Walker then begins reveals more about Myop’s background, “ The rusty boards of her family’s sharecropper cabin”. Here we find out that Myop’s family are working on a sharecropper farm, where they do own the land. We also know that they are probably quite poor, as this wasn’t uncommon at this time. Walker begins to introduce naturalistic images into the text, “ Around the spring, silver ferns and wild flowers grew” These images create a calming effect on the passage. Walker also introduces a racial reference in to the text. “They tiny white bubbles disrupt the thin black scale of soil”. A post-colonial critic may think that this refers to the white and black divide that had formed at the time that this piece was written. The black community is represented by the thin” soil, as it shows how small a minority they were at the time. The water represents the blooming white community, showing the ratio of blacks to whites. The water is seen to be eroding the soil, this represents how the black communities were treated, just as the water erodes the soil the whites drive away the blacks from many areas. I think that this view is well supported in the text and is appropriate for the time the piece was written and who it is written by.
Next Walker presents the reader with a change in direction. Although Myop’s innocence is still represented, Walker introduces a darker setting. “She had explored the woods behind her house many times” Walker creates a security by showing that Myop is familiar with these surroundings but she is “vaguely” keeping an eye out for danger. This increases the tension in the passage and creates suspense for the reader. By the end of the fifth paragraph Walker has created a dark atmosphere. “The air was damp, the silence close and deep. This creates a claustrophobic sense to the end of the paragraph and makes the reader feel enclosed within the text. It also intensifies Myop’s lack of safety. The strangeness indicates how alien her surroundings are to her.
Walker carries on introducing dark images, Myop “circles back to the house”, the use of circle shows that Myop cannot escape as the cycle is going. This may refer to the life of black farm workers. Walker indicates that it is hard for the black workers to break out from the vicious cycle that they are forced into. This reaches a climax when Myop discovers the dead man. We can automatically see that he is dead as Walker uses the past tense, “he had been a tall man”. We can see that the victim has faced a violent end from the description we are given. “He had large white teeth all of them cracked or broken”. This could show that he had been beaten or hit in some way before he was hanged. In this passage Walker uses colour, “ White teeth”, “threads of blue” and “turned green”. This use of colour creates an eerie mood, and adds to the sinister twist that Walker has given the piece. However with all this going on around her Myop seems unaffected. “Myop gazed around the spot with interest”, Myop still carries the innocence that she had at the beginning of the passage. Walker presents the reader with yet another contrast within the text. “Very near where she’d stepped into the head was a wild pink rose”. This disparity in the text makes it stand out. Walker uses the pink rose to represent hope, as even though the seed was growing near an old rotting body it survived and had produced a beautiful rose. This shows that even in the toughest times there is hope. A Marxist critic might see this as a representation of the hope that many black men and women had to contain to overcome the abuse they had to take in the 1950s and 60s.
The final paragraph contains only one line, this makes it stand out and is obviously important. “And the summer was over”, this symbolises how Myop’s childhood is over and that she has lost her innocence. Walker stresses “was” as it give the idea a clear ending, putting the events in the past.
Walker produces many different ideas and themes in ‘The Flowers’. She mainly focuses on the lives and treatment of black men and women at the time. I would agree with a post-colonial critic, as I feel that Walker uses the text to air her views on the treatment of black and the divide between whites and blacks. Although this could be seen as a Marxists perspective it think that it is limited and cannot be applied to the whole text.