Question

What is a plot summary for "Marigolds" by E. Collier?

Accepted Answer

"Marigolds" is a coming of age short story about a young girl named Lizabeth growing up in rural Maryland during the Great Depression. She describes her town as brown and dusty, but there is one vibrant spot of color in the yard of Ms. Lottie: "a brilliant splash of sunny yellow against the dust—Miss Lottie’s marigolds."
Despite being very poor, Lizabeth is too young to understand how desperate the times truly are, saying, "In those days everybody we knew was just as hungry and ill clad as we were." She spends her summer days playing with her younger brother and occasionally annoying Ms. Lottie, an old lady of the town, who is old, grumpy, and very protective of her beautiful marigold flowers. Lizabeth says that the flowers annoyed the children because they "interfered with the perfect ugliness of the place; they were too beautiful; they said too much that we could not understand; they did not make sense." On this particular day, the children throw rocks at the flowers, but something changes within Lizabeth; she feels guilty for how she has treated Ms. Lottie and says,

"I did not join the merriment when the kids gathered again under the oak in our bare yard. Suddenly I was ashamed, and I did not like being ashamed. The child in me sulked and said it was all in fun, but the woman in me flinched at the thought of the malicious attack that I had led."

Later that evening, Lizabeth is awoken in the middle of the night by the sobbing of her father and the quiet, comforting voice of her mother. Lizabeth has never before heard her father cry, and she can't seem to reconcile the man she knows with the quiet, painful sobbing she hears. It's all too much for her to bear, and in her emotional turmoil she leaves the house and goes to Ms. Lottie's house. There, in the early morning, she jumps into the beautiful marigold bushes and angrily tears them all out. Once finished, she sees Ms. Lottie standing over her, and Lizabeth finally understands, saying,

"As I gazed at the immobile face with the sad, weary eyes, I gazed upon a kind of reality which is hidden to childhood. The witch was no longer a witch but only a broken old woman who had dared to create beauty in the midst of ugliness and sterility. She had been born in squalor and lived in it all her life. Now at the end of that life she had nothing except a fallingdown hut, a wrecked body, and John Burke, the mindless son of her passion. Whatever verve there was left in her, whatever was of love and beauty and joy that had not been squeezed out by life, had been there in the marigolds she had so tenderly cared for."

Despite Lizabeth regretting this action, Ms. Lottie never plants marigolds again. Lizabeth, however, finally recognized the beauty and meaning of the flowers and planted marigolds herself as an adult.

Answer

The story's protagonist is a young black girl, about the age of fourteen, though she narrates the story after the events have already taken place, and her perspective as an adult has helped her to make sense of the feelings that overwhelmed her then. Thus, she is a first person objective narrator: a participant in the story who tells it after the story's events have concluded. She lives in Maryland, in a community that has only been marginally affected by the Great Depression because their community was already so economically depressed. There seems no hope for things to improve, no belief in the American Dream that white people seemed to have. Her life is poverty.
As kids do, she and her friends have identified one neighbor as particularly weird, a woman who lives in the most decrepit home in the community, Miss Lottie, and they plague and harass the old woman. One summer day, the kids are bored, and the narrator, Lizabeth, leads the charge against Miss Lottie's marigolds, the only spot of beauty in this old woman's poverty-stricken life, the only spot of beauty, perhaps, in the entire community. The kids hate the marigolds. The narrator tells us,

I said before that we children were not consciously aware of how thick were the bars of our cage. I wonder, now, though, whether we were not more aware of it than I thought. Perhaps we had some dim notion of what we were, and how little chance we had of being anything else. Otherwise, why would we have been so preoccupied with destruction?

Lizabeth and the other kids destroyed many of the flowers, "mad with the power of inciting such rage" in their victim, Miss Lottie. She goes back with her brother that night and finishes the job they'd started. She had been awoken by the sound of her father crying, and, for Lizabeth, this sound had caused the "world [to lose] its boundary lines." In her rage at her own powerlessness, and the fact that there is no beauty in her own life, she destroys the only beauty someone else has in theirs.

Answer

Set during the Great Depression, the story takes place in a black community in rural Maryland and is about fourteen-year-old Elizabeth and her younger brother, Joey. It is summer, and the neighborhood children are bored. They decide to annoy Miss Lottie, and elderly woman who lives in a shack with her mentally impaired son, John Burke. Miss Lottie is a scary figure for the children (some believed she was a witch), so playing a prank on her takes some courage. Miss Lottie's one joy is the row of marigolds she tended in front of her house, so Elizabeth, as the oldest, leads the children in sneaking up and pelting the flowers with rocks while Miss Lottie is weeding them. Miss Lottie, furious, yells at the children, but the children continue to taunt her until she summons John Burke to chase them off.
Elizabeth, instead of exulting in her triumph, is ashamed at her actions and angry about being ashamed. Later that evening, as she lies in bed, she overhears her father break down in front of her mother, despondent about not being able to find work. She is astonished and scared at hearing her father, who seems so strong, crying in the next room.
These feelings swirl inside her, until finally she wakes her brother at 4 am and leads him to Miss Lottie's shack. In a fit of rage, she destroys the marigolds. Miss Lottie, hearing the commotion, appears before her. In confronting Miss Lottie, as well as her own guilt and shame over destroying the one beautiful thing in Miss Lottie's life, Elizabeth learns about the meanings of innocence and compassion.

Literature

Marigolds Summary

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