FLOWERS
Discovering things you never thought existed due to the innocence and ignorance we have as kids mark the end of our childhood. The Flowers, a short story by Alice Walker tells a story of a young 10-year-old girl called Myop. The story starts with Myop exploring the forest and collecting flowers feeling happy. Myop feels peaceful in the descriptions of Walker about her family’s farm, moving from hen house to pigpen and smokehouse, singing and playing with a stick as she walks around. Myop feels peaceful and happy. She plays with her chickens and feels “bright and nice in the warm sun.” She feels the joy and exuberance of young people. The narrator even states that the days were never as glorious as these. The joy was also demonstrated by her collecting Wildflowers, an endeavor she was so engrossed in that it took her a mile or more from the house. However, the more she traveled from the comfort and protection of her house, the more she got to discover and experience the harsh reality of the world.
Often at times when encountering bad things, they tend to change who we are nd our perspective of life as well. Far from home, Myop has an awakening when she stumbles upon a dead man. At first, she is naive and untouched. She even goes head to pick a flower growing next to the dead man. Her innocence while collecting the flower is taken away when she discovers that the man had been brutalized and hanged. She is snagged by the corpse of the deceased guy. She states that his teeth are all fallen, and his head is split off from his body as though that weren’t bad enough. She discovers a noose nearby, most definitely the tool used to kill a guy. Myop isn’t gaily in the fields anymore. The violence of this man’s death stopped her dead. She lays down her flowers by the guy and sets her fun aside. The summer ends and with it, her innocence is also completely lost.
The story plot happens outside in a garden. The reader picked up the text by the writer who listed Myop, maize, cotton, peanuts, and squash, as the main character. This detail also helps to make a sense of the timeframe since sharecropping occurred after the American Civil War during the Jim Crow Law period from the middle of the 1860s until the 1960s. Myop’s family is living and working on the land with mention of his ‘sharecroppers.’ Apart from a few of the crops harvested from sharecroppers, usually, the Black people were impoverished people who were employed and resided on an owner’s farm. This is exacerbated by Myop’s passing the dead man who happened to be a black man.
Myop is African American because the story tells clues that help Myop’s race to be recognized as African American like the description of her “dark brown” skin, and the fact that her family has a cabin on a farm, the reader can assume the dead man was the victim of a lynch mob. Myop “laid down her flowers” at the end of the story, because she was overwhelmed when she realized that the man was a victim of a lynch mob. This also depicts racism as the man’s descriptions and dressing depicts that of a black man. The innocence that had led to her going to pick flowers had led to a painful revelation. And the more she understood and realized how the man had died and death, the more she lost her childhood innocence.
Myop’s grotesque discovery shows that the violence of adults will eventually reach the younger generations. But there is also, in the ending, hope that generations who follow in the footsteps of violence will be able to create something beautiful from the ruins. After all, Myop discovers a “wild pink rose” growing near the dead man and adds it to her bouquet. She eventually lays down this bundle, perhaps as an offering of beauty to counter an act of such ugliness. Myop’s gesture shows that even in acts of violence, younger generations often provide hope of a more beautiful future.
In conclusion, Walker makes us happy as he shares Myop’s utter surrender to her life, first on the field, then later when she walks unknowingly without realizing her safety as she picks flowers. The story advises us to remain close to home or else we might run into dark dangers. We have to fight against evil because we are not hated. The story is also a mere tool to inform us of the implications of the indescribable actions of prejudice and injustice we have perpetrated on one another through hatred and racism. All this regardless of the circumstances of birth is every mother’s fear for her child. The story gravely shows what actions of violence from racism can lead to the destruction of innocence of a child.