The Flowers

Thematically, Walker uses The Beauty of the Natural World to build toward the exposure of Lynchings and Racial Violence Against African Americans. Through social commentary on racism, Walker explores Coming of Age: The Loss of Innocence, a byproduct of racial violence. To demonstrate the blossoming of social awareness, “The Flowers” enacts the process in which the protagonist comes of age.

Walker uses whimsical imagery and upbeat diction to characterize Myop’s wide-eyed naivete and set an idyllic mood. Like Myop’s worldview, the imagery and mood darken as Myop’s journey into the unknown woods progresses. The story opens with Myop skipping happily around her family’s cabin and concludes with the child laying down her flowers, which symbolize her innocence and optimism. Myop exchanges her naiveite for a sober-mindedness more characteristic of adulthood.

In the first sentence, the narrative hints at the disconnect between what “the days” are and what Myop understands to be beautiful about them. The word choice “it seemed” suggests that the protagonist’s vision of the world is not complete or actual. Myop’s understanding of her environment is dependent upon her subjective experience and the palpable sensation it produces in her body. To look at the world through this lens means that she cannot see it for what it is; she can see it only for how it feels to her. By extension, her world is only as big as what she can touch with her fingertips. This limited worldview reflects the myopia (or nearsightedness) of childhood that makes the character recognizable as a youth. The opening line foreshadows that such innocent ideas are likely to be crushed by the force of the story’s events. In this way, the opening scene sets the stage for dramatic irony, in which the audience knows something that the character does not. This knowledge separates the character from the reader, although both head further into the story as it unfolds, unified in their ignorance of what they will encounter.

Walker uses employs flash fiction to tell this story because the genre lends itself to the quick changes of realization and brings the reader, as it does the protagonist, closer to the social purpose of the writing. “The Flowers” is an allegory because it contains an underlying moral message. Walker inherently asks readers to consider the effects of racism and the devastating physical and emotional tolls social prejudices take on the Black body. Because this short story is housed in a collection ostensibly centered on Black women, the reader is left to consider what lasting effects the sight of a hanged man produces in a 10-year-old Black girl and what it means to grow up in the Jim Crow era. Myop’s childlike joy and the pleasure she takes in the natural world were her last bastions against the reality of encroaching racism. Walker delays the reveal of the hanged man’s body to demonstrate Myop’s innocence; the limits of her understanding have kept her grounded in the beauty of the world until now. For example, when she discovers a bodiless skull with a metaphorical “naked grin,” her reaction is not one of disgust but of “surprise.” When she sees the rusted buckles of the dead man’s overalls, she looks “with interest” at the greenery around her. When she encounters death, she reaches for a wild pink rose. Each exchange builds toward Myop’s epiphany and the story’s climax.

In literature, an epiphany refers to a character’s decisive moment of realization. Myop’s epiphany happens silently. The sparse syntax guides the reader’s eyes to the pieces of the noose that bend toward the ground or spin in the breeze. Walker ushers the reader to view the scene through Myop’s eyes, a technique that builds the tension toward the epiphany. The narrative does not present an opportunity to examine Myop’s face and interpret the expression found there; instead, the narrative reveals only the action of her body. Since she entered the woods, her hands have been full of flowers. She does not relinquish them even when her foot gets caught in the dead man’s eyes and as she cleans the “leaves and layers of earth and debris” (Paragraph 7) from his bones. She holds on to her flowers even when she picks a new one. Through all her adventuring and discovery, she holds close to the beauty of “the days.” However, when Myop perceives the hangman’s noose as more than a simple shape around the pink rose’s root, the reality of the situation sets. The recognition of what can happen to a Black body destroys the innocence that had shielded Myop from the world’s evils. Although the narrative underscores the benign quality of the shredded noose, the threat it poses is ever present.

The final sentence of the story begins with the word “and,” but between it and the penultimate sentence is an unseen and unheard realm in which the protagonist has reevaluated her place in the world and the world’s wide scope. “And the summer was over” (Paragraph 9) can read as a declaration that Myop makes in her own mind as a response to the knowledge she now possesses. The story’s denouement can be read as a moral warning against a summery view of life, as this gives way to autumn’s diminishment and to winter’s subsequent deprivation. Like Myop, the narrative “skip[s] lightly” (Paragraph 1) from the warm abundance of harvest to the unnatural loss of light and life. The violent imposition of the social world blots out the harmonious simplicity of “corn and cotton, peanuts and squash” (Paragraph 1). Myop’s awareness expands, and she internalizes all she’s learned from her journey. The discovery of the hanged man thrusts Myop into the painful recognition that her carefree youth cannot protect her from the world’s designs on her life. She puts away childish ideals and heads into the next season of her life, bereft.