The short story "The Flowers" by Alice Walker tells of an ten-year-old African American girl named Myop who lives in a sharecropper cabin with her family. She is innocent and carefree as she wanders around the property and then out into the woods as she gathers flowers. Deep in the woods about a mile from her family's cabin, she suddenly comes across the decayed corpse of a man who appears to have been lynched. She lays down her flowers and, as Walker writes, "the summer was over." This is symbolic of the end of Myop's innocence.

Myop has two reactions to the dead man that she finds. Her first reaction is interest and curiosity. Even after she steps on the man's head and observes that "he had been a tall man," she is more curious than frightened. She pushes aside the leaves and dirt so that she can see his face and notices his cracked teeth, broken fingers, big bones, and rotten clothes. She even picks a "wild pink rose" near his head to add to her bundle of flowers. She does not really have an understanding of death at this point. Her innocence prevents her from grasping exactly what she is seeing.

However, her attitude changes when she observes the rotting remnant of a noose near the corpse's head and another rotting piece of rope in the tree. She realizes that this man was lynched. He was probably Black, and he was hung on this tree by people who hated him. She has an abrupt understanding of the dark terror of death, and this causes her to put down her flowers, either out of respect for the dead man or because of her realization of the horrible deed that was done on that spot.