Poverty Theme Analysis

Lizabeth is a young African-American girl growing up during the Great Depression, and at the beginning of the story, she’s ignorant of the extent of her poverty. She and her friends have no way of comparing themselves to others—they’re too poor to have radios or magazines—so they don’t see themselves as particularly poor. Nonetheless, they feel poverty’s effects: Lizabeth feels as if she’s in a cage, but her anger is vague and undirected, because she can’t articulate what is wrong in her life.

It’s not until Lizabeth overhears a conversation between her parents that she comes to understand the complexity of her family’s class position: she hears her father lament that he can’t find a job and provide for his family, which makes him feel inept and emasculated, and he begins to sob loudly and painfully. Lizabeth’s mother comforts him by humming softly, as if he was a child. This event throws Lizabeth’s understanding of the world into chaos: her father isn’t the rock of the family that she believed him to be, and her mother is stronger than Lizabeth previously understood. Poverty has blurred simple binaries, forcing Lizabeth to confront the fact that her understanding of the world no longer matches reality. This revelation results in rage, which she unleashes on Miss Lottie’s marigolds. After destroying the flowers Lizabeth is finally able to see who Miss Lottie really is: a woman who resists the misery of poverty not with anger, but by cultivating a beauty that improves the world around her.