Eugenia Collier’s short story “Marigolds” was originally published in 1969 in Negro Digest, when it won the first Gwendolyn Brooks Prize for Fiction. It was later republished in her 1994 story collection Breeder and Other Stories and became widely anthologized. Negro Digest, later renamed Black World, was for decades a magazine dedicated to presenting Black perspectives. “Marigolds,” a story that examines a pivotal moment in the life of an impoverished Black teen, furthered the magazine’s goal of publishing stories that captured the Black experience—in this case, that of a woman recalling how poverty and discrimination shaped her childhood community.

Summary

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Characters

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