The Flowers

Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1973

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Summary

Background

Story Analysis

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Themes

Coming of Age: The Loss of Innocence

Through the character of Myop, a 10-year-old Black girl, Walker depicts the negative effects of racism on childhood innocence. Myop begins the story in a blissful attitude. So enamored of the day, she skips playfully around her family property. The lightness of her action is ascribed to her feelings about the beauty of her environment—not the “rusty boards” of the cabin but the sweetness of the expectation of harvest. This she can feel viscerally, in her nose, mouth, and hands. She behaves as one who is carefree, and the reader can approximate her age based on the ease and unsteadied air of her movements. This opening is necessary to communicate the extent to which Myop’s youthfulness begets her nearsightedness; her age circumscribes her awareness and occludes her vision. Myop’s worldview is informed by that which she can experience with her senses. The troubled path to adulthood begins when Myop “turn[s] her back” (Paragraph 3) on her home in favor of an exploration of the wider world. This natural inclination of childhood inevitably leads to a curiosity that expedites her childhood’s ending.

As Myop wanders from the beaten path, she comes to a “gloomy” cove whose stark “strangeness” undoes the “peacefulness” of the domestic spaces she knows well (Paragraph 5). She intuits the dangers of woods, which do not manifest as physical bodily harm yet take a toll on her emotionally. She seeks to remedy her unease by retracing her steps and attempts to “circle back” (Paragraph 6) home. This language of the circle recurs in the shape of the noose, the eye, and the mouth associated with the hanged man. When Myop circles back in the direction of her home, she encounters the man first in parts, with the slow, uncomprehending gaze of a child. Taken together, these sights awaken her to a reality that had not existed for her before. It occurs to her then that there is more to fear in the woods and in the world than snakes hidden by dirt and debris. The lesson is made more unpleasant by the method of delivery, juxtaposed as it is by the beauty of a pink rose and the comforting overhang of an oak branch.

Myop grasps that her childhood innocence, like summer, is over. Through Myop’s epiphany, Walker communicates that the detrimental effects of racism are long-term. However, Myop’s compassionate gesture of laying down her flowers and recognition of social injustice speak to Walker’s overarching message: There can be a positive recourse to combating racism if action is taken. Walker urges readers to react to racism like Myop—with compassion, regard, and action.

Lynching and Racial Violence Against African Americans

Walker’s “The Flowers” is a sociopolitical commentary on the treatment of African Americans, and the story addresses cultural indifference and prejudice. Historically, white people have used lynching to scare and control Black people. Walker draws attention to this violent practice through innocence Myop’s jarring discovery of a decapitated hanged man.

The figure of Myop’s father is absent in this story, but the hanged man provides a male presence from which Myop can learn important life lessons. The man’s blue overalls suggest that he was a poor, working class sharecropper like Myop’s family. The man was not hanged in the open expanse of the woods, for public ridicule, enjoyment, and display, but the reader can infer from the place Myop found him that he died in a private ceremony of mob justice. For a man as tall and large-boned as he was to be strung to a broad limb of an oak, a strong group of motivated people must have been assembled to kill him. The plowline noose itself is crude, makeshift, and reveals the possible occupation of the guilty parties. Because the hanging resulted, too, in a decapitation, Myop and the reader are left to imagine how the man must have suffered at the time of his death. The fact that all the man’s teeth were broken either indicates how the man lived—with limited access to medical care—or how he died—in a struggle. The former is a reminder of the socioeconomic hindrances of being a person of color in the South, and the latter points further to the brutality of murders in the Jim Crow era. The man appears to Myop now as a threadbare skeleton, and the state of him, resting under layers of dirt and debris, conveys how long ago he had been killed and left behind. Myop and the reader are left to wonder how many others like him have suffered racially motivated deaths in the expanse beyond their playgrounds.

Walker’s narrator describes the shape of the man’s mouth not as a grimace, frozen in the agony of a violent death, but as a “naked grin” (Paragraph 6). This portrays the man in an attitude of good humor, like the immortal folk figures in the African American narrative tradition, who battle evil forces and win. His grin is an image of brazen defiance that affords the man a measure of agency even in death. Through Myop’s eyes, the man becomes an enduring symbol of the crushing forcefulness of racism and of the indomitable spirit of the Black individual in the face of it.

The Beauty of the Natural World

Drawing from her own experiences, Walker depicts how nature is a positive force that can provide solace to the disenfranchised.

But they have never lived, as I have, at the end of a long road in a house that was faced by the edge of the world on one side and nobody for miles on the other. They have never experienced the magnificent quiet of a summer day when the heat is intense and one is so very thirsty, as one moves across the dusty cotton fields, that one learns forever that water is the essence of all life. In the cities it cannot be so clear to one that he is a creature of the earth, feeling the soil between the toes, smelling the dust thrown up by the rain, loving the earth so much that one longs to taste it and sometimes does (Walker, Alice. “The Black Writer and the Southern Experience.” In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose by Alice Walker. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983, pp. 20-21).

This belief is evinced through the character of Myop in “The Flowers.” Myop’s certainty in the beauty of the natural world propels her into the woods on this summer day. Her sense of nature’s beauty extends from the flowers she plucks from the ground to the corn her family harvests. The former is a more traditional signifier of beauty, which she acknowledges and holds above other “common but pretty ferns and leaves” (Paragraph 4). The latter embodies her special signification in which a plant, though common, becomes beautiful to her because it bears fruit. Though her name foregrounds the nearsightedness of youthful gazing, Myop does pay close attention to the sights and sounds around her. She considers not just the presence of the pigpen, but the music it makes when struck. She admires the chickens as well as the pigs who affix themselves to the banks of the family’s spring. She observes the water that rises from the spring and the subtle ways in which “the tiny bubbles disrupt the thin, black scale of soil” and how the water “slide[s] away down the stream” (Paragraph 3). She finds wonder in these moments of close attention and reads beauty in what she finds there. Her deep appreciation of natural beauty enables her to gaze beyond the startling sight of the hanged man and find a wild pink rose to gladden the scene. This ability speaks to her optimism and to the optimism she reads in nature as, she has learned, seed begets fruit, and the bareness of winter gives way in its season to spring.

Even after the discovery of the dead man’s body, the beauty of the natural world provides solace for her. Only when the overpowering forces of racism direct her attention upward to the “[f]rayed, rotted, bleached, and frazzled” evidence of indelible violence does she “[lay] down her flowers” in a measured gesture (Paragraph 8) and declare that “summer was over” (Paragraph 9). Myop sees through a new pragmatic lens and realizes that the beauty of the world is tainted by an uglier, man-made reality. In the beginning of the story, she comprehends the world through its proximity to her fingertips. This understanding turns into one that forces her to turn inward, to reckon with her Blackness as one more aspect of nature that has repercussions for her safety and wellbeing. Her physical encounters with the natural world give way to a pained awareness of a social world that is fraught with danger.