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Summary
The children gather under the tree to laugh about the assault, but for the first time in the years of tormenting Miss Lottie, Lizabeth feels ashamed and realizes that she hates feeling that way. The part of her that is still childish and surly wants to believe the teasing was “all in fun,” but the young adult she is coming to be realizes the attack was in fact “malicious.” She cannot shake her remorse and, after a meager dinner with her silent father, she argues with her unperturbed brother and goes on to bed.
The siblings share a room and sleep on pallets, not beds. When Lizabeth’s mother finally gets home, Lizabeth wakes to hear her parents’ voices through the shanty’s thin walls. Usually, she loves the sound of her mother’s calming voice, but on this night, she can also hear her father’s voice as he pours out his desperation. He cannot find work—but no one can right now, as his wife reminds him. He cannot give her anything and is ashamed to be supported by his wife—but no one has anything right now, she says. He will not be comforted and becomes furious when his well-meaning wife reminds him that her employers, Mr. and Miz Ellis, graciously give her their handed-down goods. Her husband scorns these hand-me-downs as “white folks’ leavings.”
Lizabeth listens as her usually strong and cheerful father sobs like a heartbroken child, something she did not realize men ever did, and her mother hums to soothe him. Lizabeth covers her ears at the sound of her father’s sorrow as her world loses “its boundary lines.” What she thought was sure and solid—her father’s role in the family—cracks. In her confusion and fear, she cannot sleep, and in the predawn hours she wakes Joey to keep her company. Hardly knowing what she is doing, she leads him back to Miss Lottie’s house, where in a tantrum that stuns and alarms her brother, “all the smoldering emotions” in her mind fuel an enraged attack on the marigolds. She cries as she tears the plants out of the ground and destroys them, unable to stop until the damage cannot be undone.
Finally spent, Lizabeth cries among the destruction as her brother sits in uncharacteristic silence and Miss Lottie comes and stands before them. Lizabeth looks up at Miss Lottie’s worn, old form and then at her face, which surprisingly has no anger in it now that she has nothing to protect. At that moment, the narrator recalls, she sees the reality of adult life that children cannot know. She sees that Miss Lottie, from a life of deprivation and discrimination, nurtured one thing that was beautiful and gave her joy. At that moment, ashamed and unable to explain her actions, Lizabeth loses the protective innocence of childhood. She truly sees the humanity of Miss Lottie and feels compassion for her.
The narrator, in the present moment, muses that it took her years to begin to understand what she learned that day in Miss Lottie’s yard. Miss Lottie, now long dead, never planted flowers again, but they remain with “painful poignancy” in Lizabeth’s mind. To create something beautiful as a hedge against life’s difficulties and disappointments is a human urge, and the narrator says that she herself, “has planted marigolds.”
