased a criminal before. And most likely we wouldn’t have except near the garden. There, you felt part of a community.

I came to the United States in 1980. Cleveland is a city of immigrants. The Poles are especially well known here. I’d always heard that the Polish men were tough steelworkers and that the women cooked lots of cabbage. But I’d never known one – until the garden. She was an old woman whose space bordered mine. She had a seven-block walk to the garden, the same route I took. We spoke quite often. We both planted carrots. When her hundreds of seedlings came up in a row, I was very surprised that she did not thin them – pulling out all but one healthy-looking plant each few inches, to give them room to grow. I asked her. She looked down at them and said she knew she ought to do it, but that this task reminded her too closely of her concentration camp, where the prisoners were inspected each morning and divided into two lines- the healthy to live and the others to die. Her father, an orchestra violinist, had spoken out against the Germans, which had caused her family’s arrest. When I heard her words, in realized how useless was all that I’d heard about Poles, how much richness it hid, liken the worthless shell around an almond. I still do not know, or care, whether she cooks cabbage.


The garden found this out with Royce. He was young and black. He looked rather dangerous. People watched him and seemed to be relieved when he left the garden. Then he began spending more time there. We found out that he had a stutter. Then that he had two sisters, that he liked the cats that roamed through the garden, and that he worked very well with his hands. Soon all the mothers were trying to feed him. How very strange it was to watch people who would have crossed the street if they’d seen him coming a few weeks before, now giving him vegetables, more than he could eat. In return, he watered for people who were sick and fixed fences and made other repairs. He might weed your garden or use the bricks from the building that was torn down up the block to make you a brick path between your rows. He always pretended he hadn’t done it. It was always a surprise. One felt honored to be chosen. He was trusted and liked – and famous, after his exploit with the pitchfork. He was not a black teenage boy. He was Royce.


In September he and a Mexican man collected many bricks firm up the street and built a big barbecue. I was in the garden on Saturday when the Mexican family drove up in a truck with a dead pig in the back. They built a fire, put a heavy metal spit through the pig, and began to roast it. A bit later their friends began arriving. One brought a guitar, another played violin. They filled a folding table with food. Perhaps it was one of their birthdays, or perhaps no reason was needed for the party. It was beautiful weather, sunny but not hot. Fall was just beginning and the garden was changing form green to brown. Those of us who had come to work felt the party’s spirit enter us. The smell of the roasting pig drifted out and called to everyone, gardeners or not.
Soon the entire garden was filled.

It was a harvest festival, like those in India, though no one had planned it to be. People brought food and drinks and drums. I went home to get my wife and son. Watermelons from the garden were sliced open. The gardeners proudly showed off what they’d grown. We traded harvests, as we often did. And we gave food away, as we often did also – even I, a businessman, trained to give away nothing, to always make a profit. The garden provided many excuses for breaking that particular rule.
Many people spoke to me that day. Several asked where I was from. I wondered if they knew as little about Indians as I had known about Poles. One old woman, Italian I believe, said she’d admired my eggplants for weeks and told me how happy she was to meet me. She praised them and told me how to cook them and asked all about my family. But something bothered me. Then I remembered. A year before she’d claimed that she’d received the wrong change in my store. I was called out to the register. She’d gotten quite angry and called me – despite her own accent- a dirty foreigner. Now that we were so friendly with each other I dared to remind her of this. Her eyes became huge. She apologized to me over and over again. She kept saying, “Back then, I didn’t know it was you….”