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Summary
The narrator focuses on a late summer day when she was fourteen. Only she and her younger brother Joey still live with their parents. The older siblings have left for the city to find opportunities for work, and the littlest two siblings are staying with relatives because Lizabeth’s parents cannot afford to care for them. The shattering of Lizabeth’s family is yet another result of poverty made worse by the Depression, a tragic reality that the narrator describes in a matter-of-fact manner. Her mother cleans and cooks for a family in town, and her father is seeking work at a time when the few jobs available inevitably go first to unemployed white men.
The narrator pauses to confess that her memories of this time are mingled and undefined. Images from the summer arise in her mind: drawing pictures in the dirt, trying to catch minnows, Joey tagging along and annoying her, and above all, feeling vaguely that something is coming to an end while another thing, shadowy and scary, is about to begin. But one day—the day of the marigolds—is sharp in her memory because it ushers in the change that she has felt approaching.
The day begins benignly. Lizabeth rests under an oak tree, thinking romantically about a boy she knows. The children are bored and casting about for something to do, having run out of ways to fill the empty days before school starts. Joey suggests they go to Miss Lottie’s house to harass her, and everyone perks up. This is one of their favorite things to do, so they hurry off. They suddenly stop to plan their pestering. The narrator pauses to correct her narrative: they stop, she admits, “to reinforce our courage.”
Miss Lottie Burke’s house is old, decrepit, and “a monument to decay”—a kind of haunted house with an “enchantment” holding it up. Miss Lottie’s son John, a man with profound developmental delays, sits on the porch rocking, lost in his singular mind, but he will lash out if the children disturb him. Of course, they do provoke him, to prove that they are not scared and to delight in their escape. More than John Burke, the children fear Miss Lottie, who to their young eyes seems “at least a hundred years old” and still carries in her tall but bent body something of her youthful strength. She and her son are secluded, even within a community that itself is isolated. The youngest children imagine her to be a witch, but Lizabeth and the older children know better. While they enjoy provoking her, they still harbor some fear of her.
As they hide in the bushes, the children see Miss Lottie caring for her marigolds. This task is all they ever see her do, and she does it well. The “sorry gray house” may be going to wrack and ruin, but the “dazzling strip of bright blossoms” stands in sharp contrast to the bare lawn. The marigolds’ beauty confounds and disturbs the children, out of place as the flowers are in the dust and disrepair of the community. The children, Lizabeth says, hate the flowers intensely. They usually fling stones at the flowers while Miss Lottie works among them, earning her wrath and exulting in their youthful speed as they dash away. Looking back, Lizabeth thinks that the children would have been happy to destroy the marigolds—but none had the courage to try it.
