The Flowers Study Guide

Alice Walker was the youngest of eight children born to Lee and Tallulah Walker, sharecroppers who were fiercely committed to her education. She graduated high school as the class valedictorian and enrolled at Spelman College, where she met Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and began her lifelong work for Civil Rights and women’s rights. She  transferred to Sarah Lawrence College, where she earned her BA degree in 1965. Soon after, she took a job on the Legal and Education Defense Fund at the NAACP and began to publish poetry. She published her first collection of short fiction, In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women, in 1973. During her prolific career as a writer and activist, Walker has won many top prizes awarded to authors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award for her 1982 novel The Color Purple, which sold more than 15 million copies worldwide and has been translated into more than two dozen languages. The Color Purple was successfully adapted to film in 1985. It was directed by Steven Spielberg and starred Oprah Winfrey, who is an executive producer on a remake of the film released at the end of 2023. Walker has gone on to write more than 50 books. She has remained a fierce advocate for Civil Rights and women’s rights, and her work regularly appears on lists of essential reading for the Black Lives Matter movement. She currently lives in California.

Walker’s interest in the intertwined political, cultural, and economic systems limiting the freedom of Black women is an important backdrop for “The Flowers” and its symbolic depiction of Black children inheriting a legacy of cultural trauma. Several of Alice Walker’s novels and stories are set in the American South during the period before the Civil War and the abolition of slavery in 1865, which freed 4 million enslaved people. As “The Flowers” implies, the post-War practice of sharecropping perpetuated the economic oppression of newly freed Black Americans by keeping them in debt to exploitative white landowners. Perhaps the most important historical context for reading Alice Walker, though, is the history of her involvement in the Civil Rights movement, which was most active in the 1950s and 1960s. Walker was an active participant in the Civil Rights movement—she met Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. while a student at Spelman College and was sponsored by Coretta Scott King to attend a global youth summit in Helsinki. She marched on Washington in 1963 and worked for the NAACP on the Legal Defense and Education Fund.

The best starting context for “The Flowers” is the other works Alice Walker wrote that year: the other stories in the collection In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women, Revolutionary Petunias (1974) and In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983). Revolutionary Petunias uses flowers as a symbol for Black women’s rebellious strength, which can be seen, for example, in the title of the poem “The Nature of this Flower is to Bloom.” Furthermore, Walker’s most famous novel, The Color Purple (1982), has had a continued cultural influence and is essential reading for people interested in her work. In 1975, Walker published an essay “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston,” which was crucial to reviving interest in Hurston’s work after it had gone out of print and into obscurity. Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) is now considered a staple of the Harlem Renaissance. Finally, Toni Morrison shared Alice Walker’s interest in the strength of Black Americans in the face of cultural trauma; Beloved (1987) and Song of Solomon (1987) are often cited as her most powerful novels.