The Flowers

The story takes place in the South of the USA. An indication of that is that Myop’s family is famers; lots of people were farmers in the south. Another indication is that they are black and probably poor since they get water from a spring. There are two settings in the story; the farm and the woods.

Myop the girl in the story lives on the farm. The farm is where she feels comfortable and can live in her childish life full of innocent. At the farm there is a henhouse and a pigpen which she runs around and makes a beat with a knobby stick at the fence and sticking randomly to the chickens she like. As it said in the text: “She was ten, and nothing existed for her but her song…” That sentence describes the girl perfectly. She is a black ten year old girl who lives in a world with no fear and with no such thing as racism.

The other setting of the story is the woods. If she had followed the path she used to walk with her mother nothing would had happened. But when she made her own path she stepped out of her own peaceful world. The further she moves in to the woods the gloomier it becomes. She has defiantly stepped out of her peaceful world when she stepped smack into the cranium of a dead man.

The flowers have a big symbolic value in the story. They represent her innocence and ignorant world as a child. When she steps on the skull she begins to wonder but she still hasn’t found out that her childhood is ruined. Then she takes pink rose and see’s the remains of a rotted noose. She sees the shred of the noose overhanging a branch from a great oak. That’s when she laid down her flowers. Her safe peacefully and ignorant childhood had come to an end. She has seen how cruel the real world can be.

The seasons are also very symbolic. There is a sudden change from summer to autumn and from a warm and innocent world to a rough and cold world with racial persecution. That’s what the seasons symbolize; the transition to the real world.

One of the themes at the story is the black people’s condition in US. How they are treated and that lynching is happening. Another theme could be how it is for a child to grow up and realize how cruel and filled with treats the world is.

A message this story could have is that people need to open their eyes. They need to see how the afro Americans really are treated and accept that it’s a problem. They need to look out of their peaceful neighborhood and take a new path. Then they might discover, like Myop did, how the real world is. That could especially be a message to the people in the Northern USA who doesn’t know about the situation in the south or are ignorant of it. For example like in the movie “Mississippi Burning”.