40 Fun Facts About Marigolds (Eugenia Collier)

In Eugenia Collier's Marigolds, what does the adult Lizabeth remember most about the shantytown where she grew up?

Dust is what her memory keeps, brown and crumbly, though the town surely had lawns and trees too. Against it, Miss Lottie's yellow flowers were the one streak of color.

Which US president's name was mockingly given to Great Depression shantytowns, the kind of place where Marigolds is set?

Herbert Hoover was president when the slump began and took the blame, so homeless camps became Hoovervilles. An empty pocket turned inside out was called a Hoover flag.

In Eugenia Collier's Marigolds, what is it about Miss Lottie's flowers that makes the neighborhood children hate them?

Their beauty is the offense: the flowers spoil the perfect ugliness of a poor town and hint at a better life the children cannot reach.

In Eugenia Collier's Marigolds, what do Lizabeth and her friends throw at Miss Lottie's flowers one bored summer day?

Stones knock the heads off several blooms while the children hide in the bushes. Lizabeth leads the raid even though part of her already finds the game silly.

In Marigolds by Eugenia Collier, what do the taunting children call elderly Miss Lottie as they dance around her?

A witch is what some of them once truly believed she was, since she never left her yard and nobody ever visited. By fourteen Lizabeth knows better and chants it anyway.

By the end of Eugenia Collier's Marigolds, what does the adult Lizabeth understand Miss Lottie's flowers to stand for?

Hope is what the flowers meant: whatever joy was left in a woman who had almost nothing went into tending them, summer after summer.

In Eugenia Collier's Marigolds, what does Lizabeth feel for the first time as she looks into Miss Lottie's eyes?

Compassion arrives in that look, and the narrator says it cannot share a person with innocence. She marks the moment as the end of her childhood.

In Eugenia Collier's Marigolds, which sound from her father, heard through a thin wall at night, shakes Lizabeth?

Sobbing was something Lizabeth did not know men ever did. She covers her ears, but the strong father who whittled toys and carried children on his shoulders keeps crying.

Which author's memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings came out in the same year as Eugenia Collier's Marigolds?

Maya Angelou published her memoir in 1969, the year Collier's story appeared. Early in it, a three-year-old Maya is sent to live with her grandmother in Arkansas.

Marigolds, the flowers of Eugenia Collier's title, are the traditional flower of which Mexican holiday?

Day of the Dead altars often include orange marigolds, which are thought to draw the souls of the dead to the offerings. In Mexico the bloom is sometimes called the flower of the dead.

In Eugenia Collier's Marigolds, what is the name of Lizabeth's younger brother, who follows her on the midnight run?

Joey is still happily a child, which makes him a foil to his restless older sister. He begs her to stop as she tears up the garden.

In Eugenia Collier's Marigolds, what is the name of Miss Lottie's son, who finally chases the taunting children away?

John Burke usually notices nothing around him, but intrude on his daydreams and he flies into a rage. The children treat provoking him and then dodging him as a game.

In Eugenia Collier's Marigolds, where does Miss Lottie's grown son spend his days in front of their tumbledown house?

In a rocking chair, which he loves for the squeaking noise it makes. The house behind him has no porch, no shutters and no grass, only rotting wood.

In Eugenia Collier's Marigolds, how does Lizabeth feel right after the daytime raid while her friends celebrate?

Ashamed is the new feeling: the child in her calls it good fun, while the woman in her cringes at the attack she led. She sulks through dinner, barely noticing that her mother is missing.

In Eugenia Collier's Marigolds, how does Lizabeth's mother comfort her despairing husband in the middle of the night?

By humming to him, as if he were a frightened child. Lizabeth is stunned to find that her small, soft mother has become the strength of the family.

In Eugenia Collier's Marigolds, what kind of work keeps Lizabeth's mother away from home until late in the evening?

Domestic service makes her the family's only earner. Her husband's misery at living on his wife's wages is what Lizabeth overhears that night.

In Eugenia Collier's Marigolds, what has happened to two of Lizabeth's younger siblings because money is so short?

Given away to relatives who could better afford to keep them, the two are gone, and the older children have already left home. Only Lizabeth and one brother remain with their parents.

In Eugenia Collier's Marigolds, what do the people of Lizabeth's town wait for, having given up on promised prosperity?

A miracle was all that seemed worth waiting for. The Black townspeople knew better than to count on a recovery or on the success promised by the American Dream.

In Eugenia Collier's Marigolds, the lack of which things keeps Lizabeth and her friends unaware of how poor they are?

Radios and newspapers were beyond their means, so the children had no picture of how other people lived. They felt trapped, like zoo animals, without knowing what caged them.

In Eugenia Collier's Marigolds, why does Miss Lottie show no anger when she finds her garden wrecked?

Nothing is left to protect, so the fury she showed earlier that day has no purpose. She only stands there, and Lizabeth cannot find a word to say to her.

In Eugenia Collier's Marigolds, what does Miss Lottie do about her garden in the years after Lizabeth destroys it?

Gives it up for good: the narrator, long since moved away, knows the old woman died without raising another flower. One night of rage ended the garden.

At the end of Eugenia Collier's Marigolds, what has the adult Lizabeth done with the flower she once destroyed?

Planted it herself: the grown narrator, now far from the shantytown, ends by saying she too has grown the flower. She has learned that emptiness is not reserved for the poor.

Which narrative point of view does Eugenia Collier use in Marigolds to look back on the summer of the wrecked garden?

First person lets the story run on two tracks at once: a fourteen-year-old's confusion and the grown woman's understanding of it, from an unspecified point years later.

Eugenia Collier's Marigolds, a staple of high school English textbooks, is usually classed as which genre of fiction?

Coming of age fits because the plot turns on the single night a girl crosses into adulthood. Many high school English classes use the story to open a unit on that theme.

In gardening terms, the marigolds Miss Lottie tends every summer in Eugenia Collier's story fall into which category?

Annuals die off each year, so Miss Lottie has to start her garden again every summer. She keeps doing it even as her house falls to ruin around her.

In Eugenia Collier's Marigolds, how do Lizabeth and her brother, too poor for fishing poles, try to catch minnows?

With their bare hands, because there is no money for toys or tackle. Their other pastime that summer is drawing pictures in the dirt.

In Eugenia Collier's Marigolds, what does Lizabeth do to look brave when her brother asks if she is scared?

Spits on the ground, a show of bravado that hides real doubt about joining in. Then she promises to show the others how it is done.

In Eugenia Collier's Marigolds, what does Lizabeth's jobless father do every single day without ever succeeding?

Walks to town seeking work, and returns with nothing. The Depression hit Black workers hardest, with the highest unemployment rate and the lowest wages.

Which Chicago magazine, launched in 1942 on borrowed money, was the earliest to print Eugenia Collier's Marigolds?

Negro Digest took its name from Reader's Digest. Its founder had to put up his mother's furniture as security on a loan just to pay the postage for his launch letters.

The publisher whose first magazine printed Eugenia Collier's Marigolds went on to launch which famous glossy monthly?

Ebony followed in 1945, and with its sister title Jet it drew so many readers from the older magazine that the latter shut down for a decade.

Marigolds by Eugenia Collier won the first fiction prize named for which Chicago poet, a Pulitzer winner in 1950?

Gwendolyn Brooks was the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize, for her collection Annie Allen. She was also Poet Laureate of Illinois for 32 years, until her death.

Eugenia Collier set Marigolds in a rural shantytown in which US state, where she herself was born?

Maryland, not the Deep South, is the setting. Collier knew the state from her own 1930s childhood and went on to teach at its colleges for decades.

What makes the prize-winning Marigolds stand out in Eugenia Collier's long career as a fiction writer?

Her first published story won a fiction prize straight away and went on to become one of the most widely anthologized stories in American high school textbooks.

Which historically Black school in the US capital awarded Marigolds author Eugenia Collier her first degree?

Howard University awarded her degree magna cum laude in 1948, and she later came back to lecture there. It was one of several campuses where she taught during a long academic career.

Which historically Black school hired Marigolds author Eugenia Collier in 1955 and later made her head of English?

Morgan State University took her on as an English instructor, and she rose to lead the department. Teaching became the calling she kept until she retired in 1996.

Before she became a teacher, Marigolds author Eugenia Collier spent five years in which very different job?

Welfare caseworker was her first job after her master's degree, in a city public welfare department. She then moved into teaching and stayed for four decades.

Which book collected the short fiction of Eugenia Collier, the author of Marigolds, in the 1990s?

Breeder and Other Stories gathered her fiction more than two decades after Miss Lottie's garden first appeared in print. She also turned another of her stories, Ricky, into a play.

Which Eugenia Collier story, printed three years after Marigolds, takes its title from a Southern dessert?

Sweet Potato Pie appeared in 1972, and the Oxford American magazine reprinted it in its Spring 2021 issue, almost half a century later.

Marigolds author Eugenia Collier contributed to a study, subtitled Black Genius, of which Harlem Renaissance poet?

Langston Hughes was one subject of her scholarship, most of which dealt with Black American literature. She also co-edited an anthology of Afro-American prose and poetry.

At which Ivy League school did Marigolds author Eugenia Collier earn her master's degree in 1950?

Columbia University granted the degree two years after she finished college. Her doctorate came much later, in 1976, when she was already an established teacher and writer.