When the narrator
describes the town, he says,
Certain it is that, some
fifteen or twenty years after the settlement of the town, the wooden jail was already marked
with weather-stains and other indications of age, which gave a yet darker aspect to its
beetle-browed and gloomy front [....]. Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the
wheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot, much overgrown with burdock, pig-weed, apple-pern,
and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil that had so
early borne the black flower of civilized society, a prison.
Thus, he describes the prison's appearance, quite unfavorably, as well as the space of
land between the street and the jail. This grassy area has been taken over by ugly plants that
seem to match the unpleasant appearance of the prison. The narrator suggests that these gross
weeds have found something agreeable, something with which they can get along, in rooting
themselves in the same soil as this prison. He calls the prison the "black flower of
civilized society," implying that it is our shame, a black mark on us. Perhaps this is
because a truly civilized society would have no need to imprison anyone: maybe crimes wouldn't
be committed in the first place, or, if they were, then a civilized society would have more
civilized ways of rehabilitating those who break its laws. The existence of the prison implies
that a society is, perhaps, not as civilized as it purports to be, even€“€“and maybe,
especially€“€“the Puritans, who felt they were so righteous and yet made early plans for dealing
with law-breakers.
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