Collection 4: "Marigolds" by Eugenia Coller

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 skein of 14-going-on-15 as I recall that devastating moment when I was suddenly more woman than child, years ago in Miss Lottie’s yard.

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 the September dust, offering one’s sweat in return for some meager share of bread.

But God was chary with miracles in those days, and so we waited—and waited.

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.

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.

I remember fishing for minnows in a muddy creek and watching sadly as they
eluded my cupped hands, while Joey laughed uproariously.

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.

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.

We children made a game of thinking of ways to disturb John Burke and then to elude his violent retribution.

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.

For some perverse reason, we children hated those marigolds.

I cursed and spat on the ground—my favorite gesture of phony bravado.

She was working placidly, kneeling over the flowers, her dark hand plunged into the golden mound.

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.

Joey and I had a particularly bitter argument after supper; his exuberance got
on my nerves.

“Just come on,” I replied tersely.

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.

She had been born in squalor and lived in it all her life.

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.

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.