Friday March 18, 2010

We are reading the short story Marigolds in class. Our focus is on literary elements. We'll be working in the lab next Tuesday and Wednesday on powerpoints, which will be presented on Thursday.

YOU WILL NEED YOUR THUMB / JUMP DRIVE NEXT WEEK.

vocabulary packet due MONDAY!

If you loose your story or are absent, here is a copy!

MarigoldsBy Eugenia W. Collier
When I think of the hometown 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 and 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 shantytown 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 comes
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 skein 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 times; 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 Maryland had always been
depressed. I don’t know what it was that we were
waiting for; certainly not for the prosperity that was
“just around the corner,” for those were white folks’
words, which we never believed. Nor did we wait for
hard work and thrift to pay off in shining success, as
the American Dream promised, for we knew 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 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.
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.
incongruency: inconsistency; lack of agreement or
harmony
multicolored skein: The writer is comparing her many
feelings to a skein, or long coiled piece of many
colored yarn.
amorphous: vague, shapeless.
chary: not generous.
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 the 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
relatives 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 our 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,