Marigolds

One of the ways that Collier makes “Marigolds” convincingly realistic is by having her characters speak in dialect. She uses nontraditional spelling and grammar in order to capture the way that her Black working-class characters living in rural Maryland in the 1930s would speak. The following passage—which comes as Lizabeth eavesdrops on her mother and father in the middle of the night—demonstrates Collier’s use of dialect:

“Twenty-two years, Maybelle, twenty-two years,” [her father] was saying, “and I ain’t got nothing for you, nothing.”

“It’s all right, honey, you’ll git something. Everybody outta work now, you know that.”

“It ain’t right. Ain’t no man oughtta eat his woman’s food day in and day out, and see his children running wild. Ain’t nothing right about that.”

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