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| Author | Alice Walker |
|---|---|
| Genre | Short story |
Publication date | 1973 (as part of In Love and Trouble) |
| ISBN | 978-0-8135-2075-9 |
| OCLC | 29028043 |
"Everyday Use" is a short story by Alice Walker. It was first published in the April 1973 issue of Harper's Magazine and is part of Walker's short story collection In Love and Trouble.
One of the primary themes that the story revolves around is the idea of a person's relationship with their heritage. [3] In the story, Dee's mother remained close to family traditions, while Dee herself chose to search more deeply into her African roots. Dee has a different mindset; she does not have the same ideals as Mama and Maggie, particularly in regard to cultural preservation and the best way to go about it. Dee (Wangero) only wants the family heirlooms to display in her home for their "artistic value", whereas Maggie and her mother cherish these items because they "remind them of their loved ones." [3] In Mama’s mind, Maggie learning to make her own quilt and putting it to everyday use is preserving the culture, which is how Mama believes the quilt should be used. Even if the quilts "end up in rags," more quilts can simply be made because Maggie was taught how to make them. [1] On the other hand, Dee believes the proper way to preserve her culture is to display the quilt in her home and preserve the quilt itself rather than continuing to live out their culture as Mama and Maggie do. Another theme in this short story is the divisive power of education throughout the story. In the story education is not really talked about and is completely separated from the entire family (Sparknotes). [4]
The story is told in first-person as it unfolds through the eyes and opinions of Mama. As Maggie and Mama wait for Dee to arrive for a visit, Mama's mind wanders with various thoughts and memories of Dee, giving the audience an impartial view of Dee as being self-centered and uncaring. [5] Due to the fact that readers are getting only one viewpoint, it is uncertain if Dee truly does exhibit these characteristics or if it is only Mama's opinion of the eldest daughter that is being forced upon us. It is thought by some that Mama does not judge her children, Dee and Maggie, accurately due to Mama's own insecurities. [5] This is evidenced during Mama's daydream of Dee and herself on an imaginary popular talk show under the context of children who have "made it". [1] Mama notes being overweight and rough around the edges and eludes to the fact that Dee is ashamed of Mama's appearance. [1] As Mama continues to narrate the story, the audience continues to get a sense of Dee's snobbish personality, along with moments of doubt as readers see glimpses of Mama's own shortcomings. As the story concludes, the audience is left with the vision of Mama and Maggie remaining alone on the front lawn basking in the simplicity of each other and the straightforward life that has been built.
In the essay "'Everyday Use' and the Black Power Movement" by Barbara T. Christian, the story is discussed in reference to slavery and the black power movement. The characters in the story focus a lot on African culture and heritage. Traditional African clothing is described throughout the story, and this is a symbol of the family's heritage. The mentioning of changing names relates back to slavery as well; the characters were trying to forget about their slave names, and think of more traditional names to remember their culture and assert their African roots. Christian brings to light the difference in attitudes and perspectives about a shared culture. Christian points out that to Maggie and her mother, honoring their culture meant honoring the personal past of their family, by carrying on their names or putting the quilt to use, while to Dee, that meant honoring aesthetic and ancient traditions, such as traditional African names or hanging the quilt to be seen but not utilized. It is this very realization that leads to their mother choosing to give Maggie the quilts. [6]
On the other hand, in the essay "'Everyday Use' as a Portrait of the Artist" by Mary Helen Washington, the story is looked at from a more artistic and cultural perspective. The essay describes Dee as an artist who "returns home...in order to collect the material," which indicates that Dee comes home for a deeper understanding of her African culture. Although she changes her name from Dee to a more Native African name and wears African clothing, she lacks real knowledge of her culture. Because of this, Mama chooses Maggie over Dee to take the quilts, because Maggie shows more appreciation and knowledge of their culture and as she said in the story was involved in the making of those quilts whereas Dee had no part in.[ citation needed ]
In the essay "Stylish vs. Sacred in 'Everyday Use'" written by Houston A. Baker and Charlotte Pierce-Baker Dee or Wangero is called a "goddess". After highlighting a few passages from the story, it is mentioned that Dee/ Wangero has joined the black nationalists of the 1960s and 1970s and she shows it by changing both her name and her style. The essay doesn’t see Dee/ Wangero as an activist of that cause but as someone being "manipulated by the style-makers" as illustrated by the scene in which she described the quilt, for which she passionately fought for later in the story, as "old-fashioned and out of style". [7] Dee's new name "Wangero Leewanika Kemanjo" is misspelled, showing the reader that she doesn't know much about African culture. [8]
 | This section possibly contains original research .(August 2015) |
One symbol found in this short story is the quilt. The quilt itself is a very sentimental piece that holds great meaning and history behind it. It includes clothes that Dee's great grandmother used to wear as well as pieces of uniforms that Dee's great grandfather wore during the Civil War. [1] However, it also symbolizes value in African-American experience. [9] The quilt additionally adds to the idea of creative activities women came up with to pass down history from generation to generation as a part of their heritage. Dee seems to take the most pride in making these quilts, she views it as her way of giving back to society. Hakim-a-barber and Wangero represented the black power movement by their styles, greets, and outfits.[ citation needed ]
Another symbol found in "Everyday Use" is the yard. The yard plays an important role in the story and is described as "an extended living room". Mama and Maggie have both tidied up the yard in preparation of Dee’s visit, and sit out in the yard for hours, even after Dee’s departure. The yard seems to be a place to think for Mama, where she can imagine herself being someone more conventionally attractive than she actually is, but also remember just how much she has done for her family. [10]
In the African-American community, women have engaged in the tradition of quilting since they were brought to America as slaves. Quilting requires sewing pieces of cloth together to create a coverlet that functions as both a piece of art and a household item. African-American women, often regarded as voiceless ‘mule(s) of the world’, inherited such creative legacies from maternal ancestors and their quilts have come to represent black heritage. [11] The voices of African-American women have been stitched into their quilts, providing an account of their cultural past. As Sam Whitsitt observes, the quilt reflects the experiences of African-American women: the quilt is a symbol reflective of ‘herstory, history, and tradition’. [12] The self-expression involved in quilt-making allowed women to take control of their lives through the only medium society permitted them to use. The communal nature of quilting strengthened the bonds of sisterhood and helped to move marginalized women from enslavement to empowerment. Quilting allowed these women to assert control over the colonial practice of slavery as enforced by white hegemony. Historically, products such as cotton and indigo dye were acquired as a result of black oppression. By sewing cotton into their quilts, African-American slaves formed a bond with nature, which replaced the hegemonic relationship enforced by slavery. [13]
Black slaves often attended communal Quilting Bees, which offered these oppressed women the opportunity to create social bonds unsupervised. Thus, quilting became a symbol of sisterly solidarity for African-American slaves. Additionally, quilting functioned as a response to cultural and political change, allowing opportunity for political debate. Black women used quilting as a source of activism: their quilts often depicted anti-slavery slogans. However, quilting also came to represent the hegemony of patriarchal society. Women were often forced to learn to quilt, which became a substitute for the more ‘masculine’ activity of reading and writing. [14]
Jennifer Martin explains in her article "The Quilt Threads Together Sisterhood, Empowerment, and Nature in Alice Walker's The Color Purple and 'Everyday Use'", "When women participate in the tradition of quilting this trinity of strength provides a positive channel for them to mend together the pieces of their lives and to move from fragmentation to fusion... Martin emphasize the quilt provides a bond between the sisters and females because in the African American community often times women are oppressed [15] .Quilting is not an end-point where women achieve elusive wholeness, but a way to meld together parts of their lives and achieve power from the joining of all the components that make them unique." [16] This also explains why Mama and Maggie are so fond of their heritage and continuing to live it out, unlike Dee. They see it as a way to feel connected to one another, as well as to their ancestors, and as a way to mend their pasts and move on from them. By showing their culture and living it still, they are able to show how despite everything that may have happened to them they never lost who they really were. Quilting symbolizes this movement for them and this feeling of wholeness.
Quilting features in "Everyday Use" as a symbol of black heritage. Mama Johnson’s quilts symbolize cross-generational female bonding: they were sewn together by Grandma Dee, passed down to and then quilted by Mama and her sister, Big Dee. One quilt even features a piece of the uniform worn by their Great Grandpa Ezra during the Civil War. These quilts represent the creativity of the sisterhood that created them; however, Mama’s daughters, Maggie and Dee, view them very differently. Dee visits her family, intending to collect the artifacts of her family’s past; she wants to display them in her home with museum-like accuracy. As David Cowart notes, ‘The visitor [Dee] rightly recognizes the quilts as part of a fragile heritage, but she fails to see the extent to which she herself has traduced that heritage.’ [17] The story’s climax, which sees Mama give the quilts to Maggie, rather than Dee, is viewed as representative of the quilts’ functionality. Dee views the quilts as worthy of museum display ("Maggie can't appreciate these quilts!...She'd probably be backward enough to put them to everyday use."), while Maggie treats them as household items ("I been saving 'em for long enough with nobody using 'em. I hope [ Maggie puts them to 'everyday use']!"). [18] Both Mama and Maggie recognize that the quilt is meant for ‘everyday use’, as practiced by their ancestors.
In critical readings the largest trend around the story has been to criticize Dee and the way she goes about reasserting her personal culture. Matthew Mullins argues in his essay, "Antagonized by the Text, Or, It Takes Two to Read Alice Walker’s 'Everyday Use' however, that this perspective isn’t necessarily fair. In reading and teaching the text, he found the character Dee was universally a disliked character, saying that in an epiphany he found in his defense of Dee rather a pitying attitude and concluding that "it was impossible to see how anyone could truly 'like' Dee". This, however, he goes on to point out as not being a direct result of Dee’s actions alone, but rather the framing of her actions in the story. He argues that the text itself is what antagonizes the reader to grow this dislike of Dee: "The first-person narrative voice, the fact that Mrs. Johnson [Mama] is both narrator and character, has an immediate and forceful effect upon our perception of Dee." Mullins backs this up by quoting another scholar, Wayne Booth, who said in his work The Rhetoric of Fiction, "No narrator ... is simply convincing: he is convincingly decent or mean, brilliant or stupid, informed, intelligent, or muddled. ... we usually find our emotional and intellectual reactions to him as a character affects our reactions to the events he relates." Mullins points out that if Dee herself, or even Maggie, were the narrators of the story, we would come away with a completely different perspective on probably all of the characters. "The text actively prevents us from identifying with Dee," and this perspective has shaped the scholarly resources on this text since it came out. [19]
Joe Sarnowski, in his article "Destroying to Save: Idealism and Pragmatism in Alice Walker's 'Everyday Use'", also points out this discrepancy but taking it one step further, arguing that even though it would be naïve to claim Dee does not have faults, she, "more than any other character in the story, identifies and pursues corrective measures against the oppression of African-American society and culture." Her fault, Sarnowski says, is in not realizing how idealism and pragmatism are "intertwined" and how "privileging one undermines both". [20]
In "Quilt as a Metaphor in 'Everyday Use'" by Elaine Showalter, Mama explains that because Maggie can recreate the quilts made by her mother and grandmother, that she is the one that understands the culture and will keep it alive.[ citation needed ]
The Underground Railroad was a network of secret routes and safe houses established in the United States during the early to mid-19th century. It was used by enslaved African Americans primarily to escape into free states and from there to Canada. The network, primarily the work of free African Americans, was assisted by abolitionists and others sympathetic to the cause of the escapees. The slaves who risked capture and those who aided them are also collectively referred to as the passengers and conductors of the Railroad, respectively. Various other routes led to Mexico, where slavery had been abolished, and to islands in the Caribbean that were not part of the slave trade. An earlier escape route running south toward Florida, then a Spanish possession, existed from the late 17th century until approximately 1790. However, the network generally known as the Underground Railroad began in the late 18th century. It ran north and grew steadily until the Emancipation Proclamation was signed by President Abraham Lincoln. One estimate suggests that, by 1850, approximately 100,000 slaves had escaped to freedom via the network.
Hoodoo is a set of spiritual practices, traditions, and beliefs that were created by enslaved African Americans in the Southern United States from various traditional African spiritualities and elements of indigenous botanical knowledge. Practitioners of Hoodoo are called rootworkers, conjure doctors, conjure men or conjure women, and root doctors. Regional synonyms for Hoodoo include rootwork and conjure. As a syncretic spiritual system, it also incorporates beliefs from Islam brought over by enslaved West African Muslims, and Spiritualism. Scholars define Hoodoo as a folk religion. It is a syncretic religion between two or more cultural religions, in this case being African indigenous spirituality and Abrahamic religion.
Womanism is a term originating from the work of African American author Alice Walker in her 1983 book In Search of Our Mother's Garden, denoting a movement within feminism, primarily championed by Black feminists. Walker coined the term "womanist" in the short story Coming Apart in 1979. Her initial use of the term evolved to envelop a spectrum of issues and perspectives facing black women and others.
The National Council of Negro Women, Inc. (NCNW) is a nonprofit organization founded in 1935 with the mission to advance the opportunities and the quality of life for African-American women, their families, and communities. Mary McLeod Bethune, the founder of NCNW, wanted to encourage the participation of Negro women in civic, political, economic and educational activities and institutions. The organization was considered as a clearing house for the dissemination of activities concerning women but wanted to work alongside a group that supported civil rights rather than go to actual protests. Women on the council fought more towards political and economic successes of black women to uplift them in society. NCNW fulfills this mission through research, advocacy, national and community-based services, and programs in the United States and Africa.
African-American culture, also known as Black American culture or Black culture in American English, refers to the cultural expressions of African Americans, either as part of or distinct from mainstream American culture. African-American culture has been influential on American and global worldwide culture as a whole.
A mammy is a U.S. historical stereotype depicting black women, usually enslaved, who did domestic work, including nursing children. The fictionalized mammy character is often visualized as a dark-skinned woman with a motherly personality. The origin of the mammy figure stereotype is rooted in the history of slavery in the United States, as slave women were often tasked with domestic and childcare work in American slave-holding households. The mammy caricature was used to create a narrative of black women being happy within slavery or within a role of servitude. The mammy stereotype associates black women with domestic roles and it has been argued that it, combined with segregation and discrimination, limited job opportunities for black women during the Jim Crow era, approximately 1877 to 1966.
African-American art is a broad term describing visual art created by African Americans. The range of art they have created, and are continuing to create, over more than two centuries is as varied as the artists themselves. Some have drawn on cultural traditions in Africa, and other parts of the world, for inspiration. Others have found inspiration in traditional African-American plastic art forms, including basket weaving, pottery, quilting, woodcarving and painting, all of which are sometimes classified as "handicrafts" or "folk art".
Maggie Lena Walker was an American businesswoman and teacher. In 1903, Walker became both the first African American woman to charter a bank and the first African American woman to serve as a bank president. As a leader, Walker achieved successes with the vision to make tangible improvements in the way of life for African Americans. Disabled by paralysis and a wheelchair user later in life, Walker also paved the way for people with disabilities.
African American literature is the body of literature produced in the United States by writers of African descent. It begins with the works of such late 18th-century writers as Phillis Wheatley. Before the high point of enslaved people narratives, African American literature was dominated by autobiographical spiritual narratives. The genre known as slave narratives in the 19th century were accounts by people who had generally escaped from slavery, about their journeys to freedom and ways they claimed their lives. The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s was a great period of flowering in literature and the arts, influenced both by writers who came North in the Great Migration and those who were immigrants from Jamaica and other Caribbean islands. African American writers have been recognized by the highest awards, including the Nobel Prize given to Toni Morrison in 1993. Among the themes and issues explored in this literature are the role of African Americans within the larger American society, African American culture, racism, slavery, and social equality. African-American writing has tended to incorporate oral forms, such as spirituals, sermons, gospel music, blues, or rap.
Faith Ringgold is an American painter, painting on different materials including fabric, a published author, mixed media sculptor, performance artist, and intersectional activist, perhaps best known for her narrative quilts.
Kindred (1979) is a novel by American writer Octavia E. Butler that incorporates time travel and is modeled on slave narratives. Widely popular, it has frequently been chosen as a text by community-wide reading programs and book organizations, and for high school and college courses.
Harriet Powers was an American folk artist and quilter born into slavery in rural northeast Georgia. Powers used traditional appliqué techniques to make quilts that expressed local legends, Bible stories, and astronomical events. Powers married young and had a large family. After the American Civil War and emancipation, she and her husband became landowners by the 1880s, but lost their land due to financial problems.
Gayl Carolyn Jones is an American writer from Lexington, Kentucky. She is recognized as a key figure in 20th-century African-American literature.
"Africana womanism" is a term coined in the late 1980s by Clenora Hudson-Weems, intended as an ideology applicable to all women of African descent. It is grounded in African culture and Afrocentrism and focuses on the experiences, struggles, needs, and desires of Africana women of the African diaspora. It distinguishes itself from feminism, or Alice Walker's womanism. Africana womanism pays more attention to and focuses more on the realities and the injustices in society in regard to race.
Published in 1983, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose is a collection composed of 36 separate pieces written by Alice Walker. The essays, articles, reviews, statements, and speeches were written between 1966 and 1982. Many are based on her understanding of "womanist" theory. Walker defines "womanist" at the beginning of the collection as "A black feminist or feminist of color. From the black folk expression of mother to female children and also a woman who loves other women, sexually and/or nonsexually. Appreciates and prefers women's culture. Committed to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female. Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender."
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Cecelia Tapplette Pedescleaux, also known as Cely, is an African-American quilter of traditional and art quilts, inspired by historians, other African-American quilters, and quilt designs used during the Underground Railroad to communicate messages to slaves seeking freedom. Her quilts have been shown in China, France, Washington, D.C., New Orleans, and in other locations in the United States. A solo show of 75 of her quilts were shown at the Le Musée de Free People of Color in New Orleans (2013–2014).
NedRa Bonds is an American quilter, activist, and retired teacher, born and raised in the historic Quindaro neighborhood in Kansas City, Kansas. Bonds creates quilts and mixed media fiber dolls using fabric, beads, and symbolism to explore issues dealing with human rights, race, women, politics, and the environment. She is best known for her Quindaro Quilt, a quilt measuring 4 by 6 feet, detailing the important history of the Quindaro neighborhood and its role as part of the National Underground Railroad System of Historic Trails. As a community activist and educator, Bonds advocates for legislation, taught workshops locally and internationally, and attended the Earth Summit Conference on Environment and Development of the United Nations as a delegate in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992. Bonds is a practicing artist and retired teacher in Kansas City, Kansas. Her recent projects include her Common Threads quilt, commissioned by the Kansas City Chiefs for their Arrowhead Arts Collection, the Wak’ó Mujeres Phụ nữ Women Mural collaboration, sponsored by the Charlotte Street Foundation's Rocket Grant Program, in Lawrence, Kansas, and her recent cancer project. Bonds was appointed to the Kansas Arts Commission by Kansas Governor Joan Finney in 1992.
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