Seeds of Hope

            I have this about metaphors. I’m all for them. But, I have to admit, the words, “We thought, at the time, that it was because Pecola was having her father's baby that the marigolds did not grow,” didn’t really alert me to the fact that I would soon be confronted by one. Quite honestly, I was just wondering if the words were literal and a girl was actually having her father’s baby. In which case I cringed at the thought and later went on to imagine just what family terms would be deigned in the situation. The baby’s grandfather would be his father as well and his grandmother would be his father’s wife.

            On that note, let me just say that it left me deeply troubled. But what captured my interest was when Claudia began to talk about the seeds.  While on the subject of Pecola’s baby, Claudia says, “A little examination and much less melancholy would have proved to us that our seeds were not the only ones that did not sprout; nobody's did. Not even the gardens fronting the lake showed marigolds that year. But so deeply concerned were we with the health and safe delivery of Pecola's baby we could think of nothing but our own magic: if we planted the seeds, and said the right words over them, they would blossom, and everything would be all right.” It’s difficult to decipher just what she means by the seeds. But my best guess is that she isn’t talking about babies, about physical entities you place in dirt. She’s talking about hopes and ideas, goals. The ability to make things happen, kind of like Pecola’s dad made the baby happen. And that if you take those hopes, those goals, and dedicate a lot of time to them to nurture them, they might just sprout. We might just get what we hoped for and that might just be enough to make us happy. The fact that most people’s seeds didn’t sprout says a lot about the social situation of where Claudia lives. The fact that she herself admits to think of nothing but her seeds demonstrates that she has a lot of hopes, and we might just find out what they are.

            Claudia later says, “It was a long time before my sister and I admitted to ourselves that no green was going to spring from our seeds.” In that I take it that the ‘greener pastures’ of new beginnings and better-ness are far from her reach, or so she says, stating her life to remain in its isolated cave from achieving bliss. She goes on: “Once we knew, our guilt was relieved only by fights and mutual accusations about who was to blame. For years I thought my sister was right: it was my fault. I had planted them too far down in the earth. It never occurred to either of us that the earth itself might have been unyielding. We had dropped our seeds in our own little plot of black dirt just as Pecola's father had dropped his seeds in his own plot of black dirt.” When she says she planted her seeds to far down the earth she probably means that she cradled her hopes and locked them tights as a means of protection, dirt, that they are unable to reach out and grow. And that the earth itself is unyielding, life is just not willing to make those hopes grow when it comes to her, when it comes to this lifetime. What really got to me was the pun of the phrase, “We had dropped our seeds in our own little plot of black dirt just as Pecola's father had dropped his seeds in his own plot of black dirt,” where she uses the seed and black dirt metaphor to later prove the literal sense of Pecola’s father’s sperm, seed, into his African American daughter, black dirt. That pun in itself just blew me. But it is just now that I understand what she means when she says she had ‘dropped our seeds in our own little plot of black dirt.’ That they had lost the possibility of any of their seed’s growth, of any hopes and wishes and goals coming true, by being black. And while the words themselves are beautiful, their meaning is ugly.