Myop, a 10-year-old Black girl, lives with her family in a sharecropper cabin in the South sometime after the Civil War. One sunny, peaceful morning, she skips lightly away from her home and into the woods that she visits with her mother each autumn to gather nuts. Myop is drawn off the usual path and finds some “strange blue flowers” that she gathers until her arms are full. She starts to feel uneasy in the woods and notes that the environment has become cold and silent. She wants to return home to the peace she felt earlier.
When Myop turns to leave, her foot becomes lodged in a skull. As she frees her foot, she is startled to see the features of a man. She notices his rotting body sitting next to the skull and considers who he was when he was alive. She notices a ring around a pink rose and realizes that it is the remnants of a noose, which she confirms by finding more remnants of the noose hanging from a nearby oak tree. As Myop comes to understand that this man was lynched, she lays down her armful of flowers, a signal that the summer has ended and, moreover, that her childhood innocence is gone.
