Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Flowers, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Coming of Age and the Loss of Innocence
Cultural Trauma and Mourning
Racism, History, and Economic Injustice
Summary
Analysis
It is a beautiful summer day, and Myop, a 10-year-old girl, is skipping from “hen house to pigpen to smokehouse” on the land where her family lives and works. The quality of the air, the scents of the crops, and the colors of the scene bring her senses to life and convey a sense of vitality, youth, and happiness.
At age 10, Myop sees the world through the innocent eyes of a child and is on the verge of young adulthood. Although she is happy, the story signals that there may be danger in her world that she doesn’t yet understand. For example, readers might see her skipping from the hen house to the smokehouse in the first sentence as a symbolic journey from protection to slaughter, which creates a sense of anxiety—the opposite of Myop’s peaceful mood.
Themes
Myop carries a stick in her “dark brown hand” and taps out the beat of a song that runs through her mind as she walks away from her family’s sharecropper cabin. She walks along the fence to the spring where her family gets their drinking water. She observes flowers, pigs rooting along the banks, and bubbles on the water’s surface. As she walks into the woods, she thinks of her regular autumn walks with her mother to gather nuts. Today, she happily makes her own path through the woods. She is used to finding leaves and ferns with her mother, but this time, she discovers blue flowers and a fragrant bush.
By zeroing in on the color of Myop’s hand, the story conveys that Myop is Black. It is not yet clear what role—if any—her race will play, but a two-page story invites readers to be attentive to each and every detail. What’s more, the word “sharecropper” offers important contextual information to readers that contributes to the story’s meaning. Sharecropping was a system that perpetuated the injustices of slavery after the Civil War, so this detail reveals crucial context: Myop is economically and legally oppressed. Furthermore, the woods are richly symbolic and often represent mystery, evil, and danger in literature. Therefore, Myop’s solo journey into the woods may threaten the sense of peace she felt moments earlier. She also leaves the path she has walked with her mother, which leads readers to expect that she might experience a (likely unwelcome) change. These details help readers sense the ominous nature of this journey as the central part of a coming-of-age story.
Themes
It’s noon, and Myop is now a mile away from home. Although she has been this far from home before, she now feels unpleasant and gloomy. She turns homeward, wanting to return to the “peacefulness of morning.”
The story’s action pauses, and this pause opens space for Myop to reflect on her experience and her new feelings of discomfort as she finds herself in unfamiliar territory. This moment of contemplative self-awareness departs from the harmony she felt with nature at the story’s beginning. Her growing uneasiness replaces the sense of adventure she felt at the start of her day. She wants to return to the peace she felt at home, but the story’s trajectory makes this return seem unlikely.
Themes
Suddenly, Myop realizes she has stepped into the skull of a man. Her heel is momentarily stuck, so she needs to free it from the skull. Unafraid, she acts without hesitation. When she sees that the skull is grinning, though, she cries out. She observes the corpse, its detached head lying beside it, and grasps that this person was clearly a tall man. She removes the leaves and dirt covering the bones. She notes that the man’s teeth were all broken and that all but a few threads and buckles of his overalls have decomposed.
The skull, a remnant of a violent past, swiftly changes the course of Myop’s journey both on this specific day and, more generally, in her life. By enveloping her entire foot, the skull seems to grab her and prevent her from returning to peace, naivety, or innocence. Her courage evaporates when she sees the skull’s grin, which reminds her that the skull belonged to a human being. His severed skull and broken teeth are evidence of the brutal violence that killed him. By clearing away the leaves and dirt that cover him, Myop symbolically unburies him and the tragic past he represents.
Themes
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Myop looks at the ground surrounding the corpse. She sees a “wild pink rose” nearby and realizes that a ring around the rose is actually the remains of a noose. She looks closely and sees another fragment of the rope hanging from the limb of an oak tree. She lays down her flowers. The summer is over.
Myop quickly realizes that what she thought was a ring—a benign object—is actually a noose. The noose, a symbol long associated with racist violence, constrains the rose’s growth. The fact that Myop looks up to confirm that what she sees is in fact a noose suggests that she already knows something about what a noose is and what it does. This previous knowledge clarifies the nature of her current experience—she comes to understand that the violence in the world around her belongs to a larger history of cultural trauma—a history that has implications for her own life as a Black American. Her final act of laying down the flowers can be seen as a tribute to the dead man, an acknowledgment of the history she has uncovered, and a powerful gesture of mourning both for him and for her own childhood, which has effectively ended now that she has been forced to leave her childlike innocence behind .
Themes
