Hello, readers! It's The Princess Maker here, with another exciting snippet from an attempt at a Seedfolks sequel!
In our first chapter, we caught up with the now-widower of Florence, who you may remember as the last POV character in the book and as 'a watcher' of the Gibb Street Garden.
Since we've started with Florence, we might as well continue to go backwards in the book as far as character POVs go. What's happened with Amir, the man from India and one of the few who actually has some gardening know-how?
Let's find out!
Chapter Two: A Community Has Many Colors
Kids grow up so fast. They can also change real fast too. My tiny son is not tiny anymore, nor is he the same happy-go-lucky boy either. In the blink of an eye, he's become a tween...and is already acting like a moody teen. He stopped coming with me to the garden, claiming it's 'boring'. It took awhile, but eventually his teacher helped us discover what I believe might be the majority of the problem.
He's the only kid of 'foreigners' in his class - meaning, his parents are not from the U.S. He gets teased sometimes because of his ethnicity; I also hear he wishes he could change his appearance. However, now I know of the situation, I can do something about it. And I know the perfect way to do it.
I bought my son to the garden. He doesn't do much here anymore, except to hand over seeds and tools to me (even though he knows how to do all this planting stuff!). After a bit, he asked me why we were planting so many carrots.
I told him how, when I first started out here, I met this Polish lady named Agnes who taught me that 'Poles do MORE than cook cabbage' - although I got a pretty good laugh after she passed away about three years ago, when her granddaughter came by my home and told me she left us a bunch of cabbage seeds. I think she wrote something that said 'You want cabbage, I'll give you cabbage!'.
However, it wasn't just Agnes that showed me how wrong my assumptions about other groups were. There was also Royce, the African-American teenager who became the garden's 'security guard' in a way. It's still a shame about what happened to him. But more than them, the person who truly showed me how assumptions can be changed was from Imelda - who once called ME 'a dirty foreigner' and is now my good friend. The way all of us met and talked in the first place was because we were all working in the garden.
After hearing about how I met Imelda, my son got quiet but I could tell my stories got to him somehow. A few seconds later, this little Hispanic girl - maybe slightly younger than him - walks up to him and asks what we are planting. My son starts talking to her. A little, and then more. Then she asks if he would like to look at her father's beans, so I tell him to go on ahead. A little ways down in her spot, this boy around my son's age comes up and starts talking to them.
Seeing my son talk a little more animatedly gives me hope that he'll see that no matter how much people tease him, every community has a lot of different colors to it.
The two women Amir encounters in the book are real, but they're not named. I gave the Polish woman who cut carrots the name 'Agnes' and the former prejudiced Italian lady the name 'Imelda'. I imagine after realizing Amir was the store manager she mouthed off to, she started looking at herself a little more and tried to change.
If I were Agnes, I'd think it would be funny if people think you ate a lot of cabbage. But who is the little Hispanic girl and the other boy? What happened to Royce?
Stay tuned!