Diction In Alice Walker's The Flowers

In the exposition of "The Flowers," Walker presents the story of a young African-American girl's view of life-everything is wonderful. As the narrator informs the reader, Myop sees the world through rose tinted glasses in the first few paragraphs of the short story; being only ten, "nothing existed for her but her song, a stick clutched in her dark brown hand, and the tat-de-ta-ta of accompaniment (Walker 2)." The aforementioned diction suggests that she holds a simple view of life, not really caring about much else other than what she is doing in the present moment. This can be attributed to her young age and lack of exposure to the suffering present in the world, as during one's childhood years, often the most important things to children

Walker's choice of diction in "The Flowers" not only further developed the mood and tone of the story; it also alluded to the setting as well. To elaborate, in the beginning of "The Flowers", Myop's family's home is described as a "sharecropper cabin," suggesting that the story takes place in the aftermath of the Civil War, as sharecropping was a system of farm tenancy which began common after the Civil War because although African-Americans were freed from slavery, most had no money to support themselves, and were essentially forced to stay on their former masters' plantations, as while they were not enslaved, racial discrimination was rampant, which often limited the options of African-Americans seeking work, particularly those in the South, to jobs concerning manual labor such as farming.