Loss of Innocence and Childhood
Alice Walker’s "The Flowers" is a bildungsroman: a coming-of-age story. An innocent African-American girl named Myop begins the story by feeling that the world is a peaceful place, but by the end of the story, she realizes that the world is full of danger and violence. Walker notes that “her mother took her to gather nuts among the fallen leaves"; in other words, whereas she was under the protection of her mother before, now she explores alone.
Myop picks a bunch of strangely-colored flowers and then accidentally steps into a human skull. She realizes that this belongs to a man who was lynched, judging by the rope hanging from the tree. This loss of innocence leads her to lay the flowers that she is carrying down and declare that summer is over.
Discrimination Against African Americans
Through "The Flowers," Alice Walker portrays the condition of African-American people. Many of them, such as Myop and her family, are sharecroppers—in other words, they are paid a very small amount of money to engage in back-breaking labor on other people's land. They are also subject to frequent violence at the hands of white citizens, often for very minor infractions. When Myop discovers the rotting corpse of a man with a noose around his neck, she seems to understand that he was murdered, although her realization of this fact is not described directly.
Trauma
Confronted with a frightening image of a corpse, Myop notices very specific details—for example, how "the buckles of his overalls had turned green" due to the long time the corpse had spent outside. Immediately preceding her discovery of the corpse, Myop makes the dream-like discovery of a bunch of strangely-colored flowers. This hyperfocus on detail and the unearthly discovery of the flowers suggests a break with reality. Later, the reason for this is revealed when Myop finds the dead man: the stark confrontation with death has traumatized a young girl, confronted with a totally new perspective on the world and herself.
