Marigolds

by Eugenia Collier
Fiction, 1969

When I think of the hometown 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 bet
ween the toes of bare brown feet. I don’t know why I should remember only the dust. Surel
y there must have been lush green lawns and paved streets under leafy shade trees some
where 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 ti
me and that place, I remember only the dry September of the dirt roads and grassless yard
s of the shantytown where I lived. And one other thing I remember, another incongruency o
f 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 co
mes 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 multicolore
d skein of fourteen-going-on-
fifteen as I recall that devastating moment when I was suddenly more woman than child, y
ears 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.

I suppose that futile waiting was the sorrowful background music of 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 cor
ner,” 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 kne
w better than that, too. Perhaps we waited for a miracle, amorphous in concept but neces
sary 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 one’s sweat in r
eturn for some meager share of bread. But God was chary with miracles in those days, an
d so we waited—and waited.

We children, of course, were only vaguely aware of the extent of our poverty. Having no ra
dios, few newspapers, and no magazines, we were somewhat unaware of the world outsid
e our community. Nowadays we would be called culturally deprived and people would write
books and hold conferences about us. In those days everybody we knew was just as hung
ry and ill clad as we were. Poverty was the cage in which we all were trapped, and our hatr
ed of it was still the vague, undirected restlessness of the zoo-
bred flamingo who knows that nature created him to fly free.

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, t
he older ones having left home for early marriage or the lure of the city, and the two babie
s having been sent to relatives who might care for them better than we. Joey was three ye
ars younger than I, and a boy, and therefore vastly inferior. Each morning our mother and f
ather 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 shan
ty, 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 whi
ch Joey gleefully erased with one sweep of his dirty foot. I remember fishing for minnows i
n a muddy creek and watching sadly as they eluded my cupped hands, while Joey laughed
uproariously. And I remember, that year, a strange restlessness of body and of spirit, a fe
eling that something old and familiar was ending, and something unknown and therefore te
rrifying was beginning.

One day returns to me with special clarity for some reason, perhaps because it was the be
ginning of the experience that in some inexplicable way marked the end of innocence. I wa
s loafing under the great oak tree in our yard, deep in some reverie which I have now forgo
tten, except that it involved some secret, secret thoughts of one of the Harris boys across t
he 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 s
omewhere.”

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 i
dleness 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 w
asn’t fun anymore by now.

“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 enou
gh to scamper along with the group over rickety fences and through bushes that tore our al
ready raggedy clothes, back to where Miss Lottie lived. I think now that we must have mad
e a tragicomic spectacle, five or six kids of different ages, each of us clad in only one garm
ent—
the girls in faded dresses that were too long or too short, the boys in patchy pants, their sw
eaty 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.

When Miss Lottie’s house came into view we stopped, ostensibly to plan our strategy, but
actually to reinforce our courage. Miss Lottie’s house was the most ramshackle of all our ra
mshackle 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 t
ogether but rather from leaning together, like a house that a child might have constructed fr
om cards. A brisk wind might have blown it down, and the fact that it was still standing impl
ied a kind of enchantment that was stronger than the elements. There it stood and as far a
s I know is standing yet—
a gray, rotting thing with no porch, no shutters, no steps, set on a cramped lot with no gras
s, 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, completi
ng 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 b
y the monotonous squeak-
squawk of the chair. A battered hat atop his shaggy head shaded him from the sun. Usuall
y John Burke was totally unaware of everything outside his quiet dream world. But if you di
sturbed him, if you intruded upon his fantasies, he would become enraged, strike out at yo
u, 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 lea
st 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 redd
ish brown, and her 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 h
er. We never knew how she managed those necessities which depend on human interacti
on—
how she ate, for example, or even whether she ate. When we were tiny children, we thoug
ht 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 sh
ack, 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.”

“Yeh, look at ‘er.”

Miss Lottie’s marigolds were perhaps the strangest part of the picture. Certainly they did n
ot fit in with the crumbling decay of the rest of her yard. Beyond the dusty brown yard, in fr
ont of the sorry gray house, rose suddenly and shockingly a dazzling strip of bright blosso
ms, 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 a
nd 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 uglin
ess 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 de
stroyed 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 moun
ds, her big backside in the air—
but it wasn’t comical, it was something we could not name. We had to annoy her by whizzi
ng a pebble into her flowers or by yelling a dirty word, then dancing away from her rage, re
veling in our youth and mocking her age. Actually, I think it was the flowers we wanted to d
estroy, but nobody had the nerve to try it, not even Joey, who was usually fool enough to tr
y anything.

“Y’all git some stones,” commanded Joey now and was met with instant giggling obedienc
e as everyone except me began to gather pebbles from the dusty ground. “Come on, Lizab
eth.”

I just stood there peering through the bushes, torn between wanting to join the fun and feel
ing that it was all a bit silly.

“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 us
e ‘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. Perhap
s we had some dim notion of what we were, and how little chance we had of being anythin
g 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.”

We crept to the edge of the bushes that bordered the narrow road in front of Miss Lottie’s p
lace. She was working placidly, kneeling over the flowers, her dark hand plunged into the g
olden mound. Suddenly zing— an expertly aimed stone cut the head off one of the blosso
ms.
“Who out there?” Miss Lottie’s backside came down and her head came up as her sharp e
yes searched the bushes. “You better git!”

We had crouched down out of sight in the bushes, where we stifled the giggles that insiste
d on coming. Miss Lottie gazed warily across the road for a moment, then cautiously return
ed 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 a
nd shouting. “Y’all git! Go on home!” Then the rest of the kids let loose with their pebbles, s
torming 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! Jo
hn Burke, come help!”

Then I lost my head entirely, mad with the power of inciting such rage, and ran out of the b
ushes in the storm of pebbles, straight toward Miss Lottie, chanting madly, “Old witch, fell i
n 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 bee
s and chanting, “Old lady witch!” while she screamed curses at us. The madness lasted onl
y 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.

I did not join the merriment when the kids gathered again under the oak in our bare yard. S
uddenly 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 t
hat 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 exuberance got on my nerves. Finally I stret
ched out upon the pallet in the room we shared and fell into a fitful doze. When I awoke, so
mewhere 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 rooms. At first I he
ard 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 s
omething I could not hear, and my father cried out louder, “What must a man do, tell me th
at?”
“Look, we ain’t starving. I git paid every week, and Mrs. Ellis is real nice about giving me thi
ngs. 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 d
ark night. I had never heard a man cry before. I did not know men ever cried. I covered my
ears with my hands 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 his shoulders and go sing
ing through the house. My father whittled toys for us, and laughed so loud that the great oa
k seemed to laugh with him, and taught us how to fish and hunt rabbits. How could it be th
at 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 str
ength of the family; my father, who was the rock on which the family had been built, was so
bbing like the tiniest child. Everything was suddenly out of tune, like a broken accordion. W
here did I fit into this crazy picture? I do not now remember my thoughts, only a feeling of g
reat bewilderment and fear.

Long after the sobbing and humming had stopped, I lay on the pallet, still as stone with my
hands over my ears, wishing that I too could cry and be comforted. The night was silent no
w except for the sound of the crickets and of Joey’s soft breathing. But the room was too cr
owded 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 h
ad 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 goi
ng 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 Furies 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.
The half-
dawn light was more eerie than complete darkness, and in it the old house was like the rui
n that my world had become—
foul and crumbling, a grotesque caricature. It looked haunted, but I was not afraid, becaus
e 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 a
nd burst—
the great need for my mother who was never there, the hopelessness of our poverty and d
egradation, the bewilderment of being neither child nor woman and yet both at once, the fe
ar unleashed by my father’s tears. And these feelings combined in one great impulse towar
d destruction.

“Lizabeth!”

I leaped furiously into the mounds of marigolds and pulled madly, trampling and pulling an
d destroying the perfect yellow blooms. The fresh smell of early morning and of dew-
soaked marigolds spurred me on as I went tearing and mangling and sobbing while Joey t
ugged 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, cr
ying and crying, and it was too late to undo what I had done. Joey was sitting beside me, si
lent 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 lif
ted to the swollen legs, the age-
distorted body clad in a tight cotton nightdress, and then the shadowed Indian face surroun
ded 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 her, and that was th
e moment when childhood faded and womanhood began. That violent, crazy act was the l
ast 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 onl
y 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 body, and John Burke, the mindless son of h
er 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 tenderl
y cared for.

Of course I could not express the things that I knew about Miss Lottie as I stood there awk
ward 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 invol
ves an unseeing acceptance of things at face value, an ignorance of the area below the su
rface. In that humiliating moment I looked beyond myself and into the depths of another pe
rson. This was the beginning of compassion, and one cannot have both compassion and in
nocence.

The years have taken me worlds away from that time and that place, from the dust and sq
ualor of our lives, and from the bright thing that I destroyed in a blind, childish striking out a
t 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 contrition she never planted marigol
ds 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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