Marigolds Summary

The story'sis a young
black girl, about the age of fourteen, though she narrates the story after the events have
already taken place, and her perspective as an adult has helped her to make sense of the
feelings that overwhelmed her then. Thus, she is a first person objective narrator: a
participant in the story who tells it after the story's events have concluded. She lives in
Maryland, in a community that has only been marginally affected by the Great Depression because
their community was already so economically depressed. There seems no hope for things to
improve, no belief in the American Dream that white people seemed to have. Her life is
poverty.

As kids do, she and her friends have identified one neighbor as
particularly weird, a woman who lives in the most decrepit home in the community, Miss Lottie,
and they plague and harass the old woman. One summer day, the kids are bored, and the narrator,
Lizabeth, leads the charge against Miss Lottie's marigolds, the only spot...