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The first-person narrator of “Marigolds” is Lizabeth, a woman recalling a pivotal moment from the summer she was fourteen years old. She addresses an unnamed person for whom she is waiting. She describes the impoverished rural Maryland community where she grew up, whose Black population was so poor that radio, the latest technology, had not yet connected them to the world. In the narrator’s admittedly unclear memories, she recalls the choking dust and decrepit homes of the community. One exception in the landscape stands out, however—the bright colors of Miss Lottie Burke’s marigolds. Recalling them evokes the swirl of contradictory emotions the narrator felt as she tentatively moved from childhood into young adulthood. The narrator wonders whether the community’s children understood that they lived in a cage built by poverty, deepened by the impact of the Great Depression. She decides that they were only vaguely aware of their shared deprivation, feeling a restless anger that they sometimes acted out.
The narrator dwells on a specific day in her youth. As summer ends, the children have run out of ways to amuse themselves till Joey, Lizabeth’s younger brother, suggests a visit to Miss Lottie’s house. Harassing this elderly neighbor and her son John Burke, a man with intellectual disabilities, is a favorite game for the children. When they were younger, they thought of Miss Lottie as a witch, and they still fear her a little. They arrive at Miss Lottie’s house ready for mischief.
Taunted by Joey, Lizabeth leads an attack on the thing that matters most to Miss Lottie: the lush row of marigolds she tends carefully every summer. The sunny colors and abundance of these flowers present a stark contrast to the gray, dusty community and to Miss Lottie’s tumble-down home, and the children cannot abide them. In the midst of such despair, the flowers trouble the children in ways they cannot explain.
Lizabeth, hiding with the children in the bushes, throws the first stone to knock a blossom off a stem. Joey hits another flower, and Miss Lottie becomes aware of the children, yelling at them to leave. When they continue to fling pebbles, she becomes enraged, brandishing her cane and calling for her son John to run the children off. Feeling a surge of cruel power, Lizabeth leads the children in a taunting chant as a small avalanche of pebbles flies through the air. When John comes to his mother’s defense, the children flee.
They regroup under an oak tree to laugh about the attack, but for the first time, Lizabeth is ashamed of her actions. After a meager dinner, she goes to her pallet to sleep but wakes when her mother, Maybelle, gets home from her job cleaning and cooking for a white family in town. Through the thin walls, Lizabeth hears her father and mother talking. He expresses his shame and anger about not being able to find work and having to rely on his wife’s meager income and hand-me-downs from her employer. Despite Maybelle’s attempts to comfort him, he breaks down, sobbing. Lizabeth has never heard her strong, self-reliant father—or any man—cry, and the terrible sound shatters her sense of security. Unable to sleep, she wakes Joey, and they walk back to Miss Lottie’s house. There, in a tantrum of emotions she cannot understand, Lizabeth destroys the marigolds while Joey watches, stunned.
When all the flowers lie tattered, Lizabeth, sobbing, looks up to see Miss Lottie in front of her. She expects Miss Lottie to rage at her as usual, but the old woman no longer has anything to protect and is calm. At that moment, the innocence of childhood slips away from Lizabeth. Humbled, Lizabeth feels the stirrings of compassion for the old woman who nurtured something beautiful throughout a lifetime of poverty and discrimination.
Looking back at the event, the narrator reveals that, though she could not understand in that terrible moment, she now knows that part of adult life is the urge to make something beautiful even in discouraging circumstances, as Miss Lottie had. She admits that she, herself, has “planted marigolds.”
