Amir, Seedfolks

​Amir

SEEDFOLKS

​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. Here you have a million crabs living in a million crevices.

​AMIR

Multiple Choice

What is life like in America for Amir?

• being one among millions in vast cities

• not knowing your neighbors

• like a million crabs living in a million crevices

• all of the above

​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 want. 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.

Multiple Choice

What does Amir do for a living?

• manage a vegetable store

• manage a fabric store

• manage a brick store

• manage a garden

Multiple Choice

What object does Amir compare the garden to?

• his neighbors

• dark brick buildings

• his parents' Persian rug

• a desert dweller

Multiple Choice

According to Amir, what is the garden's greatest benefit?

• It allows the community to grow healthy food.

• It makes the neighborhood more beautiful.

• It helps people get to know each other.

• It allows people to make money by selling vegetables and fruits.

​I grew eggplants, onions, carrots, and cauliflower. When the eggplants appeared in August they were pale purple, a strange and eerie shade. Very many people came over to ask about them and talk to me. I recognized a few from 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.

Multiple Choice

Why did the neighbors talk to Amir?

• to ask about the eggplants

• to ask about the carrots

• to ask about the onions

• to ask about the cauliflower

​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. A teenager named Royce held the man to a wall with his pitchfork 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.

Multiple Choice

What is the main idea of this paragraph?

• Three men working at the garden caught a criminal.

• The garden makes them feel like they are a part of a community.

• They helped move some tires that were dumped on the garden to the curb.

​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.

Multiple Choice

Poles

• the carrot sticks

• the sticks in the garden

• the Polish

• a woman

​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.

Multiple Choice

What is a concentration camp?

• prison camps

• garden

• camping area

• summer camps

​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.​

​One old woman, Italian I believe, said she’d admired my eggplants for weeks and told me how happy she was to meet me. But something bothered me. Then I remembered. A year before she’d claimed she’d received the wrong change in my store. 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. . . . ”

Open Ended

Many people at the garden didn't know about the "strange and eerie" eggplants and so they asked Amir about them. Amir also knew very little about the Polish people but after speaking to a Polish woman from the garden, he found out how they suffered in concentration camps. An Italian woman who did not know Amir before called him a "dirty foreigner." In all of these situations, there is an overarching theme of "not knowing" until they started talking and having conversations. What can you learn from these situations?