Lizabeth is a young African-American girl growing up during the Great Depression, and at the beginning of the story, she’s ignorant of the extent of her poverty. She and her friends have no way of comparing themselves to others—they’re too poor to have radios or magazines—so they don’t see themselves as particularly poor. Nonetheless, they feel poverty’s effects: Lizabeth feels as if she’s in a cage, but her anger is vague and undirected, because she can’t articulate what is wrong in her life.
It’s not until Lizabeth overhears a conversation between her parents that she comes to understand the complexity of her family’s class position: she hears her father lament that he can’t find a job and provide for his family, which makes him feel inept and emasculated, and he begins to sob loudly and painfully. Lizabeth’s mother comforts him by humming softly, as if he was a child. This event throws Lizabeth’s understanding of the world into chaos: her father isn’t the rock of the family that she believed him to be, and her mother is stronger than Lizabeth previously understood. Poverty has blurred simple binaries, forcing Lizabeth to confront the fact that her understanding of the world no longer matches reality. This revelation results in rage, which she unleashes on Miss Lottie’s marigolds. After destroying the flowers Lizabeth is finally able to see who Miss Lottie really is: a woman who resists the misery of poverty not with anger, but by cultivating a beauty that improves the world around her.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Poverty ThemeTracker
Poverty Quotes in Marigolds
I don’t know why I should remember only the dust. Surely there must have been lush green lawns and paved streets under leafy shade trees somewhere in town; but memory is an abstract painting—it does not present things as they are but rather as they feel.
Poverty was the cage in which we all were trapped, and our hatred of it was still the vague, undirected restlessness of the zoo-bred flamingo who knows instinctively that nature created it to be free.
Miss Lottie’s house was the most ramshackle of all our ramshackle homes.
For some perverse reason, we children hated those marigolds. 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.
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?
“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.”
The world had lost its boundary lines. My mother, who was small and soft, was now the strength of the family; my father, who was the rock on which the family had been built, was sobbing like the tiniest child. Everything was suddenly out of tune, like a broken accordion. Where did I fit into this crazy picture?
