Though “Marigolds” culminates in an encounter between Lizabeth and Miss Lottie, the catalyst for this climax is what’s going on inside Lizabeth herself. Caught between childhood and womanhood at “fourteen-going-on-fifteen,” Lizabeth is straddling two worlds simultaneously, and she struggles to make sense of these two conflicting sets of expectations.

In one world, she is still a child. She wants to fish for minnows, draw pictures in the dirt, chant, throw stones, and run around with her little brother, Joey. She wants to engage in lighthearted mischief and chaos without consequence and to revel in the relatively carefree and low-stakes freedom of childhood.

At the same time, Lizabeth can feel herself approaching womanhood. She can sense this change intuitively, describing it as “a strange restlessness of body and of spirit.” As she plays with the younger children, she can feel herself outgrowing their games.

For Lizabeth, the immediate consequences of accepting adulthood are evident. The family is living in poverty, and her older siblings have already left home in pursuit of independent—and perhaps better—lives. When this trepidation toward her burgeoning adulthood manifests in erratic and cruel behavior toward Miss Lottie, Lizabeth feels something else new, too: shame.

When Lizabeth overhears her parents having a difficult conversation, her fear and uncertainty coalesce into a violent tantrum. Wracked with remorse and guilt after violently destroying Miss Lottie’s garden, she comes to realize that this moment represents the end of her childhood. She can no longer operate without consequences as a child would. In adulthood, guilt, remorse, shame, and compassion are integral consequences of one’s actions and experiences.

Though the events of “Marigolds” occur during the Great Depression, Collier is careful to note that the problems facing Lizabeth’s family cannot simply be explained by that historical event. Rather, the relevant economic issues are systemic and long-standing, resulting from years of discrimination and oppression by the country’s white majority. Against such a context, the woes of the Great Depression are not unprecedented for Lizabeth’s rural Black community, who have struggled all along:

The Depression that gripped the nation was no new thing to us, for the black workers of rural Maryland had always been depressed. I don’t know what it was that we were waiting for; certainly not for the prosperity that was “just around the corner,” for those were white folks’ words, which we never believed. Nor did we wait for hard work and thrift to pay off in shining success, as the American Dream promised, for we knew better than that, too.

From her present-day vantage point, Lizabeth notes that she and the other children had no sense of the extent of their poverty. In the absence of access to radios, magazines, and newspapers, the children see only those who looked like themselves. This lack of context allows an innocence of sorts—without the knowledge to know what they are missing, the children only see what they have.

Lizabeth’s own view of her situation becomes more mature and nuanced as a result of the story’s climax. In her remorse after destroying Miss Lottie’s marigolds, she finally sees what they represent for the first time. Miss Lottie was not a witch but “a broken old woman who had dared to create beauty in the midst of ugliness and sterility.” Those marigolds—a tiny bright spot in their collective poverty—were, themselves, a type of wealth. In the present day, Lizabeth recognizes this value even more, having planted figurative marigolds of her own in the difficult years since.

In “Marigolds,” narrator Lizabeth—now a...