Alice Walker's story, "The Flowers," does not spell out its social concerns: instead, they must be read through hints. This is not to say, however, that this story is straightforward. Rather, the implications must be teased out beyond the sketch-like portrayal of events in the work. Simply put, the story deals with one morning in the life of a young girl called Myop, who strays beyond her usual haunts while looking for flowers. While walking back, she literally steps on the remains of a man whom, she discovers, has been lynched. At this point, the story ends.

It is the terse brevity of Walker's narrative in this work that warns the reader to give the text the kind of close reading normally reserved for poetry. Furthermore, one of the epigraphs to In Love and Trouble (the collection of stories of which "The Flowers" is a part...