Alice Walker's The Flowers

443 Words2 Pages
Alice Walker’s “The Flowers” begins with a happy world through the eyes of a ten year old African-American girl; Myop. Her youth and innocence is shown when she is tapping out the beat of a song with a stick around the farm, as well as when she was “bouncing this way and that way…” as she made her way through the woods behind her house; going on yet another of her many adventures. Walker describes Myop’s surroundings and moods as pure and innocent just like Myop herself, when Walker writes “She felt light and good in the warm sun”. Walker surprises the reader as the story continues when Myop starts to lose her happy spirits, and the environment is described as strange, silent, and unpleasant. Myop decides to return to her peaceful and familiar area by her home, when she steps right in the face of a dead man’s body. At first she is unafraid, and her childish…show more content…
Walker uses great imagery to describe the man in this section of the story: “… he’d had large white teeth, all of them cracked or broken, long fingers… The buckles of his overall had turned green”. This gives a very accurate description of the dead man, and sparks the reader’s imagination with how the man had died. The reader’s questions are answered when Myop discovers “the rotted remains of a noose”, and it becomes clear that the man had been lynched. The setting is also determined here, as lynching most commonly occurred in the southern states in the USA, between 1890-1920. Myop’s innocence is lost when she, too, realizes the maltreatment that the man had received. The wild pink rose she finds in the center of the noose represents the youthfulness and naivety that Myop had also once possessed. The flower is growing beautifully through a murder scene; oblivious to the horrors that had once occurred in the area, just like Myop had been. Myop is now fully aware of the
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