Discussion Topic
The intended message and lesson of "The Flowers."
Summary:
The intended message and lesson of "The Flowers" is the loss of innocence. The story follows a young girl named Myop, whose discovery of a lynched man's remains in the woods marks a sudden and brutal transition from childhood innocence to an awareness of the harsh realities of racism and violence.
What lesson is Walker conveying in "The Flowers"?
Walker's brief and haunting story suggests that appearances are deceiving. Myop is a happy young child enjoying a summer's day. She is skipping through the woods, carrying flowers, and enjoying life. However, there are many suggestions early on that this pleasant scene isn't all its cracked up to be. First, we have Myop "vaguely keeping an eye out for snakes", suggesting that the woods can be dangerous. To reinforce that, Myop finds herself in a new spot in the woods, and is unsettle by it:
She had often been as far before, but the strangeness of the land made it not as pleasant as her usual haunts. It seemed gloomy in the little cove in which she found herself.
It is after this that Myop finds the skeleton. Not only the discovery, but also the implications associated with this particular skeleton support that deception of appearances. The skeleton appears to...
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be smiling, but clearly this man was the victim of a lynching, suggesting a violent and unpleasant life. The warn clothing of the man suggests a worker, very possibly a slave. While the stereotype of the "smiling slave" has existed for centuries, that appearance is false. Life for slaves wa dangerous and full of fear.
Myop is clearly not living in a time of slavery, but the fact that her family lives in a sharecropper's cabin connects her with that time, suggesting that her life will not as pleasant as her childhood suggests.
What is the intended message of the story "The Flowers"?
Walker's intention was to remind readers of racism in this country, and that the racism has a base in history. If we forget the history, we are doomed to repeat it. The history comes in the mention of the sharecropper's cabin and the dead body. Sharecropping was prevalent after the Civil War. It is an agricultural system in which a family would farm a certain part of land and share the crops/profits with the owner of the land. Many claim that it was an economic way to keep the freed slaves in servitude. At its heart, sharecropping was similar to indentured servitude.
In addition to this allusion to African-American discrimination, the body found by the girl has clearly been lynched. Lynching was a far too accepted practice in post-Civil War America. It was a vicious example of the discriminatory acts of whites against blacks.
The young girl in this story is happy, enjoying the summer, innocent. However, in stumbling upon the dead body, she and the readers are forced to see that not everything is so good. No matter how much "better" it seems, racism is still too prevalent in this country.