“The Flowers” Characters

The main characters in “The Flowers” are Myop and the dead man.

  • Myop is a young Black girl who lives in a sharecropper’s cabin with her family. She explores the world around her with a sense of childish innocence, until that innocence is lost during her encounter with the dead man’s body.
  • The dead man is a lynching victim whose body has been decaying in the woods for some time. He was likely a Black sharecropper, and the noose near his body indicates the manner in which he was murdered.

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Characters

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Myop

Myop begins the story as a bright, cheerful, and relatively carefree ten-year-old girl. She and her family are Black sharecroppers, meaning that they live and work on a parcel of land owned by someone else. Although sharecropping is a notoriously exploitative practice, Myop is still a child and seems relatively unaware of, or at least unbothered by, the likely impoverished circumstances her family lives in. To her, the world is still full of adventure and wonder, so the “rusty boards” of her family’s cabin are of far less concern than the beautiful wildflowers that grow by the stream or the melody she taps out with her stick.

Myop is familiar with the forest that surrounds her family’s cabin, and she seems to feel relatively safe there, “vaguely” keeping an eye out for snakes but otherwise traversing the terrain unafraid. However, when she wanders into the copse of trees where the corpse is, a sense of unease overtakes her. Myop is highly attuned to the natural world, having made the forest her domain fairly often. So, when she notices that this new area she has found seems “gloomy” and eerily silent, she instinctively tries to leave. However, she is both literally and metaphorically trapped by the presence of the corpse, with her heel becoming stuck in the man’s skull. The child in Myop desperately wants to retain a sense of innocence and shield herself from the cruelties of the world, but the corpse demands recognition. On a broader level, Myop represents the harsh coming of age that many Black Americans are forced to undergo. As opposed to being allowed to maintain their innocence and transition into adulthood gradually, the violence and injustice of the world is often as unavoidable and traumatic as finding one’s foot stuck inside of a human skull.

As many children do, Myop processes the presence of the corpse through individual details rather than all at once. Her focus flits between the man’s height, the state of his teeth, the condition of his clothes, and then shifts into examining the surrounding area. She does not yet have the maturity to take in the entire scene at once, so her mind examines each detail individually until the picture is complete. The final element she notices is the presence of a broken noose, half of which is lying on the ground and half of which continues to hang from a tree, swaying in the breeze. Although her thoughts go unspoken, Myop seems to recognize that this is a scene of violence. She lays down the flowers she has been collecting as an act of mourning for both the dead man and for her own lost innocence. She no longer lives in a world that is compatible with carefree flower-picking, and the mental burden she shoulders no longer leaves room for the physical burden of carrying her bounty back home.

The Dead Man

The dead man on the ground represents the tragic legacy of racist violence and lynchings in the United States. The tattered noose on the ground and the man’s broken teeth suggest that his final moments were violent ones, and the decayed state of his body and clothing indicates that his corpse has been allowed to rot in the woods for some time. Although the man’s life story is not delved into, Walker includes details that indicate he was likely a Black sharecropper. Denim overalls were a popular clothing item among farmworkers due to their durability and affordability, and they were somewhat of a uniform among poor sharecroppers. Additionally, lynchings were most often perpetrated against Black freedmen, who...

(This entire section contains 791 words.)

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were the primary targets of white supremacist violence. White mobs typically concocted thin justifications for their vigilante actions and were rarely prosecuted, due to a combination of judicial apathy and the logistical difficulties of identifying and arresting those involved.

In some cases, family members or other sympathetic members of the local community were able to reclaim the bodies of those who fell victim to lynchings. However, in many cases, the bodies either went unidentified or were never found; instead, they were left to decay where the victims were killed. Myop’s observations regarding the state of decay of the body she finds indicate that it falls into the latter category. However, although the man’s body was never reclaimed by his loved ones, nature seems to have tried to give him a somewhat respectful burial. His body has slowly been covered with leaves, and beautiful flowers have sprung up around the site of his violent end. The final funeral rite comes when Myop lays down her armful of wildflowers, leaving behind her own innocence even as she gives the murdered man a proper lamentation.

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