"Marigolds" and "Thank You Ma’am" are two short stories, written both by African American authors in the 20th century. They were both written around the same time, Marigolds in 1969 by Eugenia Collier and "Thank You Ma’am" in 1959 by Langston Hughes. The main theme of both stories is integrity, we see how the main characters change from not knowing integrity to having integrity. Some things like the setting of the story, symbols, and the empathy can be used to compare these two short stories.
The setting of “Marigolds” and “Thank You Ma’am” have a couple of things in common. First, both short stories take place in poor places. For example, "Marigolds" has a lot of “ramshackle” ( Collier 2) houses and the community in Marigolds is a “crumbly decay” ( Collier 3). In "Thank You Ma’am", however, we have no proof that it is a poor place but we have some clues that it is poor like “a boy tried to snatch her purse” ( Hughes 1).…show more content… For example, in "Marigolds" the symbol of the story is the flower, Marigold. The marigolds “interfered with the perfect ugliness of the place” (Collier 3), here we can see that the marigolds are beautiful compared to the poor, ugly place. The marigolds represent something that Lizabeth doesn’t have around her, beauty and hope. In "Thank You Ma’am" the symbol is Luella’s pocket book. It symbolizes something that Roger does not have, money. In Marigolds, since Lizabeth “hated those marigolds”( Collier 3) she decides to destroy the marigolds instead of having to see them every day. At this period of the short story, we can compare Lizabeth to hate. But however, in "Thank You Ma’am" the main character, Roger, instead of destroying the women’s pocketbook, decided to “snatch her ( Luella’s ) purse” ( Hughes 1). The two kids react both in different ways to seeing things they don’t
