28 pages • 56 minutes read
The Flowers
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Background
Historical Context: Reconstruction and the Jim Crow Era
After the Civil War (1861-1865), President Abraham Lincoln passed the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution, abolishing slavery and involuntary servitude and establishing the emancipation of enslaved Black people. The 14th and 15th Amendments granted African Americans citizenship and permitted African American men the right to vote, respectively. In the postwar Reconstruction era (circa 1865-1877), one of many unanswered questions remained: How might free or freed African Americans enjoy economic freedom without being granted a parcel of land? Although slavery was dismantled formally on the national level, white plantation owners were still in possession of their vast farms and the supplies held over from the days of slave labor. A new labor system propagated in the South that accounted for landowners’ lack of cash and freed Black people’s lack of resources to live independent lives. Black sharecroppers worked land that was formerly worked by enslaved people and lived in cabins rented to them by their employers. Sharecroppers were often overwhelmed by debt as they paid their employer the allotted portion of their yield and kept the remainder of their crop for their own sustenance.
In 1865 and 1866, following the abolition of slavery, southern states began to enact Black Codes, laws that asked and answered the question: How much freedom should African Americans be apportioned? In practice, law enforcement officers and judges in the South upheld the codes, which included labor contract laws and apprenticeship laws that saw minors performing forced labor on plantations without pay. The codes also dictated what property Black people could purchase, taxed those who wanted to work as anything other than farmers or servants, restricted Black people’s right to vote, and limited their ability to seek justice in court.
In 1877, Jim Crow laws were passed to institutionalize racial segregation on state and local levels in the South. These racial laws instigated the Jim Crow era. The prevalence of lynchings by white mobs and private organizations like the Ku Klux Klan increased steadily into the 20th century, through the Great Depression, and after World War II. Although Black people found greater economic and educational opportunity up north, the North was similarly segregated, and barriers to vote were put in place to discourage African Americans. Although the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and the 1968 Fair Housing Act formally undid the damage wreaked by Jim Crow legislation, African Americans would continue to fight institutional racism and confront racial violence throughout the century and beyond. (History.com Editors, “Reconstruction.” A&E Television Networks, 2022.)
Authorial Context: Alice Walker’s Coming-of-Age Experiences
Alice Walker was born in Eatonton, Georgia, in 1944. Her parents worked as sharecroppers to support Walker and her seven older siblings. The family endured significant economic hardship. Still, because her parents recognized her early aptitudes, they enrolled the four-year-old Walker in first grade, where she excelled academically. At age eight, a copper pellet from her brother’s BB gun struck her right eye, blinding her. The family was unable to secure the necessary medical treatment for the injured eye until Walker was 14 years old. Walker later details the incident and the toll it took on her self-image in an essay: “Now when I stare at people—a favorite pastime, up to now—they will stare back. Not at the 'cute' little girl, but at her scar. For six years I do not stare at anyone, because I do not raise my head” (Walker, Alice. “Beauty: When the Other Dancer Is the Self,” In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983, p. 387).
This life experience finds its way into the short story “The Flowers” through the character Myop. The name Myop is derived from the word “myopia,” meaning nearsightedness. The word can also refer to a lack of foresight or insight. Myop’s myopia is symptomatic of her youth and is remedied by her sudden awareness of the harsh realities of the Jim Crow South. The descriptions of Myop throughout the story also suggest that the character, like Walker, has a visual impairment. Myop walks with a “short, knobby stick” and does not see the dead man until she has already stepped on the skull.
Schooled in segregated classrooms, Walker turned to writing and reading. As a scholarship recipient, she was able to attend Spelman College at age 17. Following the dismissal of her teacher and mentor Howard Zinn, author of A People's History of the United States (1980), from Spelman’s faculty when Walker was a sophomore, she transferred to Sarah Lawrence College to study poetry. With the help of the poet Muriel Rukeyser, Walker published Once, her first poetry collection, in 1968. She moved to Mississippi upon graduating from Sarah Lawrence, and working for the NAACP, she engaged in major civil rights efforts in the South.
Walker’s lifelong activism dovetails with her writing. In a BBC interview, Walker recalls being “profoundly stirred” at age 13 after encountering the obliterated face of her neighbor, a woman fatally shot by her husband. Walker says that the violent image propelled her to “get to the bottom of what [she] thought was the story.” She names “poverty, rage, oppression, sexism, and misogyny” as the themes about which she writes to further the cause of human rights. “The Flowers,” like much of Walker’s writing, is drawn from her experiences as a Black woman. The short story puts the reader in a similar position as the character Myop, whose excited exploration of the scenery turns into a jarring, unexpected epiphany.
Cultural Context: Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit”
American literary critic Harold Bloom maintains that great writers are inspired by their predecessors, and African American music and musicians have significantly inspired Walker. Bloom edited a collection of criticism devoted to Walker’s writing and pinpointed the Black women who influenced Walker’s work: “Walker associated her feeling for [Zora Neale] Hurston with her similar veneration for famous black women singers, Billie Holiday and Bessie Smith” (Bloom, Harold. “Intro.” Alice Walker. Edited by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House, 1989, p. 1). Both Alice Walker’s “The Flowers” and Billie Holiday’s signature song “Strange Fruit” condemn lynching by contrasting the natural setting in which it occurs with the grotesque inhumanity of the act itself.
First published as a poem entitled “Bitter Fruit” in 1937, “Strange Fruit” was written by Abel Meeropol under the pseudonym Lewis Allan. Meeropol was a Jewish schoolteacher from the Bronx who set the poem to music so that it could be performed at meetings of the teachers’ union in which he was an activist. Billie Holiday was introduced to the song by the proprietor of Café Society, an integrated nightclub in Greenwich Village, where it was first performed in 1939. In 1999, Time magazine named Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” the song of the century. (Aida Amoako, “Strange Fruit: The Most Shocking Song of All Time?” BBC, 2019).
“Strange Fruit”
Southern trees bear a strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees
Pastoral scene of the gallant South
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth
Scent of magnolia, sweet and fresh
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh
Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck
For the sun to rot, for the tree to drop
Here is a strange and bitter crop
(Source)
Imagery from Walker’s “The Flowers” parallels the song. The lyrics mention the “scent of magnolia, sweet and fresh,” just as Myop gathers “brown, fragrant buds” (Paragraph 4) from a sweetsuds bush. In each case, a sweet smell emblematic of the South wafts about the scene of a lynching. Wind twists the shred of hangman’s rope tied to a tree branch in “The Flowers,” while in the song, wind sucks at the “strange fruit”—the victim’s body—dangling from a tree “for the sun to rot.” Likewise in Walker’s story, Myop notices that most of the tall man’s clothing “had rotted away” (Paragraph 7). The word “strange” from the song even features in Walker’s story: “She had often been as far before, but the strangeness of the land made it not as pleasant as her usual haunts.” (120). “Strange Fruit” aimed to destroy complacency within the audience. As a short story, “The Flowers” serves the same purpose.
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