33 pages • 1 hour read
Alice WalkerEveryday Use
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1973A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Meaning of African-American Identity and Heritage
“Everyday Use” is first and foremost a story about two different understandings of what it means to be African-American. Although all four of the story’s characters define themselves in terms of their heritage and history, it quickly becomes clear that there is a split when it comes to deciding which aspects of that history to emphasize and embrace. The story thus unfolds as a kind of debate between the ideas embodied by Maggie and Mrs. Johnson on the one hand, and Dee and Hakim-a-barber on the other.
Although Walker does not explicitly say so, it seems clear that Dee and Hakim-a-barber’s views have been shaped by the Black Power movement—in particular, by its rejection of Western culture as intertwined with racial oppression. In their search for a more authentic ethnic or racial identity, many members of this movement turned to traditional African cultures, just as Hakim-a-barber converts to Islam and Dee adopts the name “Wangero” and a more African style of dress. Notably, “Everyday Use” doesn’t entirely write off this impulse to turn to Africa in the search for ethnic identity and pride; although initially taken aback by her daughter’s appearance, Mrs. Johnson ultimately decides she likes her “loose and flow[ing]” dress (Paragraph 20).
With that said, Walker does call into question the motives behind the new identity Dee has crafted for herself. According to her mother, Dee has always had an ambitious streak, and she fiercely resented the family’s relative poverty as a girl: “Dee wanted nice things. A yellow organdy dress to wear to her graduation from high school; black pumps to match a green suit she’d made from an old suit somebody gave me” (Paragraph 12). In this sense, Dee’s turn towards African culture seems less like an attempt to recover her heritage than a continuation of her efforts to escape it; by retreating to the distant past, she is able to avoid her family’s more recent history. Tellingly, to the extent that Dee does celebrate African-American culture, she does so in a way that simultaneously distances herself from it. When Dee “talk[s] a blue streak over the sweet potatoes” her mother serves (Paragraph 45), or announces her intention to use the butter churn as a centerpiece, she is approaching her own family history as an anthropologist might: as something to study and appreciate, but not to identify with.
By contrast, Mrs. Johnson’s sense of identity and self-respect as a black woman is rooted in just that family history. This is nowhere clearer than in her explanation of how she chose Dee’s name. To Dee herself, the name (which likely originally belonged to a slaveholder) is an intolerable reminder of slavery and its aftermath. Mrs. Johnson, however, reminds her daughter that the name also has a long history of use in their own family; though presumably not ignorant of the name’s painful associations, she can’t reject it without also rejecting women like her sister and grandmother. Similarly, the story as a whole suggests that the turn towards African culture is misguided when it entails a rejection of the black identity that developed over the course of slavery, segregation, etc.; people like Dee and Hakim-a-barber risk throwing out the good in their desire to leave behind the bad.
The Role of Art in Daily Life
Like the essay “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,” “Everyday Use” challenges conventional ideas about nature and the function of art—in particular, the idea that pieces of art are static and detached from ordinary life. This definition of art excludes much of the creative work that black women have historically engaged in; the quilts that Mrs. Johnson’s grandmother made, for instance, would traditionally be functional rather than aesthetic objects.
Notably, however, “Everyday Use” doesn’t suggest that the quilts (or the butter churn, benches, etc.) should be aesthetic rather than functional. This is the view that Dee takes, but it isn’t one the story shares; in fact, Walker pokes fun at Dee’s desire to repurpose useful objects like the churn top into furnishings for her home. The problem is not simply the condescension of Dee’s attitude—that is, her belief that her mother and sister lack the education to appreciate the value of the family’s heirlooms—but also the underlying assumption about what makes art meaningful. Dee’s appreciation of items like the quilts is highly abstract: the quilts are important because they represent the cultural moment in which her ancestors made them. She therefore responds with horror to the suggestion that Maggie might continue using the quilts on a day-to-day basis, since doing so, in her eyes, can only undercut their value as a historical snapshot.
By contrast, the story is premised on the idea that utility and aesthetic merit actually coincide with one another; it’s precisely the “everyday use” of objects like the churn and the quilts that give them their significance. This is especially true on a personal level, since what makes these objects meaningful to characters like Mrs. Johnson and Maggie are the memories they evoke. Here, for instance, is what Mrs. Johnson says about the dasher for the churn: “[T]here were a lot of small sinks; you could see where thumbs and fingers had sunk into the wood. It was beautiful light yellow wood, from a tree that grew in the yard where Big Dee and Stash had lived” (Paragraph 54). The description of the indentations in the wood is especially noteworthy, because it implies that the dasher’s value lies partly in the work that has gone into crafting and using it. This in turn suggests that the dasher, quilts, etc. become more meaningful, rather than less, as people interact with them over time. As a result, Mrs. Johnson is unperturbed when Dee worries that the quilts might fall apart, saying simply that Maggie can repurpose the scraps to make new ones; what matters to her is not preserving the quilts in one particular form, but rather preserving and adding to the tradition of quilt making they embody.
The Value of Formal Education
One of the first things Walker tells the reader about Dee is that she has “made it” (Paragraph 3); unlike the rest of her family, she has not only completed high school but also attended college, and she now seems to be living a comfortably middle-class life. However, while education has undoubtedly improved Dee’s material circumstances, it’s far from clear that those benefits will ever extend to the rest of Dee’s family. In fact, Dee’s only advice to her sister is to “try to make something of [her]self” (Paragraph 81)—that is, to improve her lot in life through her own exertions—apparently forgetting that she herself was able to complete her education only with the support of her family and church.
Dee’s words to Maggie also highlight her inability to understand her mother and sister’s existence on its own terms. For Dee, it is self-evidently obvious that a worthwhile life is one that follows the trajectory of her own, even though Mrs. Johnson clearly finds much to enjoy about her circumstances; the story opens, for instance, with an account of how pleasant it is to live in the countryside, where “anyone can come and sit and look up into the elm tree and wait for the breezes” (Paragraph 2). Dee’s dismissal of pleasures like this one suggests that education—far from expanding her horizons—has only reinforced her disdain for those she perceives as beneath her. At times, she even leverages her education to intimidate and manipulate those around her, making herself more powerful at their expense. Here, for example, is how Mrs. Johnson recalls the relationship between Dee and her childhood friends: “Furtive boys in pink shirts hanging about on washday after school. Nervous girls who never laughed. Impressed with her they worshiped the well-turned phrase, the cute shape, the scalding humor that erupted like bubbles in lye. She read to them” (15).
On the face of it, the shift in Dee’s attitude towards her family’s heirlooms seems to mark one way that education truly has made her more open-minded. However, it soon becomes clear that Dee’s view of the quilts, butter churn, etc. is incomplete, and that it is incomplete in large part precisely because of the intellectual lens through which she’s viewing them. For Dee, these things aren’t so much tangible objects as they are symbols of a black history and culture she wants to reclaim. This impulse is understandable, but it prevents her from understanding or sympathizing with the more personal significance of the objects to her mother and sister. By contrast, Maggie, who learned to quilt from her great-grandmother and aunt, seems poised to appreciate the quilts in a way Dee can’t—not just as mementos of beloved family members, but also as products of a form of craftsmanship she herself has studied and can take part in. The story as a whole, therefore, hints that there are other forms of learning that are as (if not more) valid as formal schooling, at least when it comes to understanding the experiences and perspectives of others.
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