in her dark hand, coupled with feeling... light and good in the warm sun.

Not only is this characterization of Myop, but it also setting the tone for the time where a little Black girl, who for all intents and purposes, would not feel good and light due to her family's poverty, and their relative social standing in the world.

Then, the story switches back to the imagery of innocence versus reality as Myop chooses her own path instead of following the path that she would take with her mom. For readers, this use of imagery highlights change, growth, and leaving the old child-like ways behind. Additionally, the light versus dark juxtaposition reenters the story as Myop describes white- or good- bubbles, disturbing the thin, black- or dirty/bad- soil in the water. It is here, that we start to see an intentional flipping of what is classically considered good, and what is classically considered bad or evil. In most literature, what is good is light, white, and/or pure; what is bad is the opposite: dark, heavy, and dirty. Alice Walker I intentionally challenges this notion, by displaying the white bubbles, as being the culprit to disturbing the black soil. She turns the classical notions of good versus evil on its head, and sets up the ultimate loss of innocence felt by Myop when she finds the dead body. 

For many readers, it is easy to believe that Myop was ignorant to the world around her. This is not true. Alice Walker intentionally describes a scene that is both familiar to, and understood by Myop. This intentionality indicates that Myop fully understands the world she lives in, but has chosen not to allow it to deter her innocent frolics. Again, reference the protest of white disturbing darkness throughout the story. As Myop encounters the dead body, this notion is evidenced again here,

It was then she stepped smack into his eyes. Her heel became lodged in the broken ridge between brow and nose, and she reached down quickly, unafraid, to free herself.

...because Myop bends down and frees herself, unafraid, as if this weren't her first encounter with a dead body, nor is she particularly surprised to see the body, and/or, become a part of it bystepping into the eye socket. What happens next puts the nail in the coffin of the protest element of this story, as Alice Walker describes the naked smile of the corpse, and the decaying, rotting, white  noose. Again, what is classically considered pure and good, is described as rotting, and dirty. The corpse, which is assumed to be a black man, is seen as having a naked, or vulnerable, exposed and bare smile, of broken and cracked white teeth. It is at this moment that Myop's innocence is lost because she can no longer ignore her reality. She is forced to end her summer, and thusly, lose her innocence because she can't un- see the truth of the world around her.

"The Flowers" is a story of losing innocence (or, if you will, of lost innocence). The theme is grounded in a specific racial experience as the story quite poetically relates a young girl's discovery of a lynched man lying dead in some underbrush.

As the story begins, Myop is young and believes in her youth and possesses the natural solipsism of youth. However, the further Myop gets from home (her place and moment of origin), the darker the world becomes. When she realizes this, Myop tries to go back and tries to regain her position of innocence. Her effort fails.

"Myop began to circle back to the house, back to the peacefulness of the morning. It was then she stepped smack into his eyes."

The discovery of a dead, lynched body overtakes her former, brighter vision of reality. Myop drops her load of flowers. 

"The final line, "And the summer was over", stands alone as the single sentence of the last paragraph, forcing readers to think about the way in which Myop's innocence has been destroyed: she can no longer be innocent[...]" (eNotes).

The meaning of the story then can be related to Myop's journey from innocence to experience or from ignorance to experience. At the story's outset, Myop did not believe her world was populated by such gruesome things but in the end she can no longer hold onto the idea that her world is one of pure beauty. She releases that idea figuratively when she drops her bundle of flowers. 

First, begin by thinking of the significance of the little girl's name. Myop is short for "myopia" a eye condition where one cannot see things far away (near-sightedness). Little Myop cannot see beyond the beauty of her carefree childhood.

However, one summer morning her romping takes her farther from home than she'd ever been before, a whole mile. She does not realize (due to her myopia) the remains of a hanged man until she quite literally bumps into him.

That the man was a laborer is clear from "some threads of blue denim" from his overalls and the "shredding plowline" that is found in the earth nearby. The brutality of his death is uncovered in the details: "large white teeth, all of them cracked or broken" indicates that he had been beaten before his murder. He had been left and forgotten for so long that he had literally rotted away, his severed head lying horrifically beside his decomposing body.

The story concludes with "And the summer was over." The young negro girl has lost her innocence, her myopia.

The main theme of this short story is the fall from innocence. Myop, a child, has lived a sheltered life in the idyllic "garden" of her home. As summer ends and fall comes, every day seems to her like a "golden surprise" as she explores the stream near her home or gathers nuts in the woods with her mother. She doesn't yet realize the limits on her life.

One day, as she is gathering blue (the blue symbolizing being blue or sad) flowers, she stumbles across the corpse of a man who was obviously lynched, having been both hung from a tree limb and beheaded. This discovery of death and violence on the land she had considered nothing but beautiful and nurturing jolts her into a new awareness and a loss of innocence. In the season of fall, she falls from grace.

The story is about the sin of racism as an evil that all Black children will eventually become aware of, shaking their trust in the world. When Myop sees the corpse, not only is "summer" as a season over but it is replaced by "fall" as a pun on the biblical fall from grace, symbolizing Myop's new awareness that good and evil are everywhere.

The major themes of this text are related: innocence cannot last forever, and ignorance is bliss. Even Myop's name—the root of the word "myopic," meaning "nearsighted"—seems to draw attention to how small her world is, so to speak. It's as though she can only see what is near to her, and this has kept her innocent and ignorant of the real world outside her own childhood one. The narrator tells us that she has explored the woods behind her home many times; this space has comprised her whole world, where the worst thing she has had to fear are snakes. However, this time she makes "her own path," finding new flowers but also learning that the "strangeness of the land made it not as pleasant as her usual haunts." When she steps through the skull of the dead man's skeleton, she notes the remains of the noose used to hang him, and she [lays] down her flowers" on the spot.

And the summer was over.

The season of summer is used to symbolize Myop's childhood. In spring and summer, she was innocent, happy, and blithe as a result of her inexperience with and ignorance of the world. Now that she has seen not only death but also racist cruelty, both her innocence and her ignorance vanish.

There are several themes apparent in "The Flowers" by Alice Walker. A prominent one is a loss of childhood innocence, which a previous Educator response explains.

An additional theme is that violence and racism have a ripple effect, touching generation after generation.

The man whom Myop finds is a victim of racist violence, as evidenced by the details readers are provided in the setting. Myop's family members are sharecroppers, and it is noted that she has a "dark brown" hand. The man she finds "had been...tall," and he wore denim overalls, most of which have rotted away. He has not only been hanged, as evidenced by the noose, but has also been beheaded.

Myop's grotesque discovery shows that the violence of adults will eventually reach the younger generations. But there is also, in the ending, hope that generations who follow in the footsteps of violence will be able to create something beautiful from the ruins. After all, Myop discovers a "wild pink rose" growing near the skull and adds it to her bouquet of flowers. She eventually lays down this bundle, perhaps as an offering of beauty to counter an act of such ugliness. Myop's gesture shows that even in acts of violence, younger generations often provide hope of a more beautiful future.

There are many symbolic references related to nature in this story, so I'll focus my efforts there since the previous educators have given a great explanation of some of the others.

Cotton appears in the very first paragraph, and that's an important symbol because we know that Myop's family are sharecroppers. Cotton is a weighty symbol in American culture; on one hand, it is fundamental to many of the fabrics in our lives. Its white softness connotes a sense of purity. However, cotton farming in the South was successful in large part because of the work of slaves and sharecroppers, both groups of people toiling endlessly while their masters or landowners prospered in comfort. Cotton symbolizes the duality of Myop's childhood and foreshadows the transformation she will undergo by the end of the story.

Myop follows a fence until it reaches a spring. Water can symbolize various things in literature, but here it represents life. Her family obtains their drinking water from this spring, and wildflowers grow here. On this day, Myop chooses to leave the fence and the life-giving spring to venture into the unknown.

As she walks, Myop keeps an eye out for snakes—but only vaguely. Snakes here represent the danger in the world around her, and Myop has a sense that she should be concerned, but the threat isn't strong enough to give her reason for great concern. Instead, her life is consumed with things that are beautiful: flowers of various colors and scents.

The flower growing out of the man's head is pink, the symbolic color of little girls. Also important is the detail that she picks this rose, adding it to her bundle. It grows wild, much like the days of young childhood, and it is found in the midst of horror. This rose thus symbolizes the beauty that can be found even in the midst of a horrific discovery and also symbolizes the ending of Myop's innocent days of childhood.

The flowers she collects along the way also serve to symbolize this eventual collection of the final pink rose, the culmination of the end of Myop's journey and her transformation into a more adult understanding of the world around her.

One of the most important symbols in Alice Walker's short story "The Flowers" is Myop's "family's sharecropper cabin." Myop is described as walking away from the dirt road of the cabin to the stream behind the house and deeper into the woods beyond the stream. In addition, while taking this walk, Myop is described as being extremely happy. The story is set during the final days of summer when the harvest begins, and in Myop's mind, these final days of summer are the most beautiful ever, especially because the scents of the harvest excite her as if each new day holds a "golden surprise." Yet, the image of a sharecropper cabin is an extremely sorrowful image; it's an image tied to extreme poverty, a black man's continued subordination to white masters despite the end of slavery, the denial of education needed for a black man to break these chains of subordination, and racism, making the image of a sharecropper cabin symbolic of poverty, subordination, and racism. Yet, Myop, at the start of the story, is apparently innocent of an understanding of the extent of her family's suffering. Therefore, the image also foreshadows and symbolizes the suffering and racism she will soon come to understand as she leaves her childhood innocence behind.

In the woods, Myop strays a mile from home gathering wildflowers. She is just starting to head home when she discovers the corpse of a hanged man. Myop notices the noose that serves as evidence of a lynch mob hanging the moment she sees a single wild rose. In describing the wild rose, author Walker intentionally creates a very incongruous image. Walker describes Myop as picking the rose and seeing "a raised mound, a ring, around the rose's root." The problem is that wild roses do not grow from single rooted stems; they grow from bushes. Yet, Walker has intentionally chosen not to mention the bush. The incongruous image of the wild rose helps the reader see that the members of the lynch mob used the wild rose in mockery of life and that, in the story, the wild rose symbolizes a mockery of life. Rather than protecting the life of the more than likely innocent man, as a wild rose should, it was used by members of the lynch mob to cause his painful death, all because of racism. It is when Myop is described as having "laid down her flowers," as if laying down flowers on a tomb, that Myop seems to have come to fully understand what she is seeing. The act of laying down these wild flowers symbolizes her awakening--no longer does she see life as a joyous wonder; she is now fully aware of the existence of death and will soon become more aware of the fact that racism causes death and destruction. Hence, the story is titled "The Flowers" because her act of laying down flowers at the side of a deceased man portrays her new awareness of death and suffering.