The Flowers

“The harvesting of the corn and cotton, peanuts and squash, made each day a golden surprise that caused excited little tremors to run up her jaws.”

The word “harvesting” establishes a late summer or autumn setting, while the crops indicate a rural southern locale. That the child expects “a golden surprise” attaches a further degree of youthful happiness to the girl’s mood, as she expects something good to happen. The search for that surprise may be her purpose in venturing forth. What causes “little tremors to run up her jaws” is the fact that she is smiling.

“She was ten, and nothing existed for her but her song, the stick clutched in her dark brown hand, and the tat-de-ta-ta-ta of accompaniment.”

Walker uses visual and auditory imagery to characterize Myop. The sensorial description demonstrates that Myop’s sight is limited to tangible, firsthand experiences. Her childhood youthfulness and bliss are underscored by the onomatopoeia of her accompaniment which, taken together, blot out her awareness of all other realities from existence. Additionally, the brief recognition of Myop’s “dark brown hand” signifies that she is Black.

“Turning her back on the rusty boards of her family’s sharecropper cabin, Myop walked along the fence till it ran into the stream made by the spring.”

This is the first time the location is clearly identified as a dilapidated sharecropper cabin without plumbing or hot water. The family gets water from the nearby stream. Sharecroppers paid the landlord a portion of the harvest each year for use of a cabin and some land. Like Walker’s depiction of her own childhood, Myop is poor yet feels a rich appreciation for nature.

“Often, in late autumn, her mother took her to gather nuts among the fallen leaves.”

This is the first and only mention of Myop’s mother. It establishes the role Myop plays in her sharecropper family, showing that she is expected to contribute but that she has guidance and support. Now, without her mother to accompany her, Myop is able to forge her own path.

“Today she made her own path, bouncing this way and that way, vaguely keeping an eye out for snakes.”

For Myop, her awakening comes only after she decides to embark on her journey alone (without her mother) and after she decides to deviate from the usual paths her mother laid out for her (with the discrete purpose of collecting nuts in late autumn, not flowers in summer). She bounds down an unfamiliar path to fulfill her own purposes. This becomes an exercise of agency that brings her into direct confrontation with the real and the existential dangers of the Jim Crow South. That Myop expresses a vague awareness of natural dangers suggests that she is not wholly ignorant; rather, she chooses to focus only on beauty.

“By twelve o’clock, her arms laden with sprigs of her findings, she was about a mile or more from home.”

Walker slips in an important detail about the story’s setting that underlines the idea that a change is coming: “By twelve o’clock.” Change is what defines the coming-of-age genre. Whatever happens before this point in the story occurs in the morning. The rest of the story takes place in the afternoon.

“She had often been as far before, but the strangeness of the land made it not as pleasant as her usual haunts.”

The distance Myop has traveled is not the source of her unease; it is the land and its “strangeness” that leeches enjoyment from Myop’s exploration. Myop’s sense of an unnatural presence foreshadows the strange sight of the overly large and headless body. The word “haunts” also recalls the ghosts of slain Black men and women whose deaths make the land gloomy and perilous.

“It seemed gloomy in the little cove in which she found herself. The air was damp, the silence close and deep.”

Walker uses contrasting imagery to compare the safety of the bucolic farm to the ominous cove. Myop’s home is a safe place where she feels “light and good in the warm sun” (119); conversely, the dark cove—void of sounds of life—makes her feel apprehensive. This shift in atmosphere signifies a turning point in Myop’s maturation.

“From feet to neck covered a long space. His head lay beside him.”

Walker’s reveal of the decapitated body is sharp and effective. The narrative first focuses on the man’s feet, travels upward to his neck, and trails down again as the reader considers the “long space” that the body covers. In this way, the absence of the head in the first sentence seems incidental. However, the quiet exposition of a head that “lay[s] beside” a body compounds, with its stark contrast, the reader’s shock as they register the image before them. The simplicity of the language and sentence structure reflect a child’s lack of comprehension.

“All his clothes had rotted away except some threads of blue denim from his overalls.”

Myop identifies the man as a Black sharecropper based on his working-class attire. He wears the denim overalls with brass buckles common to a sharecropper. The proximity of the man’s status to Myop’s own incites her epiphany. She is able to make the connection that what happened to the dead man before her could happen to another Black sharecropper.

“Very near where she stepped into the head was a wild pink rose.”

This mention of the man’s body, which had before this point employed the possessive “his,” now uses the alienating demonstrative “the” to portray Myop’s diverted attention. “He” becomes “the body,” as Myop searches for a means to cope with what is, for her, an incomprehensible reality. Myop looks away and toward the last vestige of beauty in her expanding world: the wild pink rose.

“Around an overhanging limb of a great spreading oak clung another piece. Frayed, rotted, bleached, and frazzled—barely there—but spinning restlessly in the breeze.”

Myop regards the “ring” around the pink rose as its own natural entity until she sees the rest of the rope hanging from the nearby oak tree. She mentally connects the “rotted” pieces as parts of a whole: a hangman’s rope. In this moment, she understands that the dead man was hanged.

“Myop laid down her flowers.”

Rather than offering the reader an expository look into Myop’s emotional state as she reconciles the sight of the body with the sight of the plowline noose, Walker asks the reader to consider what they see. This subtle and silent gesture shows Myop’s relinquishing, in literal and figurative terms, what she has clung to in her youth. The relinquishing of flowers is a key motif that develops the coming-of-age theme.