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Kim is Vietnamese. Eight months after Kim was born her dad died. Her dad was a farmer. She had no memories of him. she has a sister and mom. Now she wants to honor her dad by planting some lima beans. She goes to plant some in the vacant lot.

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Ana is an elderly woman and one of the novel’s narrators; she came to Cleveland from Romania as a small child. She spent years working as a typist at the local police department,

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He works as a janitor at a school. A few years before the novel begins, he lost his son to gun violence and his wife to a car accident. He feels like he spends all week at work being bossed around and can’t control anything in his life. However, he takes care of Ana, who lives four floors above him—and it’s their friendship that leads Wendell to the garden.

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Gonzalo is a teenager from Guatemala. He tells us that since he was a kid when he arrived in the U.S., it was easier for him to learn English because he had the 100,000 brain cells needed to pick up a new language by playing with English-speaking kids on the playground and watching cartoons in English.

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Leona is a middle-aged Black woman. She’s the person responsible for getting the garbage cleared from the vacant lot. Leona takes on this task in part because she wants to grow goldenrod, which reminds her of her Granny.

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Sam is old and retired after spending more than 30 years promoting pacifism. But even though he’s retired, Sam sees himself as continuing his work—and indeed, he thinks he’s doing even more good in Cleveland than he ever did He sees it as his duty to “sew up the rips in the neighborhood,” which he does by showing people, especially immigrants and Black people, that he’s friendly.

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Virgil is a rising sixth grader and an immigrant from Haiti. Though he looks forward to spending his summer vacation sleeping in, dis dad has other ideas. On the first day of summer vacation, he drags Virgil out of bed early to cultivate a plot in the garden. But Virgil is extremely embarrassed when he discovers that the garden is part of his dad’s latest get-rich-quick schemes and requires that they cultivate six plots instead of one.

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Sae Young is a middle-aged Korean woman. She immigrated to Cleveland with her husband years before the novel begins and ran a dry cleaning business with him. Despite their efforts, Sae Young and her husband were never able to have children, and her husband died of a heart attack at only 37 years old. Two years later, someone robbed the business and violently attacked Sae Young. There were several years in which Sae Young was too afraid to go into public. When we (readers of Seedfolks and classes 210, 308, and 307) meet her, Sae Young is finally able to face grocery shopping herself, and she’s at the point where she feels ready to be among people again. The community garden offers her a safe environment to work through her fears of people.

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Curtis is a young Black man in his late 20s. He’s Super buff, and because of this women hang out with him. Curtis comes to the community garden to grow tomatoes with the hope of winning back his ex-girlfriend (Lateesha). He and Lateesha dated five years before, but at that point, Curtis enjoyed the other girls. This resulted in their breakup. Now, Curtis is ready to settle down and get married—and he knows that Lateesha is looking to marry as well.

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Maricela is a 16-year-old Mexican girl. She’s pregnant and doesn’t want to be, but this is only one of the reasons Maricela feels alone, trapped, and hated. Being Mexican, Maricela feels as though other people from Central America resent her for being able to immigrate to the U.S. by walking. She also feels that society hates teenagers in general, so this is the third reason why she feels resented and alone. Throughout her pregnancy, Maricela consistently hopes that she’ll miscarry. Though she appreciates the opportunity to be part of a program that helps pregnant teens get their GEDs and provides transportation to doctors’ appointments, Maricela is dismayed when the program organizer, Penny, requires the three participants to tend a plot in the community garden.

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Amir is a fabric merchant from India. As he describes his idyllic childhood in Delhi, he suggests that major cities in India and the U.S. aren’t so different when it comes to their size. As Amir details his experiences meeting other gardeners, he comes to the conclusion that he and nearly everyone else in Cleveland is, to some degree, prejudiced against people from other countries.

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The final narrator of Seedfolks, Florence is an older Black woman and a “watcher”. Her arthritis makes it too painful for her to bend down and grow vegetables herself, but she nevertheless enjoys watching the garden grow and supporting its efforts. Florence is also the person who explains the origin of the novel’s title. “Seedfolks,” she explains, are the first members of a family or a community to settle somewhere. She explains how her own “seedfolks,” her great-grandparents, were freed slaves who walked all the way from Louisiana to Colorado. She sees all the people who start plots in the community garden as “seedfolks,” planting their hopes and dreams for the future and developing the community in the process.