In the short story "Marigolds" by Eugenia Collier, the author's tone, as established by the first person narrator, a girl named Lizabeth, is somber and reflective. The word "somber" means dark, gloomy, dismal, depressing, and melancholy. The word "reflective" has to do with the act of thinking carefully about something. From her adulthood, the narrator is recalling a memory from her past when she was just going through the transition from childhood to adolescence. The incident was germinal in her journey to maturity.

The author establishes the tone in descriptions throughout the story. She writes of the "brown, crumbly dust" in the "shantytown" in which her family lived and of the "impoverished little community" of Black workers during the Great Depression who "had always been depressed." Her mother and father "trudged wearily down the dirt road each day," her mother to her job and her father to an endless search for work.

The children, though, are naive, and "only vaguely aware of the extent of our poverty." To amuse themselves they go to harass an old woman named Miss Lottie and her simpleminded son John Burke by throwing stones at Miss Lottie's marigolds, the only bright spot on her property. Afterwards, though, Lizabeth is ashamed.

That night, she overhears her mother and father arguing, and then hears her father crying. She feels as if her world has shattered, and in response, she goes out to Miss Lottie's yard and destroys all the marigolds. When she is finished, Miss Lottie is standing there confronting her, and Lizabeth realizes that the marigolds were all the beauty the old woman had in her sad, impoverished life. For Lizabeth, it was the "end of innocence" and "the beginning of compassion." The last sentence says that "I too have planted marigolds." As an adult, the narrator has realized that life has deep sorrows that must be covered up by any beauty that can be found.