The Flowers

The Flowers Summary | The Flowers Summary

This story is about Myop, a ten-year-old black girl. It's a beautiful day and Myop is happy and full of youthful energy and innocence. Myop is skipping along, singing a song, and tapping out a beat with the stick in her hand. She is skipping by her family's henhouse, pigpen, and smokehouse. She turns away from her family's sharecropper cabin and walks along the fence, then comes to the stream where her family retrieves their drinking water. She watches the water and looks at the wild flowers. Myop then begins to explore the woods, which she has done on numerous occasions. In late autumn, Myop and her mother would often go to the woods and gather nuts together.

On this day Myop goes a new way into the woods. She discovers a batch of strange and beautiful blue flowers and brown buds from a sweetsuds bush. By noon, Myop's arms are full of various flowers she has found and picked. She finds herself in a gloomy silent cove about a mile away from her home. The unfamiliarity of her surroundings takes the pleasure out of the place, so Myop starts to head home with her findings.

It is on her return that Myop steps into a dead man's eyes. Her heel becomes stuck in the man's broken ridge between his brow and nose. Promptly and fearlessly, Myop reaches down with her hand to free herself. That is when Myop sees the man's naked grin, and she makes a sound of surprise. She sees that the man had once been tall, for his body is long despite his head laying beside him. As she pushes back the debris, she finds that he had big teeth, all of which have been broken or cracked. His fingers are long and he was a big-boned man. His clothes have mostly rotted away and the buckles of his overalls are now green. Myop looks around the area with interest and spots a beautiful pink rose. She picks it to add to her collection and notices that around the root of the rose is a noose, which is now rotted through. Up above, Myop sees an oak branch with a strand of frayed, rotting rope still turning restlessly in the breeze. She lays down her flowers. Her summer is over.