What is the theme, or message, in the short story "Marigolds" by Eugenia Collier?

An important
message or theme of the story is that the ability to understand and see other peopleespecially
outsidersas fully human is the beginning of maturity into adulthood.

Lizabeth
is a young adolescent who remembers vividly the day she led the other children in taunting old
Miss Lottie as a witch and destroying her beautifully tended marigolds.

We
can understand how Lizabeth vented the rage she felt at her own constricted, impoverished life
on an old woman who couldn't easily fight back. The story is set in the Depression, and Lizabeth
and her brother Joey live in a shack with her parents. Her mother works all day as a maid, and
her father goes out each day in search of the work he never finds. Lizabeth feels a sense of
affront that, amid all the squalor and ugliness in which they live, Miss Lottie would dare to
grow beautiful flowers.

In tormenting Miss Lottie and ripping up what she
tried to create, Lizabeth expresses some of her own internalized rage. However, as she looks at
Miss Lottie, she suddenly feels ashamed, realizing she has victimized not an "other"
or a "witch" but a real human being like herself. Instead of wanting to continue to
express wrath at her, she feels compassion for this older woman.

Learning to
view others with empathy is an important theme the story illustrates: compassion, to Collier, is
the essence of adulthood.