"Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity." (Martin Luther King Jr.). In the symbolic story “The Flowers” ​​Alice Walker recounts the experience of a lively young girl who is the victim of a brutal end. This story was written in 1900. Although the story is not a well-known piece by Alice Walker, it is a very compelling story of the reality we live in. It shows the transition between ignorance and reality for 10-year-old Myop. Although the story “The Flowers” ​​is a fictional story, it projects the reality of life and the blindness and innocence of children to world problems such as racism and sexism. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay To build a truly authentic experience for readers, Walker incorporates autobiographical details about his life and racial experiences to reinforce the realistic nature of the text. Author Alice Walker was born on February 9, 1944, a time considered very intolerant in the United States. Everything was segregated. There were separate bathrooms for whites and people of color, theaters, schools, etc. This was also during the era of Jim Crow laws. Jim Crow laws were named after a song lyric that was offensive to African Americans. Jim Crow laws had been in place for about 100 years. These laws were made to marginalize people of color, yet people who decided to defy the laws were often faced with brutal assaults and death. Alice Walker attended a segregated school that would be considered inferior by today's standards. Despite it being a segregated school, Walker still remembers her amazing teachers who encouraged her in her pursuit of writing. She was also raised in a way that would be considered old and first wanted "permission" to become a writer from her mother. His father was a sharecropper and organized the county's first black voters. Since his parents were sharecroppers, his family did not have much money. When Alice Walker was eight years old she was injured when her brother fired a BB gun and hit Walker's right eye. Because her parents did not have enough money and did not have a car, she could not receive professional medical treatment and became blind in her right eye. It was after the injury, when scar tissue began to grow over her eyes, that she began reading and writing because she became conscious of her appearance, and even includes the eye in her writing, Beauty: When the Other Dancer is the Self. “The Flowers” ​​not only projects innocence, racial and gender issues, but so do many of his other works. Alice Walker is a famous writer, poet and essayist. He has won more than five awards for his writing. She is best known for the novel The Color Purple, which is about an African-American girl named Celie who experiences life struggles and abuse. This novel also became a film directed by the famous director Steven Spielberg. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction. Most of Walker's works such as The Color Purple are inspired by the life experiences of black women and the difficulties they face in the world. His works depict emotional, physical and spiritual devastation. For example, the abuse Celie suffered from her father and her husband. He also draws inspiration from his own experiences. Being the daughter of a sharecropper she incorporates her own experience into her story “The Flowers”. He also incorporates history into most of his stories. For example, the skeleton that Myop discovers in the forest during his walk. Later, after graduating fromhigh school, she was offered a scholarship to Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, and became involved in the civil rights movement. In 1963 she was offered another scholarship and transferred to Sarah Lawrence College in New York where she graduated in 1965. In 1967 she married Melvyn Leventhal while working with the Head Starter program, a program to educate poorer children. Walker and Leventhal ended up having a daughter named Rebecca. However, they ended up divorcing after 11 years of marriage. Despite starting a family, Walker continued her writing career and continued to publish enlightening works. Within "The Flowers" there are two separate and contrasting parts, the first half of the story has an optimistic view of the world, a child's view. The story begins with a black girl named Myop skipping around her farm on a summer day that has never looked so beautiful. Her home is in a rural area, so she hasn't yet been exposed to racism or sexism than if she lived in a big city. She can smell the harvest of plants like corn and peanuts, and the harvest makes every day exciting for her, waiting to see something different happen on her little farm. He carries a stick and enjoys the summer. Nothing exists except his song. No worries in the world, no worries to worry about. He can simply enjoy nature and stop to smell the roses. The second half of “The Flowers” ​​takes on a pessimistic view of the world, this represents the reality of the world. Myop begins to move away from his familiar surroundings to explore the woods more deeply. While he is out he keeps his eyes peeled for snakes. Myop moving away from home serves as the story's conflict. As he walks away he begins to worry. The setting soon becomes that of a cemetery, disturbing and damp. Just like reality, it is not a sunny, joyful place. Although the story “The Flowers” ​​is quite short, the first part also has an intricate meaning. The main character's name Myop is the Latin word for myopia. This represents innocence, not knowing the problems of the world. He lives in his own version of the Garden of Eden. The farm contains animals and trees, like the Garden of Eden. As the story progresses, Myop walks beside a stream and watches as "white bubbles interrupt the thin black flake of the ground." This shows black society in the past and present, white people disrupting the peace of the society where black people live. How Britain went to Africa to collect slaves to sell, separating families and destroying the lives Africans knew. However, for Myop, it's simply bubbles and dirt. As she wanders around the unknown area she still continues to pick her flowers, showing her innocence. The second section represents death and reality, the loss of innocence. Although Myop "vaguely keeps an eye on the serpents", this is a representation, there should be no deceitful serpents in his Garden of Eden. He ends up going into a skeleton's eye. Skeletons represent death and horror. But when he removed his foot he was not afraid. This is a sign of acceptance that there is evil and horrors in the world even if he has not yet experienced any of them. As he looks around he sees a raised mound shaped like a large ring and a rope hanging from a nearby tree branch, a noose. This man was the victim of a hanging sufficiently remote in the past to allow the body to decompose, leaving only the skeleton. Also notice his broken teeth. This man was subjected to leaching before being hanged and beaten. This man, black or not, must have opposed the common ideology of segregation, whether it was”.