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Marigolds Full Story Summary. The first-person narrator of “Marigolds” is Lizabeth, a woman recalling a pivotal moment from the summer she was fourteen years old. She addresses an unnamed person for whom she is waiting. She describes the impoverished rural Maryland community where she grew up, whose Black population was so poor that radio ...
Analysis. When Lizabeth recalls the town that she grew up in, the thing she remembers most is dust. Surely there must have been green lawns and leafy trees, but memory doesn’t always present things as they were. So, it’s brown, crumbly dust that stands out in her memory. That, and Miss Lottie ’s sunny yellow marigolds.
In Eugenia Collier’s “Marigolds,” the protagonist, Lizabeth, is forced out of a sheltered childhood into the painful realities of her community’s struggles. In any coming-of-age story, the protagonist fails if she cannot accept the reality of adult life and begin to develop a way to thrive in it. “Marigolds” begins with an adult ...
In 1969 Collier published “Marigolds,” which won the Gwendolyn Brooks Prize for Fiction and continues to be widely read and anthologized. She’s also published numerous scholarly and critical articles, as well as personal essays. "My students can't get enough of your charts and their results have gone through the roof." -Graham S.
Summary: “Marigolds”. The short story “Marigolds” (1969) by Eugenia Collier is narrated by Lizabeth. It opens with the main character contemplating the hometown of her youth and recalling “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 ...
Analysis: “Marigolds”. “Marigolds” is a Coming of Age story set in an impoverished Black community during the Great Depression and primarily features a 14-year-old protagonist, Lizabeth, as she reaches womanhood. The narrator, an older Lizabeth, reflects on a summer day that culminates in the end of her innocence and the beginning of ...
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Memories of the marigolds are linked, for the narrator, to waiting, another state that produces yearning and discomfort. Because memory leads to memory, the marigolds lead the narrator think about the unnamed person for whom she waits, likely in vain, and then to the “futile” waiting that she calls the “sorrowful background music” of the dusty community of her childhood.
