Activity

2.14 SIFTing through “Marigolds”

SUGGESTED Learning Strategies: Graphic Organizer, Marking The
Text, SIFT, Visualizing

My Notes Short Story

About the Author

Eugenia Collier (b. 1928) grew up and continues to live
in Baltimore. Retired now, she taught English at several
universities. She has published two collections of short
stories, a play, and many scholarly works. Her noteworthy
and award-winning story ”Marigolds” powerfully captures
the moment of the narrator’s coming of age.

by Eugenia W. Collier

When I think of the home town of my youth, all that I seem to remember
is dust—the brown, crumbly dust of late summer—arid, sterile dust that gets
into the eyes and makes them water, gets into the throat and between the
toes of bare brown feet. I don’t know why I should remember only the dust.

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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. And so, when I think of
that time and that place, I remember only the dry September of the dirt roads
and grassless yards of the shantytown where I lived. And one other thing I
remember, another incongruency1 of memory—a brilliant splash of sunny
yellow against the dust—Miss Lottie’s marigolds.
Whenever the memory of those marigolds flashes across my mind, a
strange nostalgia comes with it and remains long after the picture has faded.
I feel again the chaotic emotions of adolescence, illusive as smoke, yet as
real as the potted geranium before me now. Joy and rage and wild animal
gladness and shame become tangled together in the multicolored skein of
fourteen-going-on-fifteen as I recall that devastating moment when I was
suddenly more woman than child, years ago in Miss Lottie’s yard. I think of
those marigolds at the strangest times; I remember them vividly now as I
desperately pass away the time.

1 incongruency: something that is not appropriate or fitting

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Activity 2.14
continued

I suppose that futile waiting was the sorrowful background music of My Notes
our impoverished little community when I was young. 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. Perhaps we waited for
a miracle, amorphous2 in concept but necessary if one were to have the grit
to rise before dawn each day and labor in the white man’s vineyard until
after dark, or to wander about in the September dust offering some meager Word
share of bread. But God was chary3 with miracles in those days, and so we Connections
waited—and waited. The word amorphous has
the Greek root -morph-,
We children, of course, were only vaguely aware of the extent of our
meaning “shape” or
poverty. Having no radios, few newspapers, and no magazines, we were
“form.” The root comes
somewhat unaware of the world outside our community. Nowadays we
from Morpheus, the god
would be called culturally deprived and people would write books and hold
of sleep—or shaper of
conferences about us. In those days everybody we knew was just as hungry
dreams.
and ill clad as we were. Poverty was the cage in which we all were trapped,
and our hatred of it was still the vague, undirected restlessness of the zoo- The Greek prefix a- means
bred flamingo who knows that nature created him to fly free. “not” or “without.”
As I think of those days I feel most poignantly the tag end of summer, the
bright, dry times when we began to have a sense of shortening days and the
imminence of the cold.
By the time I was fourteen, my brother Joey and I were the only children
left at our house, the older ones having left home for early marriage or the
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lure of the city, and the two babies having been sent to relatives who might
care for them better than we. Joey was three years younger than I, and a boy,
and therefore vastly inferior. Each morning our mother and father trudged
wearily down the dirt road and around the bend, she to her
domestic job, he to his daily unsuccessful quest for work.
After our few chores around the tumbledown shanty,
Joey and I were free to run wild in the sun with
other children similarly situated.
For the most part, those days are ill-
defined in my memory, running together and
combining like a fresh watercolor painting left out
in the rain. I remember squatting in the road drawing a
picture in the dust, a picture which Joey gleefully erased with
one sweep of his dirty foot. I remember fishing for minnows
in a muddy creek and watching sadly as they eluded my

2 amorphous: without shape or form

3 chary: ungenerous, wary

Unit 2  •  Defining Style   123

Activity 2.14
continued
SIFTing through “Marigolds”

My Notes cupped hands, while Joey laughed uproariously. And I remember, that year,
a strange restlessness of body and of spirit, a feeling that something old and
familiar was ending, and something unknown and therefore terrifying was
beginning.
One day returns to me with special clarity for some reason, perhaps
because it was the beginning of the experience that in some inexplicable4 way
marked the end of innocence. I was loafing under the great oak tree in our
yard, deep in some reverie which I have now forgotten, except that it involved
some secret, secret thoughts of one of the Harris boys across the yard. Joey
and a bunch of kids were bored now with the old tire suspended from an oak
limb, which had kept them entertained for a while.
“Hey, Lizabeth,” Joey yelled. He never talked when he could yell. “Hey,
Lizabeth, let’s go somewhere.”
I came reluctantly from my private world. “Where you want to go? What
you want to do?”
The truth was that we were becoming tired of the formlessness of our
summer days. The idleness whose prospect had seemed so beautiful during
the busy days of spring now had degenerated to an almost desperate effort to
fill up the empty midday hours.
“Let’s go see can we find some locusts on the hill,” someone suggested.
Joey was scornful. “Ain’t no more locusts there. Y’all got ’em all while they
was still green.”
The argument that followed was brief and not really worth the effort.
Hunting locust trees wasn’t fun anymore by now.

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“Tell you what,” said Joey finally, his eyes sparkling. “Let’s us go over to
Miss Lottie’s.”
The idea caught on at once, for annoying Miss Lottie was always fun.
I was still child enough to scamper along with the group over rickety
fences and through bushes that tore our already raggedy clothes, back to
where Miss Lottie lived. I think now that we must have made a tragicomic
spectacle, five or six kids of different ages, each of us clad in only one
garment—the girls in faded dresses that were too long or too short, the boys
in patchy pants, their sweaty brown chests gleaming in the hot sun. A little
cloud of dust followed our thin legs and bare feet as we tramped over the
barren land.

4 inexplicable: unable to be explained or understood

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Activity 2.14
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When Miss Lottie’s house came into view we stopped, ostensibly5 to My Notes
plan our strategy, but actually to reinforce our courage. Miss Lottie’s house
was the most ramshackle of all our ramshackle homes. The sun and rain
had long since faded its rickety frame siding from white to a sullen gray.
The boards themselves seemed to remain upright not from being nailed
together but rather from leaning together, like a house that a child might
have constructed from cards. A brisk wind might have blown it down, and
the fact that it was still standing implied a kind of enchantment that was
stronger than the elements. There it stood and as far as I know is standing
yet—a gray, rotting thing with no porch, no shutters, no steps, set on a
cramped lot with no grass, not even any weeds—a monument to decay.
In front of the house in a squeaky rocking chair sat Miss Lottie’s son,
John Burke, completing the impression of decay. John Burke was what was
known as queer-headed. Black and ageless, he sat rocking day in and day
out in a mindless stupor, lulled by the monotonous squeak-squawk of the
chair. A battered hat atop his shaggy head shaded him from the sun. Usually
John Burke was totally unaware of everything outside his quiet dream
world. But if you disturbed him, if you intruded upon his fantasies, he
would become enraged, strike out at you, and curse at you in some strange
enchanted language which only he could understand. We children made
a game of thinking of ways to disturb John Burke and then to elude his
violent retribution.
But our real fun and our real fear lay in Miss Lottie herself. Miss Lottie
seemed to be at least a hundred years old. Her big frame still held traces
of the tall, powerful woman she must have been in youth, although it was
now bent and drawn. Her smooth skin was a dark reddish brown, and her
© 2010 College Board. All rights reserved.

face had Indian-like features and the stern stoicism that one associates with
Indian faces. Miss Lottie didn’t like intruders either, especially children. She
never left her yard, and nobody ever visited her. We never knew how she
managed those necessities which depend on human interaction—how she
ate, for example, or even whether she ate. When we were tiny children, we
thought Miss Lottie was a witch and we made up tales that we half believed
ourselves about her exploits. We were far too sophisticated now, of course, to
believe the witch nonsense. But old fears have a way of clinging like cobwebs,
and so when we sighted the tumbledown shack, we had to stop to reinforce
our nerves.
“Look, there she is,” I whispered, forgetting that Miss Lottie could not
possibly have heard me from that distance. “She’s fooling with them crazy
flowers.”

5 ostensibly: for the pretended reason

Unit 2  •  Defining Style   125

Activity 2.14
continued
SIFTing through “Marigolds”

My Notes “Yeh, look at ’er.”

Miss Lottie’s marigolds were perhaps the strangest part of the picture.
Certainly they did not fit in with the crumbling decay of the rest of her
yard. Beyond the dusty brown yard, in front of the sorry gray house, rose
suddenly and shockingly a dazzling strip of bright blossoms, clumped
together in enormous mounds, warm and passionate and sun-golden. The
old black witch-woman worked on them all summer, every summer, down
on her creaky knees, weeding and cultivating and arranging, while the house
crumbled and John Burke rocked. 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. There was something in the vigor with which the
old woman destroyed the weeds that intimidated us. It should have been
a comical sight—the old woman with the man’s hat on her cropped white
head, leaning over the bright mounds, her big backside in the air—but it
wasn’t comical, it was something we could not name. We had to annoy her by
whizzing a pebble into her flowers or by yelling a dirty word, then dancing
away from her rage, reveling in our youth and mocking her age. Actually, I
think it was the flowers we wanted to destroy, but nobody had the nerve to
try it, not even Joey, who was usually fool enough to try anything.
“Y’all git some stones,” commanded Joey now and was met with instant
giggling obedience as everyone except me began to gather pebbles from the
dusty ground. “Come on, Lizabeth.”
I just stood there peering through the bushes, torn between wanting to
join the fun and feeling that it was all a bit silly.

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“You scared, Lizabeth?”
I cursed and spat on the ground—my favorite gesture of phony bravado.
“Y’all children get the stones, I’ll show you how to use ’em.”
I said before that we children were not consciously aware of how thick
were the bars of our cage. I wonder now, though, whether we were not more
aware of it than I thought. 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? Anyway, the pebbles were
collected quickly, and everybody looked at me to begin the fun.
“Come on, y’all.”

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Activity 2.14
continued

We crept to the edge of the bushes that bordered the narrow road in front My Notes
of Miss Lottie’s place. She was working placidly, kneeling over the flowers, her
dark hand plunged into the golden mound. Suddenly zing—an expertly aimed
stone cut the head off one of the blossoms.
“Who out there?” Miss Lottie’s backside came down and her head came
up as her sharp eyes searched the bushes. “You better git!”
We had crouched down out of sight in the bushes, where we stifled the
giggles that insisted on coming. Miss Lottie gazed warily across the road for
a moment, then cautiously returned to her weeding. Zing—Joey sent a pebble
into the blooms, and another marigold was beheaded.
Miss Lottie was enraged now. She began struggling to her feet, leaning
on a rickety cane and shouting. “Y’all git! Go on home!” Then the rest of the
kids let loose with their pebbles, storming the flowers and laughing wildly
and senselessly at Miss Lottie’s impotent rage. She shook her stick at us and
started shakily toward the road crying, “Git ’long! John Burke! John Burke,
come help!”
Then I lost my head entirely, mad with the power of inciting such rage,
and ran out of the bushes in the storm of pebbles, straight toward Miss
Lottie, changing madly, “Old witch, fell in a ditch, picked up a penny and
thought she was rich!” The children screamed with delight, dropped their
pebbles, and joined the crazy dance, swarming around Miss Lottie like
bees and changing, “Old lady witch!” while she screamed curses at us. The
madness lasted only a moment, for John Burke, startled at last, lurched out
of his chair, and we dashed for the bushes just as Miss Lottie’s cane went
whizzing at my head.
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I did not join the merriment when the kids gathered again under the
oak in our bare yard. Suddenly I was ashamed, and I did not like being
ashamed. The child in me sulked and said it was all in fun, but the woman
in me flinched at the thought of the malicious attack that I had led. The
mood lasted all afternoon. When we ate the beans and rice that was supper
that night, I did not notice my father’s silence, for he was always silent these
days, nor did I notice my mother’s absence, for she always worked until well
into evening. Joey and I had a particularly bitter argument after supper; his
exuberance6 got on my nerves. Finally I stretched out upon the pallet in the
room we shared and fell into a fitful doze. When I awoke, somewhere in
the middle of the night, my mother had returned, and I vaguely listened to
the conversation that was audible through the thin walls that separated our

6 exuberance: extreme good cheer or high spirits

Unit 2  •  Defining Style   127

Activity 2.14
continued
SIFTing through “Marigolds”

My Notes rooms. At first I heard no words, only voices. My mother’s voice was like a
cool, dark room in summer—peaceful, soothing, quiet. I loved to listen to
it; it made things seem all right somehow. But my father’s voice cut through
hers, shattering the peace.
“Twenty-two years, Maybelle, twenty-two years,” he was saying, “and I got
nothing for you, nothing, nothing.”
“It’s all right, honey, you’ll get something. Everybody out of work now,
you know that.”
“It ain’t right. Ain’t no man ought to eat his woman’s food year in and year
out, and see his children running wild. Ain’t nothing right about that.”
“Honey, you took good care of us when you had it. Ain’t nobody got
nothing nowadays.”
“I ain’t talking about nobody else, I’m talking about me. God knows I try.”
My mother said something I could not hear, and my father cried out louder,
“What must a man do, tell me that?”
“Look, we ain’t starving. I get paid every week, and Mrs. Ellis is real nice
about giving me things. She gonna let me have Mr. Ellis’s old coat for you this
winter—“
“Damn Mr. Ellis’s coat! And damn his money! You think I want white
folks’ leavings? Damn, Maybelle”—and suddenly he sobbed, loudly and
painfully, and cried helplessly and hopelessly in the dark night. I had never
heard a man cry before. I did not know men ever cried. I covered my ears
with my hand but could not cut off the sound of my father’s harsh, painful,
despairing sobs. My father was a strong man who could whisk a child upon

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his shoulders and go singing through the house. My father whittled toys for
us, and laughed so loud that the great oak seemed to laugh with him, and
taught us how to fish and hunt rabbits. How could it be that my father was
crying? But the sobs went on, unstifled, finally quieting until I could hear
my mother’s voice, deep and rich, humming softly as she used to hum to a
frightened child.
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? I do not now remember my thoughts, only a feeling of great
bewilderment and fear.

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Activity 2.14
continued

Long after the sobbing and humming had stopped, I lay on the pallet, My Notes
still as stone with my hands over my ears, wishing that I too could cry and
be comforted. The night was silent now except for the sound of the crickets
and of Joey’s soft breathing. But the room was too crowded with fear to allow
me to sleep, and finally, feeling the terrible aloneness of 4 a.m., I decided to
awaken Joey.
“Ouch! What’s the matter with you? What you want?” he demanded
disagreeably when I had pinched and slapped him awake.
“Come on, wake up.”
“What for? Go ‘way.”
I was lost for a reasonable reply. I could not say, “I’m scared and I don’t
want to be alone,” so I merely said, “I’m going out. If you want to come,
come on.”
The promise of adventure awoke him. “Going out now? Where to,
Lizabeth? What you going to do?”
I was pulling my dress over my head. Until now I had not thought of
going out. “Just come on,” I replied tersely
I was out the window and halfway down the road before Joey caught up
with me.
“Wait, Lizabeth, where you going?”
I was running as if the Furies7 were after me, as perhaps they were—
running silently and furiously until I came to where I had half known I was
headed: to Miss Lottie’s yard.
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The half-dawn light was more eerie than complete darkness, and in it the
old house was like the ruin that my world had become—foul and crumbling,
a grotesque caricature. It looked haunted, but I was not afraid, because I was
haunted too.
“Lizabeth, you lost your mind?” panted Joey.
I had indeed lost my mind, for all the smoldering
emotions of that summer swelled in me and burst—the great
need for my mother who was never there, the hopelessness
of our poverty and degradation, the bewilderment of being
neither child nor woman and yet both at once, the fear

7 Furies: in classical mythology, three spirits of

revenge who pursued and punished wrongdoers.

Unit 2  •  Defining Style   129

Activity 2.14
continued
SIFTing through “Marigolds”

My Notes unleashed by my father’s tears. And these feelings combined in one great
impulse toward destruction.
“Lizabeth!”
I leaped furiously into the mounds of marigolds and pulled madly,
trampling and pulling and destroying the perfect yellow blooms. The fresh
smell of early morning and of dew-soaked marigolds spurred me on as I went
gearing and mangling and sobbing while Joey tugged my dress or my waist
crying, “Lizabeth, stop, please stop!”
And then I was sitting in the ruined little garden among the uprooted
and ruined flowers, crying and crying, and it was too late to undo what I had
done. Joey was sitting beside me, silent and frightened, not knowing what to
say. Then, “Lizabeth, look.”
I opened my swollen eyes and saw in front of me a pair of large, calloused
feet; my gaze lifted to the swollen legs, the age-distorted body clad in a tight
cotton nightdress, and then the shadowed Indian face surrounded by stubby
white hair. And there was no rage in the face now, now that the garden was
destroyed and there was nothing any longer to be protected.
“M-miss Lottie!” I scrambled to my feet and just stood there and stared
at here, and that was the moment when childhood faded and womanhood
began. That violent, crazy act was the last act of childhood. For as I gazed at
the immobile face with the sad, weary eyes, I gazed upon a kind of reality
which is hidden to childhood. The witch was no longer a witch but only a
broken old woman who had dared to create beauty in the midst of ugliness
and sterility. She had been born in squalor and lived in it all her life. Now
at the end of that life she had nothing except a falling-down hut, a wrecked

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body, and John Burke, the mindless son of her passion. Whatever verve
there was left in her, whatever was of love and beauty and joy that had
not been squeezed out by life, had been there in the marigolds she had so
tenderly cared for.
Of course I could not express the things that I knew about Miss Lottie as
I stood there awkward and ashamed. The years have put words to the things
I knew in that moment, and as I look back upon it, I know that that moment
marked the end of innocence. Innocence involves an unseeing acceptance
of things at face value, an ignorance of the area below the surface. In that

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Activity 2.14
continued

humiliating moment I had looked beyond myself and into the depths of My Notes
another person. This was the beginning of compassion, and one cannot have
both compassion and innocence.
The years have taken me worlds away from that time and that place, from
the dust and squalor of our lives, and from the bright thing that I destroyed
in a blind, childish striking out at God knows what. Miss Lottie died long
ago and many years have passed since I last saw her hut, completely barren at
last, for despite my wild contrition8 she never planted marigolds again. Yet,
there are times when the image of those passionate yellow mounds returns
with a painful poignancy. For one does not have to be ignorant and poor to
find that his life is as barren as the dusty yards of our town. And I too have
planted marigolds.
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8 contrition: sorrow or remorse for one’s wrongs

Unit 2  •  Defining Style   131

Activity 2.14
continued
SIFTing through “Marigolds”

The acronym SIFT stands for Symbol, Images, Figurative Language, and
Tone or Theme. You can use this strategy to “sift” through the parts of a
story in order to explore how a writer uses literary elements and stylistic
techniques to convey meaning or theme.
Record examples from “Marigolds” of each of the SIFT elements in the
graphic organizer.

Symbol:

Imagery:

Figurative Language:

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Tone/Theme:

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Activity 2.14
continued

“Marigolds” is a story that examines the coming of age of a young girl,

Lizabeth. In order to truly understand the story, as well as Lizabeth’s Literary terms
transformation, you must clearly articulate the choices that she makes An internal conflict occurs
along the way, both within her own mind and between forces from when a character struggles
the outside world. On the following chart, examine the internal and between opposing needs or
external conflicts Lizabeth faces. desires or emotions within
his or her own mind.

An external conflict occurs

when a character struggles
against an outside force.
This force may be another
character, a societal
expectation, or something in
the physical world.

Internal Conflicts
One side of the conflict The other side of the conflict
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External Conflicts
One side of the conflict The other side of the conflict

Unit 2  •  Defining Style   133