Marigolds
Author: Eugenia W. Collier
When I think of the home town 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 makes them water, gets into
the throat and between the toes of bare brown feet. I don’t know why I should
remember only the dust. Surely there
must have been lush green lawns and paved streets under leafy shade trees
somewhere 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 time and that place, I remember only the
dry September of the dirt roads and grassless yards of the shanty town where I
lived. And one other thing I remember,
another incongruency of 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 come 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 multicolored skin of fourteen-going-on fifteen
as I recall that devastating moment when I was suddenly more woman than child,
years ago in Miss Lottie’s yard. I think
of those marigolds at the strangest time; 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 waiting for;
certainly not for the prosperity that was “just around the corner,” for those
were white folk’s words, which we never believed. Nor we did wait for hard work and thrift to
pay off in shining success, as the American Dream promised, for we know better
than that, too. Perhaps we waited for a
miracle, amorphous in concept but necessary 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 September dust offering some meager share of
bread. But God was chary with miracles
in those days, and so we waited – and waited.
We children , of course, were
only vaguely aware of the extent of our poverty. Having no radios, few newspapers, and no
magazines, we were somewhat unaware of the world outside 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
hungry and ill clad as we were. Poverty
was the cage in which we all were trapped, and our hatred 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 time I was fourteen, my
brother Joey and I were the only children left at our house, the older ones
having left home for early marriage or the lure of the city, and the two babies
having been sent to relative who might care for them better than we. Joey was three years younger than I, and a
boy, and therefore vastly inferior. Each
morning our mother and father trudged wearily down the dirt road and around the
bend, she to her domestic job, he to his daily unsuccessful quest for work. After a
few chores around the tumbledown shanty. 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 which Joey gleefully erased with one
sweep of his dirty foot. I remember
fishing for minnows in 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 feeling that something old and familiar was ending, and something unknown and
therefore terrifying was beginning.
One day returns to me with
special clarity for some reason, perhaps because it was the beginning of the
experience and in some inexplicable way marked the end of innocence. I was loafing under the great oak tree in our
yard, deep in some reverie which I have now forgotten, except that it involved
some secret, secret thoughts of one of the Harris boys across the 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 somewhere.”
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 idleness 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 wasn’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 enough to scamper along with the group over rickety fences and
through bushes that tore our already raggedy clothes, back where Miss Lottie
lived. I think now that we must have a tragicomic spectacle,
five or six kids of different ages, each of us clad in only one garment – the
girls in faded dresses that were too long or too short, the boys in patchy
pants, their sweaty 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 ramshackle homes. The sun and rain had long since faded its
rickety frame siding from while to a sullen gray.
The boards themselves seemed to
remain upright not from being nailed together but rather from leaning together,
like a house that a child might have constructed from cards. A brisk wind might have blown it down, and
the fact that it was still standing implied a kind of enchantment that was
stronger than the elements. There it
stood and as far as I know is standing yet- a gray rotting thing with no porch,
no shutters, no steps, set on a cramped lot with no grass, 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, completing the impression of
decay. John Burke was what was know as
queer-headed. Black and ageless, he sat
rocking day in and day out in a mindless stupor, lulled by the monotonous squeak-squawk
of the chair. A battered hat atop his
shaggy head shaded him from the sun.
Usually John Burke was totally unaware of everything outside his quiet
dream world. But if you disturbed him if
you intruded upon his fantasies, he would become enraged, strike out at you,
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 least 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
reddish 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 her. We never knew how she managed
those necessities which depend on human interaction – how she ate, for example,
or even whether she ate. When we were
tiny children, we thought Miss Lottie, was a witch and we made up tales and 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 shack, we had to
stop to reinforce our nerves.
“Look, there she is,” I
whispered, forgetting that Miss Lottie could not possibly have heard from 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 not fit in with the crumbling decay of the rest of
her yard. Beyond the dusty brown yard,
in front of the sorry gray house, rose suddenly and shockingly a dazzling strip
of bright blossoms, clumped together in enormous mounds, warm and passionate
and sun-golden. The old black with-woman
worked on them all summer, every summer down on her creaky knees, weeding and
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 ugliness 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 destroyed 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 mounds, her big backside in the air – but it wasn’t
comical, it was something we could not name.
We had to annoy her by whizzing a pebble into her flowers or by yelling
a dirty world, then dancing away from her rage, reveling in our youth and
mocking her age. Actually, I think it
was the flowers we wanted to destroy, but nobody had the nerve to think it was
the flowers we wanted to destroy, but nobody had the nerve to try it, not even
Joey, who was usually fool enough to try anything.
“Y’all git some stones,”
commanded Joey now and was met with instant giggling obedience as everyone
except me began to gather pebbles from the dusty ground. “Come on,
Lizabeth.”
I just stood there peering
through the bushes, torn between wanting
to join the fun and feeling 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 use ‘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. Perhaps we had some dim notion of what we
were, and how little chance we had of being anything 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 on the edge of the
bushes that bordered the narrow road in frond of Miss Lottie’s photo
place. She was working placidly,
kneeling over the flowers, her dark hand plunged into the golden mound. Suddenly zing – an expertly aimed stone cut
the head off one of the blossoms.
“Who out there?” Miss Lottie’s backside came down and her head
came up as her sharp eyes searched the bushes.
“You better git!”
We had crouched down out of sight
in the bushes, where we stifled the giggle that insisted on coming, Miss Lottie
gazed warily across the road for a moment, then cautiously returned 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
rickety cane and shouting. “Y’all git!
Go on home!” Then the rest of the kids
let loose with their pebbles, storming the flowers and laughing wildly and
senselessly at Miss Lottie’s impotent rage.
She took her stick at us and started shakily toward the road crying,
“Git ‘long John Burke! John Burke, come
help!”
Then I lost my head entirely, mad
with the power of inciting such rage and ran out of the bushes in the storm
pebbles, straight toward Miss Lottie, changing madly, “Old witch, fell in 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 bees
and changing, “Old lady witch!” while she screamed curses at us. The madness lasted only 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. Suddenly 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 that 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 stretched out upon the pallet in the room we shared and fell
into a fitful doze. When I awoke,
somewhere 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 heard
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 something I could
not hear, and my father cried out louder, “What must a man do, tell me that?”
“Look, we ain’t starving. I get paid every week, and Mrs. Ellis is real
nice about giving me things. She gonna
let me have Mr. Ellis’s old coat for you this winter –“
“Damn Mr. Elli’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
dark night. I had never heard a man
cried before. I did not know men ever
cried. I covered my ears with my hand
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 singing through the house. My father whittled toys for us, and laughed
so loud that the great oak seemed to laugh with him, and taught us how to fish
and hunt rabbits. How could it be that
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 strength of the family; my father who was the rock on which the
family had been built, was sobbing like the tiniest child. Everything was suddenly out of tune, like a
broken accordion. Where did I fit into
this crazy picture? I do not now
remember my thoughts, only a feeling of great bewilderment and fear.
Long after the sobbing and
humming had stopped, I lay on the pallet, still as stone with my hand over my
ears, wishing that I too could cry and be comforted. The night was silent now except for the sound
of the crickets and of Joey’s soft breathing.
But the room was too crowded with fear to allow me to sleep, and
finally, feeling the terrible aloneness of 4A.M., I decided to awaken Joey.
“Ouch! What’s the matter with
you? What you want?” He demanded disagreeably when I had pinched
and slapped him awake.
“Come on, wake up.”
“What for? Go ‘way.”
I was lost of 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.”
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 ruin that my
world had become – foul and crumbling, a grotesque caricature. It looked haunted, but I was not afraid,
because 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 and burst – the great
need for my mother who was never there, the hopelessness of our poverty and
degradation, the bewilderment of being neither child nor woman and yet both at
once, the fear unleashed by my father’s tears.
And these feelings combined in one great impulse toward destruction.
“Lizabeth!”
I leaped furiously into the
mounds of marigold and pulled madly, trampling and pulling and destroying the
perfect yellow blooms. The fresh smell of
early morning and of dew-soaked marigolds spurred me on as I went gearing and
mangling the sobbing while Joey tugged 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, crying and crying,
and it was too late to undo what I had done.
Joey was sitting beside me, silent 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 lifted to the swollen
legs, the age-distorted body clad in a tight cotton nightdress, and then the shadowed
Indian face surrounded 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 the moment when childhood faded and womanhood
began. That violent, crazy act was the
last 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 only 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 her 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 tenderly cared for.
Of course I could not express the
things that I knew about Miss Lottie as I stood there awkward and ashamed.
The years have put words to the things I knew in that moment marked the
end of innocence. Innocence involves an
unseeing acceptance of things at face value, an ignorance of the area below the
surface. In that humiliating moment I
had looked beyond myself and into the depths of another person. This was the beginning of compassion, and one
cannot have both compassion and innocence.
The years have taken me worlds
away from that time and that place, from the dust and squalor of our lives, and
from the bright thing that I destroyed in a blind, childish striking out at 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 marigolds 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.
SpringBoard. English Textual
Power. The College Board’s official Pre-AP program
Posted on august 24, 2011
repost on march 15, 2016
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