Marigolds (Eugenia Collier)
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40 free Marigolds (Eugenia Collier) trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Eugenia Collier's Marigolds is only a few pages long and stays with people for years. A grown woman looks back on one summer of the Great Depression, when she was fourteen and restless, and on a single night when she did something she could not undo to an old neighbor's flower garden. It is among the most widely anthologized short stories in American high school textbooks, because almost everyone recognizes the moment it describes. This quiz follows the story from the opening memory to the closing lines: Lizabeth and her family, Miss Lottie and her son, the raid in the daytime, the conversation overheard in the dark and what happens afterward. It also covers the setting, the narration, the symbolism and the themes teachers most often ask about, along with the author's life, the magazine that first printed the story and the prize it won. The questions suit students revising for a class test, teachers who want a quick check on the reading, and anyone who met the story at school and wonders how much of it stuck. Every answer comes with a short explanation.
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Q 01In Eugenia Collier's Marigolds, what does the adult Lizabeth remember most about the shantytown where she grew up?
Dust
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.
Q 02Which US president's name was mockingly given to Great Depression shantytowns, the kind of place where Marigolds is set?
Herbert Hoover
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.
Q 03In Eugenia Collier's Marigolds, what is it about Miss Lottie's flowers that makes the neighborhood children hate them?
Their beauty
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.
Q 04In Eugenia Collier's Marigolds, what do Lizabeth and her friends throw at Miss Lottie's flowers one bored summer day?
Stones
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.
Q 05In Marigolds by Eugenia Collier, what do the taunting children call elderly Miss Lottie as they dance around her?
A witch
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.
Q 06By the end of Eugenia Collier's Marigolds, what does the adult Lizabeth understand Miss Lottie's flowers to stand for?
Hope
Hope is what the flowers meant: whatever joy was left in a woman who had almost nothing went into tending them, summer after summer.
Q 07In Eugenia Collier's Marigolds, what does Lizabeth feel for the first time as she looks into Miss Lottie's eyes?
Compassion
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.
Q 08In Eugenia Collier's Marigolds, which sound from her father, heard through a thin wall at night, shakes Lizabeth?
Sobbing
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.
Q 09Which author's memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings came out in the same year as Eugenia Collier's Marigolds?
Maya Angelou
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.
Q 10Marigolds, the flowers of Eugenia Collier's title, are the traditional flower of which Mexican holiday?
Day of the Dead
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.
Q 11In Eugenia Collier's Marigolds, what is the name of Lizabeth's younger brother, who follows her on the midnight run?
Joey
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.
Q 12In Eugenia Collier's Marigolds, what is the name of Miss Lottie's son, who finally chases the taunting children away?
John Burke
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.
Q 13In Eugenia Collier's Marigolds, where does Miss Lottie's grown son spend his days in front of their tumbledown house?
In a rocking chair
Q 21In Eugenia Collier's Marigolds, what does Miss Lottie do about her garden in the years after Lizabeth destroys it?
Gives it up for good
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.
Q 22At the end of Eugenia Collier's Marigolds, what has the adult Lizabeth done with the flower she once destroyed?
Planted it herself
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.
Q 23Which narrative point of view does Eugenia Collier use in Marigolds to look back on the summer of the wrecked garden?
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.
Q 14In Eugenia Collier's Marigolds, how does Lizabeth feel right after the daytime raid while her friends celebrate?
Ashamed
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.
Q 15In Eugenia Collier's Marigolds, how does Lizabeth's mother comfort her despairing husband in the middle of the night?
By humming to him
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.
Q 16In Eugenia Collier's Marigolds, what kind of work keeps Lizabeth's mother away from home until late in the evening?
Domestic service
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.
Q 17In Eugenia Collier's Marigolds, what has happened to two of Lizabeth's younger siblings because money is so short?
Given away to relatives
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.
Q 18In Eugenia Collier's Marigolds, what do the people of Lizabeth's town wait for, having given up on promised prosperity?
A miracle
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.
Q 19In Eugenia Collier's Marigolds, the lack of which things keeps Lizabeth and her friends unaware of how poor they are?
Radios and newspapers
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.
Q 20In Eugenia Collier's Marigolds, why does Miss Lottie show no anger when she finds her garden wrecked?
Nothing is left to protect
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.
First person
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.
Q 24Eugenia Collier's Marigolds, a staple of high school English textbooks, is usually classed as which genre of fiction?
Coming of age
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.
Q 25In gardening terms, the marigolds Miss Lottie tends every summer in Eugenia Collier's story fall into which category?
Annuals
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.
Q 26In Eugenia Collier's Marigolds, how do Lizabeth and her brother, too poor for fishing poles, try to catch minnows?
With their bare hands
With their bare hands, because there is no money for toys or tackle. Their other pastime that summer is drawing pictures in the dirt.
Q 27In Eugenia Collier's Marigolds, what does Lizabeth do to look brave when her brother asks if she is scared?
Spits on the ground
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.
Q 28In Eugenia Collier's Marigolds, what does Lizabeth's jobless father do every single day without ever succeeding?
Walks to town seeking work
Walks to town seeking work, and returns with nothing. The Depression hit Black workers hardest, with the highest unemployment rate and the lowest wages.
Q 29Which Chicago magazine, launched in 1942 on borrowed money, was the earliest to print Eugenia Collier's Marigolds?
Negro Digest
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.
Q 30The publisher whose first magazine printed Eugenia Collier's Marigolds went on to launch which famous glossy monthly?
Ebony
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.