Marigolds

Eugenia Collier's short story Marigolds was first published in November 1969 in Negro Digest (later renamed Black World) and remains under copyright. We cannot present the full text here, but you can find it in numerous school anthologies and literary collections where it is frequently reprinted, including Breeder and Other Stories and many middle school and high school textbooks. You may also find authorized versions through your local library. We encourage you to read the story first, then return here for commentary, analysis, and discussion.

Historical Context

Marigolds appeared in the November 1969 issue of Negro Digest, an influential African American literary and cultural magazine edited by Hoyt W. Fuller. The late 1960s were a period of tremendous upheaval and creative energy in African American letters. The Black Arts Movement, led by writers such as Amiri Baraka and Nikki Giovanni, was calling for literature that spoke directly to the Black experience. Negro Digest was a vital platform for this work, publishing fiction, poetry, and essays by emerging and established African American writers alike.

Collier's story won the Gwendolyn Brooks Prize for Fiction, an award named for the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks, who had become the first African American to win the Pulitzer in 1950 for her poetry collection Annie Allen. The prize brought Marigolds to national attention, and the story quickly began appearing in school anthologies across the United States. Today it is one of the most widely taught African American short stories in the country, a fixture of middle school and high school English curricula from coast to coast.

Although the story is set during the Great Depression of the 1930s, its themes of poverty, beauty, rage, and the passage from childhood to adulthood are timeless. Collier, who grew up in Baltimore during the Depression, drew on her own memories of that era to create a fictional landscape that feels utterly real. The rural Maryland shantytown of the story, with its dust and decay and grinding poverty, is rendered with the specificity of lived experience.

Plot Summary

The story is narrated by an adult woman looking back on a pivotal event from her childhood. The narrator, Lizabeth, recalls growing up in a small, impoverished African American community in rural Maryland during the Great Depression. The landscape is one of relentless poverty — dusty roads, ramshackle shanties, and the pervasive sense that nothing will ever change. The adults are worn down by hardship; the children, including Lizabeth and her younger brother Joey, fill their days with restless, aimless mischief, too young to fully understand their circumstances but old enough to feel their weight.

In the midst of this barren landscape lives Miss Lottie, an elderly woman described as bent and weathered, who lives in a decrepit house with her oddly childlike adult son, John Burke. But Miss Lottie has one remarkable distinction: she tends a garden of brilliant marigolds in front of her house. These flowers are the only spot of color and beauty in the entire community, a dazzling, almost defiant splash of gold against the drab brown of the shantytown. For the children, the marigolds are a source of both fascination and irritation. They cannot understand why Miss Lottie tends them with such care, and they take a perverse pleasure in taunting the old woman and throwing stones at her flowers.

One night, Lizabeth lies in bed and overhears her parents talking through the thin walls of their shanty. Her mother, who works as a domestic servant, is the family's sole breadwinner. Her father, a proud and capable man, has been unable to find work. Lizabeth hears something that shatters her world: her father is crying. The sound of his sobs — the sound of a strong man broken by poverty and helplessness — fills Lizabeth with a wild, formless rage. She has never heard her father cry before, and the experience cracks something open inside her. Unable to process her emotions, unable to articulate the despair and fury she feels, she leaps out of bed in the middle of the night and runs to Miss Lottie's house.

In a frenzy, Lizabeth tears up every single marigold in Miss Lottie's garden. She rips them out of the ground, she crushes them, she destroys them utterly. Joey follows her, bewildered and frightened. When Lizabeth finally stops, panting and wild-eyed, she looks up and sees Miss Lottie standing in the doorway. The old woman's face is not angry — it is broken. Lizabeth sees, for the first time, not a witch or a target for childish cruelty, but a fellow human being in pain. She sees, in that moment, what the marigolds meant: they were Miss Lottie's act of beauty and defiance against the ugliness of poverty, her refusal to surrender to despair. And Lizabeth has destroyed them.

Themes

Loss of Innocence and Coming of Age. The central theme of Marigolds is the narrator's passage from childhood to adulthood. Lizabeth's destruction of the marigolds is the act that carries her across the threshold. The moment she sees Miss Lottie's face and understands the meaning of what she has done, she can never go back to the thoughtless cruelty of childhood. The adult narrator reflects that "one cannot have both compassion and innocence" — that true understanding of other people's suffering requires the loss of the self-centered obliviousness that characterizes childhood.

Poverty and Its Effects on Dignity. The story is unsparing in its depiction of Depression-era poverty and the toll it takes on human dignity. Lizabeth's father is a proud man humiliated by his inability to provide for his family. Miss Lottie lives in a house that is falling apart around her. The entire community exists in a state of deprivation so total that even the children feel its corrosive effects without being able to name them.

Beauty as Resistance. Miss Lottie's marigolds represent an act of resistance against the ugliness of poverty. In a world where everything is dusty, broken, and hopeless, the marigolds are a deliberate assertion of beauty and life. Their destruction, and Lizabeth's subsequent understanding of what they meant, is the emotional core of the story. The adult narrator reveals that she, too, eventually planted marigolds — suggesting that the capacity for beauty and hope can be passed on, even through painful lessons.

Compassion and Understanding. The story argues that true compassion — the ability to feel another person's pain as one's own — comes only at a cost. Lizabeth gains compassion by losing innocence. She can empathize with Miss Lottie only after she has caused her harm. This bittersweet truth is the story's most enduring insight.

Literary Devices

First-Person Retrospective Narration. The story is told by an adult Lizabeth looking back on her childhood. This narrative distance allows the narrator to reflect on the meaning of events that the child Lizabeth could not have understood at the time. The retrospective voice gives the story its elegiac, meditative quality.

Symbolism. The marigolds are the story's central symbol. They represent beauty, hope, and resistance in the face of poverty and despair. Their destruction symbolizes the loss of innocence, and the narrator's decision to plant her own marigolds as an adult symbolizes the continuation of hope.

Contrast and Juxtaposition. Collier constantly contrasts beauty with ugliness, childhood with adulthood, innocence with understanding. The marigolds blaze against the drab shantytown. Lizabeth's childish cruelty is set against Miss Lottie's quiet dignity. The father's sobs shatter the illusion of adult invulnerability.

Imagery. The story is rich with sensory imagery — the dust of the shantytown, the brilliance of the marigolds, the darkness of the night when Lizabeth destroys them, the look on Miss Lottie's face. Collier's precise, evocative descriptions make the story's setting and emotions vivid and immediate.

Epiphany. The story's climax is a classic moment of literary epiphany — a sudden, transformative insight. When Lizabeth sees Miss Lottie's face after destroying the marigolds, she understands something about human suffering, dignity, and beauty that she could never have learned any other way. This moment changes her forever.

Why "Marigolds" Is Taught in Schools

Marigolds is one of the most commonly assigned short stories in American middle school and high school English classes. Its accessible length, clear narrative arc, and powerful themes make it ideal for classroom discussion. The story introduces students to concepts of symbolism, first-person narration, and coming-of-age literature in a way that is both intellectually rigorous and emotionally engaging. Its depiction of the Great Depression connects to American history curricula, while its exploration of poverty, race, and compassion opens doors to discussions about social justice and empathy. The story also provides an important opportunity to include African American women's voices in the literary canon that students encounter in school.