Everyday Identifications

“Everyday Use” is a short story about a young black woman who desperately wants to leave her heritage and humble beginnings behind but throws conflict into the equation when she asks for the things that are symbolic of that very heritage and those very humble beginnings (Walker). The story seems to suggest that, in her desperate quest to overcome, this particular character does not realize that her path of escape is leading her full circle to her beginning.

The Background

Alice Walker begins her short story in Everyday Use with a mother with a second-grade education who is living a very poor life, eking out an existence with just the bare necessities.  Her focus in life, at this point, is to finish raising her second daughter and marry her off so that she can finally relax and sit around singing her church songs—even though she really cannot sing very well. 

This mother has given birth to two daughters and, in spite of both of them coming from the same beginnings and being raised in the same manner, the two girls could not be more different.  The older girl is smart, beautiful, and expects the world to accommodate her wants because, in effect, it always has. She was the sister who became educated, found a good man, and is staking her place in the world independently and in spite of her humble beginnings. The younger sister, Maggie, however, was touched by misfortune. She bears scars on her face and body from a fire which burned down their previous home, and she does not possess the intellect which blessed the older sister. Her goal in life, provided to her by her mother, is to marry a young man “with mossy teeth in an earnest face.” 

The Conflict

The older girl, Dee, becomes the focus of the story as she visits her poor mother and sister. Making her grand entrance from the car along with her new man, Dee introduces her man to her family with a name that neither can pronounce and then announces that Dee, herself, has changed her own name because she could “no longer live with a name that was given to her by her oppressors.” She announces her new African name, Wangero, proudly insisting that she is better than her beginnings and will not be tied down to a heritage which left her and others like her subservient. The conflict arises because her mother does not understand her daughter’s desire to escape her past or even how changing her name to an African name would somehow give her the escape she so desires. The mother is a down-to-earth woman who is happy to have the things she has and does not seem to recognize how little that is, relative to the superficial material mindset of her daughter, Dee. When Dee questions why her mother named her Dee, her mother replies that, in effect, it is a family name which has been handed down generation after generation. She highlights to Dee the status of the women before her who also bore that name but then gives up after several generations because she does not connect the name to oppression as Dee does. Dee refuses to see the significance of the name, and the mother refuses to see the significance of Dee’s name change.

Interestingly, Dee then goes on to request the quilts her grandmother had made. When the mother provides her a selection of the quilts made since her grandmother’s death, Dee refuses and insists on having the hand-sewn quilts made by her grandmother. The mother refuses, explaining that those particular quilts were earmarked to go with Dee’s younger sister upon her marriage, to which Dee responds with a temper tantrum that Maggie would not know how to properly care for the quilts, that she would most likely use them on a daily basis and, ultimately, ruin their precious value. Unlike the many examples before, Dee finally did not get her way and the quilts were kept for Maggie.

Conclusion

Dee’s desire for change was an escape from what she perceived to be a very poor, oppressive history. Her escape was prompted by her belief that her future held more promise than her ancestors, her mother, and her sister could understand. In spite of her desire to escape that past, however, she seemed to be running toward it, refusing to let it go. Her and her husband’s request for the butter churn and the hand-made quilts—particularly given that other quilts had been offered but had been refused because she wanted the more valuable hand-sewn items—seemed to place a higher value on those items because they came from her poor, unique heritage. Her desire to leave that heritage behind was so strong that she abandoned the name handed to her by her ancestors and was left unable to grasp the significance of that name and tradition. Her belief that leaving that past behind her but requesting to have the items which came from that past directly conflicted with her escape, and her desire to have nice things overpowered her understanding that her privileged life was a far cry from that of her mother’s and sister’s such that she was asking to take for decoration items which were necessities for her family. Ultimately, the story ends by highlighting how Dee’s running away from a life which could easily have gone in another direction leads her back to her life’s beginnings. Her opportunities for comforts and wealth were a far cry from the opportunities her grandmother or her mother had; yet, her desire to have the things associated with her grandmother and her mother kept her tied to the very life she had escaped. 

Alice Walker presented a very interesting story on the internal conflicts which can arise when one attempts to leave an unwanted, difficult existence but also desires subconsciously to maintain a connection to that existence.

Works Cited

Walker, Alice. Everyday Use. Rutgers University Press, 1994. Book.