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Summary
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Marigolds, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Coming of Age
The Importance of Beauty
Poverty
Summary
Analysis
When Lizabeth recalls the town that she grew up in, the thing she remembers most is dust. Surely there must have been green lawns and leafy trees, but memory doesn’t always present things as they were. So, it’s brown, crumbly dust that stands out in her memory. That, and Miss Lottie’s sunny yellow marigolds.
The defining feature of the impoverished town where Lizabeth grew up is brown, crumbly dust. This feature reflects the destitution of the town—it’s so poor that there’s very little beauty or interruption to monotony. Miss Lottie’s dazzling yellow marigolds stand out as a beautiful streak of color amidst all the poverty and dust.
Themes
Literary Devices
Whenever Lizabeth remembers Miss Lottie’s marigolds, all the chaotic emotions of adolescence come flooding back. She’s transported to a moment in Mrs. Lottie’s yard, back when she was fourteen, when she suddenly became more woman than child.
The marigolds are linked to a transitional moment in Lizabeth's life—a moment of coming of age. This paragraph foreshadows the end of the story, when Lizabeth transitions fully to adulthood.
Themes
Literary Devices
Lizabeth grew up in a shantytown in Maryland during the Great Depression. As she remembers it, her town was characterized by a general feeling of waiting; not for prosperity that white folks assured them was “just around the corner,” nor for the success promised by the American Dream, because they knew better than to wait for those things. Instead, they waited for a miracle.
Themes
Literary Devices
As a child, Lizabeth and her friends were only vaguely aware of the extent of their poverty—they didn’t have access to radios, newspapers, or magazines, so they couldn’t compare their community to any others. Poverty trapped them like a cage, but their hatred of it was vague and undirected, like an animal at a zoo.
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In her childhood, Lizabeth lives with her parents and her younger brother, Joey. Her older siblings have already left home, and two of her younger siblings have been given away to relatives who can better afford to care for them. Lizabeth’s mother works as a domestic, and her father is unemployed. Still, he walks to town every day to try to find some work.
Themes
During the summer Lizabeth and Joey spend most their days playing. They amuse themselves by doing things like drawing in the dirt or fishing for minnows with their bare hands. Lizabeth remembers feeling a strange restlessness during that time, almost like something old was ending and something new was beginning.
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Literary Devices
Lizabeth remembers the day that marked the end of her innocence. She is loafing under an oak tree when Joey and their friends ask her to find something for them to do. Joey suggests that they hunt locusts, but that’s not fun anymore. Instead, Lizabeth proposes that they go annoy Miss Lottie.
Themes
Bothering Miss Lottie is always fun, so the children scamper over to her house. Of all the ramshackle homes in their shantytown, Mrs. Lottie’s house is the most decrepit. Its rickety frame is like a house built from cards; a brisk wind might blow it over. There’s no porch or shutters, the wood is all rotting, and the lot has no grass—the house is a monument to decay.
John Burke, Miss Lottie’s son, sits on a rocking chair in front of the house. He is known as “queer-headed” and likes the chair because of the squeak-squawk sound it makes when it rocks. Usually John Burke is unaware of what happens around him, but if you intrude upon his fantasies he becomes enraged. The children have made a game of angering John Burke and then eluding his attacks.
Themes
The real fun, however, is in annoying Miss Lottie. She’s at least one hundred years old. Miss Lottie was tall and powerful when she was young, but now she’s bent and drawn. Miss Lottie never left her yard, and nobody ever came to visit her. Some of the children used to think she was a witch, but they’re too old to believe in that now.
Themes
When the children see Miss Lottie, she’s bent over working on her marigolds. Her flowers are particularly dazzling because they’re surrounded by so much dust and decay. Miss Lottie nurtures her marigolds all summer, every summer, even while her house falls to ruin.
Themes
The children hate the marigolds for their beauty—they interfere with the perfect ugliness of the town. The way Miss Lottie cares for the flowers, and destroys the weeds surrounding them, intimidates and upsets the children, though they can’t explain exactly why. The children decide to annoy the old woman by throwing stones at her flowers.
As the children begin to gather stones, Lizabeth hesitates. She’s torn between wanting to join in the fun and feeling that it all is a bit silly. Joey provokes her by asking if she’s scared. Lizabeth responds by spitting on the ground, a gesture of phony bravado, and says that she’ll show the children how its done.
Themes
Lizabeth wonders if, as children, they were not more aware of their poverty than she previously claimed: if they didn’t recognize the cage that poverty trapped then in, then why were they so bent on destruction? Anyway, the children gather the stones and Lizabeth leads them towards Miss Lottie’s garden.
Themes
Lizabeth throws a stone and cuts the head off one of the marigolds. Miss Lottie yells, then Joey chucks a stone and beheads another marigold. Miss Lottie struggles to her feet, leaning on her rickety cane, and shouts at the children. More stones are thrown, and Miss Lottie cries for John Burke to come and help her.
Themes
Mad with the power of inciting Miss Lottie’s rage, Lizabeth runs out of the bushes and chants “Old lady witch, fell in a ditch, picked up a penny and thought she was rich!” while dancing around the old woman. The other children join in too, but then John Burke runs out and chases them all off.
Themes
Though the other kids are in a state of merriment after their fun, Lizabeth suddenly feels ashamed. She’s conflicted: the child in her says it was all in good fun, but the woman in her cringes at the thought of the malicious attack. She’s in a funny mood all day and hardly notices her father’s silence and mother’s absence during dinner that night.
Lizabeth wakes in the middle of the night and hears her parents talking through the thin walls that separate their rooms. Her father is ashamed that his wife is working and he isn’t, and he laments that “no man oughtta eat his woman’s food day in and day out, and see his children running wild.” Despite his daily efforts, he can’t find a job and doesn’t know what to do.
Her father begins to sob, loudly and painfully. Lizabeth has never heard a man cry before—she didn’t know that men ever cried. She covers her ears with her hands, but she still hears her father sobbing. Her father is a strong man—he can whisk a child upon his shoulders, he can whittle toys from wood, and he can hunt. How could it be that he is crying?
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Literary Devices
Finally, Lizabeth’s mother comforts her father by humming to him, as if he were a frightened child. Lizabeth is bewildered; her mother, who was small and soft, is now the strength of the family. Her father, who was the rock on which the family had been built, is sobbing like a child. The world had lost its boundary lines.
Lizabeth lies awake even after her parents have stopped talking and gone to sleep. She feels scared and lonely, so she decides to wake Joey. She can’t tell Joey how she really feels, so she says that she’s going out, knowing that the promise of an adventure will entice Joey to come along.
Themes
Lizabeth runs as if the furies are after her, and Joey follows. She stops at Miss Lottie’s yard. Her emotions swell to a bursting point—she’s exasperated by her mother’s constant absence, crushed by the hopelessness of her poverty, bewildered by her changing body, and afraid of her father’s tears. She experiences an overwhelming impulse to destroy.
Themes
Lizabeth leaps into Miss Lottie’s garden and pulls furiously at the marigolds, destroying the perfect golden flowers. She’s sobbing and Joey begs her to stop, but she continues trampling and pulling the flowers until all of them are ruined.
Themes
Lizabeth stops sobbing, opens her swollen eyes, and sees the age-distorted body of Miss Lottie standing in front of her. There is no rage in her face, since her garden has already been destroyed and there is nothing left to protect. Lizabeth scrambles to her feet, and it’s at that moment when her childhood fades and her womanhood begins.
Themes
As Lizabeth gazes into Miss Lottie’s eyes, she sees a kind of reality that’s hidden from children. She sees that Miss Lottie is not a witch, but only a “broken old woman who had dared to create beauty in the midst of ugliness and sterility.” She had lived a life in squalor, and whatever joy was left in her had gone into those flowers that she had so lovingly cared for. And now those flowers lay in ruin.
Standing before Miss Lottie, Lizabeth feels ashamed and cannot express her thoughts aloud. Looking back on this moment, Lizabeth recognizes it as the end of her innocence—for innocence involves an acceptance of things at face value, with no thought to the area below the surface. When she looked into Miss Lottie’s eyes she felt the beginning of compassion, and one cannot have both compassion and innocence.
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Literary Devices
Now, years later, Lizabeth lives far from the dust and squalor of her shantytown. She knows that Miss Lottie died long ago, and that she never planted marigolds again. Yet, Lizabeth still thinks about those marigolds every now and then—one doesn’t have to live in poverty to know that life can be as barren as a dusty road. And Lizabeth too has planted marigolds as an adult.
