Summary
"The Flowers" is set in the Deep South of the United States of America and was published as part of a short-story collection in 1973. It is about the loss of innocence of a ten-year-old girl named Myop. Flowers are usually a symbol of happiness, but here, author Alice Walker instead uses flowers to represent the Myop's loss. The story, written from a third-person perspective, shows the conflict between the fantasy of a child’s mind and the reality of the world into which the child is thrust.
In the story, Myop skips around the property where her family lives, including a pigpen and henhouse. She taps out a tune on the fence with a stick she holds in her dark brown hand (here Walker indicates that this child is African-American), and she eventually heads into the woods that surround her family's cabin. She looks at the ferns and the spring where her family gets water eventually going even deeper into the woods. She finds a bunch of blue flowers, a very unusual discovery.
By noon, she has gone deep into the woods about a mile away from home. She has gathered the blue flowers and holds them in her arms. The air starts to seem gloomy and dark.
Myop begins to circle back to her family's home. Suddenly, she steps through the skull of a dead man. He has clearly been dead for a long time because only his dry corpse remains and much of his clothing has rotted off. Myop notices that he was a tall man, and all of his teeth were broken.
Myop notices that a beautiful pink rose has grown up nearby, and she picks it up. However, she notices that there is a strange ring around it, and she realizes that this is the remnant of a noose. She looks up and notices another scrap of rope hanging from the tree. The story ends with her laying down her flowers and declaring that summer is over.
Analysis
The name "Myop" likely derives from the Greek word "myopia," which means nearsightedness. This name likely points to Myop's inability to clearly see the violence and danger of the world around her—though, by the end of the story, she has become wiser.
This story is remarkable for its brevity and for the amount of information that Walker manages to convey in its 565 words. For example, the narrator never outright states that Myop is African-American, nor that she lives in the South: instead, the narrator notes that the hand that holds the stick is dark brown, and the narrator describes Myop's family as sharecroppers, a designation that belonged almost exclusively to African-Americans. Additionally, the narrator never states how the man died, but the fact that his teeth were broken and a noose was found nearby suggest that he was the victim of a lynching.
The story is divided into two clear parts. The first portion is characterized by words with positive associations: the air is "keen," the day is a "golden surprise," and Myop happily skips around the forest near her house. The mood shifts partway through when Myop discovers a bunch of strangely-colored blue flowers, which, writer Rion Amilcar Scott suggests, gives the story an unearthly feel, like a hallucination.
The second part of the story is characterized by words with more negative associations. There is a certain "strangeness" and the air is "gloomy." The narrator is foreshadowing Myop's sudden discovery of the corpse of a man. At first, Myop is not afraid but rather merely curious about this new find. However, when she notices that there is a noose nearby, she lays down her flowers and the narrator declares that the summer is over. The noose was a common tool used in lynching, the organized murder of African-Americans in the south in the early twentieth century. The narrator never states that Myop recognizes what the noose means, but Myop's shift in mood suggests that she understands it is a symbol of racial violence against people that look like her. Like many African-American children, Myop is happy and carefree until she realizes the extent of violence in the world around her.
Flowers are a recurrent symbol throughout the story. Throughout Walker's work, flowers are associated with women and also beauty in the face of ugliness and death. Peculiarly, Myop discovers the beautiful pink rose within the rotting circle of the noose; this suggests that the ugliness of death created something of beauty.
