Flowers have a strong symbolic meaning in many of Alice Walker's writings, especially in Revolutionary Petunias. Flowers symbolize a commitment to beauty that seems revolutionary in the face of the ugliness that so often attends their lives. Sammy Lou, the doomed protagonist of the poem, expresses concern that beauty and spirituality live on even after her death.
Sammy Lou commits a crime of revenge in the poem. In her eyes, it is justifiable and correct to kill her husband's murderer. She is pictured as a backwoods woman who has lived a peaceful life as a wife and mother until evil enters her life. She heeds the Bible's injunction of "an eye for an eye" and cannot understand how the outside public--strangers all--can paint such terrible images of her without knowing anything about her. The suggestion is that the judgmental venom she encounters is doubled because she is black and because she is a woman.
A great many of Alice Walker's poems and stories are set in a time before feminism was even a concept. While there's no specific date mentioned in Revolutionary Petunias, references to the electric chair and funeral home calendars on the walls of her home give the poem the feel of a period piece, which implies sexism and racism out in the open. Sammy Lou fits Walker's definition of an exemplar of Womanism: "She is purple--purple with rage, purple as restored royalty, purple blossoming wild in an open field." Womanist characters are empowered by a strong sense of self to speak out and to act out, even in the absence of a social movement to support their actions.
Revolutionary Petunias is about Sammy Lou, but her relationships with men are wound throughout. We know little about Sammy Lou's husband other than that he was killed and avenged. In many of Alice Walker's other works, including the lauded novel The Color Purple, it is the male partner who causes the female protagonist the most pain. In this poem, the absent husband is not assigned any such characteristics, but he was murdered by another man, which makes the world of men seem even more brutal.
Sammy Lou faces her impending death bravely. Perhaps she knows that she leaves the best part of herself behind. When she enjoins those around her to water her petunias, she suggests that life and beauty will continue without her. Since she has raised several children, there is a symbolic link to her family, which will live on after her death. In this way, she survives.