The Flowers

The time and place a story takes place is called the setting. In “The Flowers,” the micro setting is Myop’s family’s sharecropper farm as well as nearby lands. The macro setting is post-Reconstruction in the American South during the Jim Crow era. Readers can infer the time period based on the reference to Myop’s “sharecropper cabin.” In addition, the hanged man’s manner of death signifies the racial tensions of the period. Walker juxtaposes Myop’s bucolic farm with the silent, gloomy cove to illustrate Myop’s coming of age.

Myop is introduced to the reader through her movement outside of and away from her family’s farm. The hen house, pigpen, and smokehouse are in closest proximity to the domestic space of the sharecropper cabin and therefore adopt, by association, the relative safety of that home. The chickens become friends that participate in Myop’s fun. The fence of the pigpen becomes a buttress against which she can play a lighthearted rhythm. As Myop moves further from her home, she must literally turn her back to the cabin and follow the fence to its very edge, to explore the world around her in earnest. Even the spring, positioned in midst of wildflowers, becomes adjacent to the interior safety of the home because the family frequents it often to secure their drinking water. The woods which stand apart from the house represent the outer limits of childhood safety. Myop decides to “ma[k]e her own path” (Paragraph 4) and deviates from the well-worn trail that she and her mother tread during harvest season. As a result, she finds flowers and bushes that are strange in their uncommon color and fragrance. This “strangeness,” found in the oppressive silence of the woods “a mile or more” (Paragraph 5) from the cabin, extends from the objects in the environment to the environment itself. As Myop moves further from her home, the growing unfamiliarity of her environment precipitates Myop’s shifting attitude toward the security of her surroundings.

Diction is the word choices the author uses to convey ideas and concepts. Walker uses simple yet lively diction to characterize Myop’s innocence as well as to establish the text’s setting, tone, and mood. The accessible register of the language enables readers to engage with the text on Myop’s light-hearted, childlike level. Walker juxtaposes joyful, upbeat word choices and images with darker descriptions (e.g., snakes, gloomy, rotted) to emphasize Myop’s unexpected epiphany. 

Syntax is the author’s intentional arrangement of words within a text. Walker can sustain the suspense of a moment and create surprise by using passive sentence structures. Beginnings such as “It was then she stepped” and “It was only when she saw” (Paragraph 6) provide the reader time to process both the preceding period of blissful ignorance and the subsequent instant of realization. In this way, the reader shares the same narrative position with Myop and experiences her epiphany when the story reveals the noose. Walker, in using passive sentence structures, provides syntactical cushioning for these moments of violent discovery.

Whereas tone refers to how the author feels about the text’s message, which is inferred through the character(s), mood refers to how the text makes the reader feel. Similarly, atmosphere refers to how the place or setting within the text makes the reader feel.

In “The Flowers,” Walker uses diction, syntax, and imagery to depict the mood, which changes from idyllic to foreboding. After noon, a liminal time of day that signals a transition from morning light to waning light, Myop finds that the pleasure she took in the landscape has soured suddenly. Warm, whimsical sentences become cold and short, and descriptions of Myop’s surroundings become darker. The warmth and lightness of the summer sunshine turns to the damp heaviness of the “little cove” that sits like a separate entity outside of the season. It is in this enclosed space that silence overwhelms the bright, joyful “tat-de-ta-ta-ta” of Myop’s childhood. The narrator, in Myop’s voice, articulates this shift in the atmosphere as a “strangeness of the land” (Paragraph 5) whose depth and claustrophobic closeness surrounds her. The narrative uses this eerie stillness to prepare the reader for Myop’s encounter with the hanged man’s body and her subsequent initiation into adulthood’s awareness and wariness.