The Flowers

Myop is a 10-year-old Black girl whose sense of self is shaped by her relationship with the natural world—the world of the hen house, the pigpen, the smokehouse, the sharecropper cabin, the spring, and the woods. She takes great pleasure in experiencing firsthand the literal fruits of her family’s labor. Only Myop’s mother is referenced in the story. She, in her brief mention, serves as a guiding and nurturing influence and provides a model for Myop against which, in her childhood aloofness, she rebels. Myop makes her own path through the woods and, by extension, her own path into her young life. Walker characterizes Myop as curious, lighthearted, and joyful.

Myop’s walking stick suggests that she has a visual impairment, although the carefree girl uses the stick to make songs. The name Myop is derived from the word “myopia,” which means nearsighted as well as a lack of foresight or insight. Walker depicts Myop’s literal and figurative nearsightedness when the girl’s heel gets stuck in the dead man’s eye socket. Myop is “unafraid” (Paragraph 6) when she dislodges her shoe, in part because she has not quite reconciled the scene before her. Even still, the sight of the dead man’s bones does not deter her from collecting more flowers for her collection. Myop’s unaffected attitude speaks both to her doggedness and to her naivete. However, the combination of disparate elements—bones, the dead man’s body, the noose—in the place where she had been in the pursuit of beautiful things incites her epiphany: Racial violence looms and has always done so, and safety is a concept too fragile to sustain travel from childhood to adulthood. In the end of the story, Myop enacts a funeral rite and offers her flowers to the dead man. No longer impervious to the realities of racism, Myop relinquishes her innocence and acknowledges that she is forever changed.