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In Eugenia Collier’s “Marigolds,” the protagonist, Lizabeth, is forced out of a sheltered childhood into the painful realities of her community’s struggles. In any coming-of-age story, the protagonist fails if she cannot accept the reality of adult life and begin to develop a way to thrive in it. “Marigolds” begins with an adult narrator who introduces and contextualizes the main narrative, and it ends with her closing reflections. The adult narrator’s comments “frame” the main story, in which her younger self leaves her sheltered childhood to enter the adult world of her community. This frame draws attention to the idea that compassion and beauty make mature life bearable.
In the frame of “Marigolds,” the narrator looks back to when she was fourteen and recalls a “devastating moment” that shifted her perspective. The narrator waits hopelessly for some unnamed “you” to arrive, and the frustration of hopeless waiting sweeps her back to her rural Maryland community where a choking dust cakes everything, including her memories, and the Great Depression imposes deep hardships on the already struggling Black residents.
One colorful element stands out in the gray-brown home of her youth: Miss Lottie’s marigolds, beautiful flowers that tempt the bored children on the late summer day. The inciting incident occurs when fourteen-year-old Lizabeth’s drowsy thoughts are interrupted as she rests in the shade. Lizabeth is restless that summer, growing irritated with her little brother Joey and the childish antics she once enjoyed. The story’s external conflict is driven by the “cage” of poverty that entraps the community, but Lizabeth roils with internal conflict, still a child but leaning toward womanhood. Still, when Joey suggests that, for fun, the children harass their elderly neighbor, Miss Lottie, Lizabeth goes along.
The story’s rising action sees the children creeping up to Miss Lottie’s derelict house and gathering small stones. Out of a childish sense of pride, they do not admit that they fear Miss Lottie and her odd, intellectually disabled son; when younger, they even imagined that Miss Lottie might be a witch. Lizabeth seems to hang back, but Joey accuses her of cowardice, goading her into leading the attack. The children fling stones at Miss Lottie’s flowerbed, hating the dazzling beauty of the marigolds she has tended for many summers. They have vandalized Miss Lottie’s home before, and today Lizabeth leads them as they hurl stones and chant taunts until Miss Lottie, enraged, calls her son to chase them away. They laugh together about the fun of it all, but Lizabeth, for the first time, feels shame. She regrets her actions as “malicious,” a sign that she is developing a mature understanding of how her actions affect others. This, too, sets her apart from the younger children.
That night, Lizabeth wakes to the sound of her parents talking. Her father, whom Lizabeth perceives as strong, is brought to sobbing despair by his inability to provide for his family. Unable to sleep in a “room too crowded with fear,” Lizabeth wakes Joey and runs in frantic anger to Miss Lottie’s house. There, at the story’s climax, she rages and sobs, tearing up every flower as Joey, stunned, pulls at her dress to try to stop her. She cannot explain, at that moment, that her actions result from her realization that the adults she depends on are fragile. They cannot shield her from the effects of poverty, no matter how much they love her. She lashes out at the beauty and symbolic hope of the marigolds, and when they lie in tatters around her, she cannot stop crying—until she sees Miss Lottie standing before her.
Filled with shame, Lizabeth stands and finds that the “broken old woman,” far from raging at her, simply looks at the destroyed marigolds. For the first time, Lizabeth sees Miss Lottie as a suffering human, with the infirmities of age and the deprivations of poverty. As the story’s brief falling action occurs, Lizabeth cannot articulate this new truth. In seeing Miss Lottie as a person, not as a caricatured target, Lizabeth feels the innocence of childhood, which is in fact naivety about reality, fall away. In its place rises a new feeling: compassion. The flashback concludes as Lizabeth realizes that the marigolds embodied whatever joy, love, and “verve” Miss Lottie still had after years of lack, and she admires this woman who “dared” to create beauty in the midst of ugliness.
The narrator brings readers back to the present in the final paragraph and closes the frame with a mature conclusion, one she couldn’t have made at fourteen years old. Lizabeth knows now that life can sometimes be “barren,” but beauty—as represented by the marigolds—can sustain hope. Lizabeth says that even she has planted marigolds in her adulthood, though whether these are literal or metaphorical signposts of hope, she does not specify.
