28 pages 56 minutes read

The Flowers

Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1973

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Summary: “The Flowers”

“The Flowers,” a short story by Alice Walker, considers the impact of the Jim Crow South on a young Black girl’s emotional development and social awareness. Walker won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1983—along with a National Book Award—for her critically acclaimed work The Color Purple (1982). Her experience growing up poor in the segregated sharecropping community of Eatonton, Georgia, as well as her advocacy as a Womanist activist, inform the personal and social dimensions of her poetry, nonfiction, and prose. In this story, 10-year-old Myop is enamored with the natural world until her love of its beauty leads to an encounter with the body of a hanged Black man, prompting a marked change in her outlook. Through Myop, Walker explores the theme of racial violence against the backdrop of coming of age.

This guide refers to the version in Alice Walker’s 1973 debut short story collection, In Love & Trouble: Stories of Black Women, in which this piece first appeared.

Content Warning: The source material contains depictions of racial violence.

The story opens on Myop in an attitude of playfulness, skipping as she explores the limits of the world outside her family’s sharecropper cabin.

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