In a number of interviews, Walker has made plain her indebtedness to the work of Zora Neale Hurston (In Love and Trouble is dedicated to the memory of Hurston). Walker sees her work continuing in the vein of Hurston's by giving voice to those who have traditionally been silenced and whose sufferings have gone untold. In doing so, Walker says that she writes the stories that she wanted to read as a child but could never find. Like Walker, Hurston's work uncovers hidden stories, such as AfricanAmerican folk tales in Of Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse(l938), and the stories and voices of African-American women silenced by both racist and sexist oppression in Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937).

A contemporary text with particular relevance to "The Flowers" is Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye (1972). Like Walker, Morrison's text dramatizes the effects of endemic racism on...