I will wait for
her in the yard that Maggie and I made so clean and wavy yesterday afternoon. A
yard like this is more comfortable than most people know. It is not just a
yard. It is like an extended living room. When the hard clay is swept clean as
a floor and the fine sand around the edges lined with tiny, irregular grooves,
anyone can come and sit and look up into the elm tree and wait for the breezes
that never come inside the house.
Maggie will be
nervous until after her sister goes: she will stand hopelessly in corners,
homely and ashamed of the burn scars down her arms and legs, eying her sister
with a mixture of envy and awe. She thinks her sister has held life always in
the palm of one hand, that "no" is a word the world never learned to
say to her.
You've no doubt
seen those TV shows where the child who has "made it" is confronted,
as a surprise, by her own mother and father, tottering in weakly from
backstage. (A pleasant surprise, of course: What would they do if parent and
child came on the show only to curse out and insult each other?) On TV mother
and child embrace and smile into each other's faces. Sometimes the mother and
father weep, the child wraps them in her arms and leans across the table to
tell how she would not have made it without their help. I have seen these
programs.
Sometimes I dream
a dream in which Dee and I are suddenly brought together on a TV program of
this sort. Out of a dark and soft-seated limousine I am ushered into a bright
room filled with many people. There I meet a smiling, gray, sporty man like
Johnny Carson who shakes my hand and tells me what a fine girl I have. Then we
are on the stage and
In real life I am
a large, big-boned woman with rough, man-working hands. In the winter I wear
flannel nightgowns to bed and overalls during the day. I can kill and clean a
hog as mercilessly as a man. My fat keeps me hot in zero weather. I can work
outside all day, breaking ice to get water for washing; I can eat pork liver
cooked over the open fire minutes after it comes steaming from the hog. One
winter I knocked a bull calf straight in the brain between the eyes with a
sledge hammer and had the meat hung up to chill before nightfall. But of course
all this does not show on television. I am the way my daughter would want me to
be: a hundred pounds lighter, my skin like an uncooked barley pancake. My hair
glistens in the hot bright lights. Johnny Carson has much to do to keep up with
my quick and witty tongue.
But that is a
mistake. I know even before I wake up. Who ever knew a Johnson with a quick
tongue? Who can even imagine me looking a strange white man in the eye? It
seems to me I have talked to them always with one foot raised in flight, with
my head fumed in whichever way is farthest from them.
"How do I
look, Mama?" Maggie says, showing just enough of her thin body enveloped
in pink skirt and red blouse for me to know she's there, almost hidden by the
door.
"Come out
into the yard," I say.
Have you ever seen
a lame animal, perhaps a dog run over by some careless person rich enough to
own a car, sidle up to someone who is ignorant enough to be kind to him? That
is the way my Maggie walks. She has been like this, chin on chest, eyes on
ground, feet in shuffle, ever since the fire that burned the other house to the
ground.
I used to think
she hated Maggie, too. But that was before we raised money, the church and me,
to send her to
I never had an
education myself. After second grade the school was closed down. Don't ask my
why: in 1927 colored asked fewer questions than they do now. Sometimes Maggie
reads to me. She stumbles along good-naturedly but can't see well. She knows
she is not bright. Like good looks and money, quickness passes her by. She will
marry John Thomas (who has mossy teeth in an earnest face) and then I'll be
free to sit here and I guess just sing church songs to myself. Although I never was a good singer. Never could carry a
tune. I was always better at a man's job. I used to love to milk till I was
hooked in the side in '49. Cows are soothing and slow and don't bother you,
unless you try to milk them the wrong way.
I have
deliberately turned my back on the house. It is three rooms, just like the one
that burned, except the roof is tin; they don't make shingle roofs any more.
There are no real windows, just some holes cut in the sides, like the portholes
in a ship, but not round and not square, with rawhide holding the shutters up
on the outside. This house is in a pasture, too, like the other one. No doubt
when
She had a few. 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.
When she was
courting Jimmy T she didn't have much time to pay to us, but turned all her
faultfinding power on him. He flew to marry a cheap city girl from a family of
ignorant flashy people. She hardly had time to recompose herself.
When she comes I
will meet—but there they are!
Maggie attempts to
make a dash for the house, in her shuffling way, but I stay her with my hand.
"Come back here," I say. And she stops and tries to dig a well in the
sand with her toe.
It is hard to see
them clearly through the strong sun. But even the first glimpse of leg out of
the car tells me it is
"Wasuzo-Teano!" she says, coming on in that gliding way
the dress makes her move. The short stocky fellow with the hair to his navel is
all grinning and he follows up with "Asalamalakim,
my mother and sister!" He moves to hug Maggie but she falls back, right up
against the back of my chair. I feel her trembling there and when I look up I
see the perspiration falling off her chin.
"Don't get
up," says
Meanwhile Asalamalakim is going through motions with Maggie's hand.
Maggie's hand is as limp as a fish, and probably as cold, despite the sweat,
and she keeps trying to pull it back. It looks like Asalamalakim
wants to shake hands but wants to do it fancy. Or maybe he don't
know how people shake hands. Anyhow, he soon gives up on Maggie.
"Well,"
I say. "
"No,
Mama," she says. "Not 'Dee,' Wangero Leewanika Kemanjo!"
"What
happened to '
"She's
dead," Wangero said. "I couldn't bear it
any longer, being named after the people who oppress me."
"You know as
well as me you was named after your aunt Dicie," I said. Dicie is my
sister. She named
"But who was
she named after?" asked Wangero.
"I guess
after Grandma Dee," I said.
"And who was
she named after?" asked Wangero.
"Her
mother," I said, and saw Wangero was getting
tired. "That's about as far back as I can trace it," I said. Though,
in fact, I probably could have carried it back beyond the Civil War through the
branches.
"Well,"
said Asalamalakim, "there you are."
"Uhnnnh," I heard Maggie say.
"There I was
not," I said, "before 'Dicie' cropped up in
our family, so why should I try to trace it that far back?"
He just stood
there grinning, looking down on me like somebody inspecting a Model A car. Every once in a while he and Wangero
sent eye signals over my head.
"How do you
pronounce this name?" I asked.
"You don't
have to call me by it if you don't want to," said Wangero.
"Why
shouldn't 1?" I asked. "If that's what you want us to call you, we'll
call you."
"I know it might sound awkward at first," said Wangero.
"I'll get
used to it," I said. "Ream it out again."
Well, soon we got
the name out of the way. Asalamalakim had a name
twice as long and three times as hard. After I tripped over it two or three
times he told me to just call him Hakim-a-barber. I wanted to ask him was he a
barber, but I didn't really think he was, so I didn't ask.
"You must
belong to those beef-cattle peoples down the road," I said. They said
"Asalamalakim" when they met you, too, but
they didn't shake hands. Always too busy: feeding the cattle, fixing the
fences, putting up salt-lick shelters, throwing down hay. When the white folks
poisoned some of the herd the men stayed up all night with rifles in their
hands. I walked a mile and a half just to see the sight.
Hakim-a-barber
said, "I accept some of their doctrines, but farming and raising cattle is
not my style." (They didn't tell me, and I didn't ask, whether Wangero (Dee) had really gone and married him.)
We sat down to eat
and right away he said he didn't eat collards and pork was unclean. Wangero, though, went on through the chitlins
and com bread, the greens and everything else. She talked a blue streak over
the sweet potatoes. Everything delighted her. Even the fact that we still used
the benches her daddy made for the table when we couldn't effort to buy chairs.
"Oh,
Mama!" she cried. Then turned to Hakim-a-barber.
"I never knew how lovely these benches are. You can feel the rump
prints," she said, running her hands underneath her and along the bench.
Then she gave a sigh and her hand closed over Grandma Dee's butter dish.
"That's it!" she said. "I knew there was something I wanted to
ask you if I could have." She jumped up from the table and went over in
the corner where the churn stood, the milk in it crabber by now. She looked at
the churn and looked at it.
"This churn
top is what I need," she said. "Didn't Uncle Buddy whittle it out of
a tree you all used to have?"
"Yes," I
said.
"Un huh," she said happily. "And I want the dasher,
too."
"Uncle Buddy
whittle that, too?" asked the barber.
Dee (Wangero) looked up at me.
"Aunt Dee's
first husband whittled the dash," said Maggie so low you almost couldn't
hear her. "His name was Henry, but they called him Stash."
"Maggie's
brain is like an elephant's," Wangero said,
laughing. "I can use the chute top as a centerpiece for the alcove
table," she said, sliding a plate over the chute, "and I'll think of
something artistic to do with the dasher."
When she finished
wrapping the dasher the handle stuck out. I took it for a moment in my hands.
You didn't even have to look close to see where hands pushing the dasher up and
down to make butter had left a kind of sink in the wood. In fact, there 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.
After dinner Dee (Wangero) went to the trunk at the foot of my bed and
started rifling through it. Maggie hung back in the kitchen over the dishpan.
Out came Wangero with two quilts. They had been
pieced by Grandma Dee and then Big Dee and me had hung them on the quilt frames
on the front porch and quilted them. One was in the Lone Star pattern. The
other was Walk Around the Mountain. In both of them
were scraps of dresses Grandma Dee had won fifty and more years ago. Bits and pieces of Grandpa Jattell's
Paisley shirts. And one teeny faded blue piece, about the size of a
penny matchbox, that was from Great Grandpa Ezra's uniform that he wore in the
Civil War.
"Mama," Wanegro said sweet as a bird. "Can I have these old
quilts?"
I heard something
fall in the kitchen, and a minute later the kitchen door slammed.
"Why don't
you take one or two of the others?" I asked. "These
old things was just done by me and Big Dee from some tops your grandma
pieced before she died."
"No,"
said Wangero. "I don't want those. They are
stitched around the borders by machine."
"That'll make
them last better," I said.
"That's not
the point," said Wangero. "These are all
pieces of dresses Grandma used to wear. She did all this stitching by hand. Imag' ine!" She held the quilts securely in her arms,
stroking them.
"Some of the
pieces, like those lavender ones, come from old clothes her mother handed down
to her," I said, moving up to touch the quilts. Dee (Wangero)
moved back just enough so that I couldn't reach the quilts. They already
belonged to her.
"Imagine!"
she breathed again, clutching them closely to her bosom.
"The truth
is," I said, "I promised to give them quilts to Maggie, for when she
marries John Thomas."
She gasped like a bee had stung her.
"Maggie can't
appreciate these quilts!" she said. "She'd probably be backward
enough to put them to everyday use."
"I reckon she
would," I said. "God knows I been saving 'em
for long enough with nobody using 'em. I hope she
will!" I didn't want to bring up how I had offered Dee (Wangero) a quilt when she went away to college. Then she
had told they were old~fashioned, out of style.
"But they're
priceless!" she was saying now, furiously; for she has a temper.
"Maggie would put them on the bed and in five years they'd be in rags. Less than that!"
"She can
always make some more," I said. "Maggie knows how to quilt."
Dee (Wangero) looked at me with hatred. "You just will not
understand. The point is these quilts, these quilts!"
"Well,"
I said, stumped. "What would you do with them?"
"Hang
them," she said. As if that was the only thing you could do with quilts.
Maggie by now was
standing in the door. I could almost hear the sound her feet made as they
scraped over each other.
"She can have
them, Mama," she said, like somebody used to never winning anything, or
having anything reserved for her. "I can 'member Grandma Dee without the
quilts."
I looked at her
hard. She had filled her bottom lip with checkerberry snuff and gave her face a
kind of dopey, hangdog look. It was Grandma Dee and Big Dee who taught her how
to quilt herself. She stood there with her scarred hands hidden in the folds of
her skirt. She looked at her sister with something like fear but she wasn't mad
at her. This was Maggie's portion. This was the way she knew God to work.
When I looked at
her like that something hit me in the top of my head and ran down to the soles
of my feet. Just like when I'm in church and the spirit of God touches me and I
get happy and shout. I did something I never done before: hugged Maggie to me,
then dragged her on into the room, snatched the quilts out of Miss Wangero's hands and dumped them into Maggie's lap. Maggie
just sat there on my bed with her mouth open.
"Take one or
two of the others," I said to
But she turned
without a word and went out to Hakim~a~barber.
"You just
don't understand," she said, as Maggie and I came out to the car.
"What don't I understand?" I wanted to know.
"Your
heritage," she said, and then she turned to Maggie, kissed her, and said,
"You ought to try to make something of yourself, too, Maggie. It's really
a new day for us. But from the way you and Mama still live you'd never know
it."
She put on some
sunglasses that hid everything above the tip of her nose and chin.
Maggie smiled;
maybe at the sunglasses. But a real smile, not scared. After we watched the car
dust settle I asked Maggie to bring me a dip of snuff. And then the two of us
sat there just enjoying, until it was time to go in the house and go to bed.
David White
Published in 2001 in Portals,
Purdue North Central literary journal.
“Everyday Use”: Defining African-American Heritage
In “Everyday Use,” Alice Walker tells a
story of a mother’s conflicted relationship with her two daughters. On
its surface, “Everyday Use” tells how a mother gradually rejects the
superficial values of her older, successful daughter in favor of the practical
values of her younger, less fortunate daughter. On a deeper level, Alice
Walker is exploring the concept of heritage as it applies to African-Americans.
“Everyday Use” is set in the late ‘60s or early
‘70s. This was a time when African-Americans were struggling to define
their personal identities in cultural terms. The term “Negro” had been
recently removed from the vocabulary, and had been replaced with “Black.” There
was “Black Power,” “Black Nationalism,” and “Black Pride.” Many blacks
wanted to rediscover their African roots, and were ready to reject and deny
their American heritage, which was filled with stories of pain and
injustice. In “Everyday Use,” Alice Walker argues that an
African-American is both African and American, and to deny the American side of
one’s heritage is disrespectful of one’s ancestors and, consequently, harmful
to one’s self. She uses the principal characters of Mama, Dee (Wangero), and Maggie to clarify this theme.
Mama narrates the story. Mama describes
herself as “a large, big-boned woman with rough, man-working hands. In
the winter I wear flannel nightgowns to bed and overalls during the day.
I can kill and clean a hog as mercilessly as a man” (Walker, “Everyday Use”
408). This description, along with her reference to a 2nd grade education
(409), leads the reader to conclude that this woman takes pride in the
practical aspects of her nature and that she has not spent a great deal of time
contemplating abstract concepts such as heritage. However, her lack of
education and refinement does not prevent her from having an inherent
understanding of heritage based on her love and respect for those who came
before her. This is clear from her ability to associate pieces of fabric
in two quilts with the people whose clothes they had been cut from:
In both of them were
scraps of dresses Grandma Dee had worn fifty and more
years ago. Bits and pieces of Grandpa Jarrell’s
Paisley shirts. And one teeny
faded blue piece, about the size of a penny matchbox, that was from
Great
Grandpa Ezra’s uniform that he wore in the Civil War… “Some of the
pieces,
like those lavender ones, come from old clothes [Grandma Dee’s] mother
handed
down to her,” [Mama] said, moving up to touch the quilts.
(
The quilts have a special meaning to Mama. When she
moves up to touch the quilts, she is reaching out to touch the people whom the
quilts represent.
Quilts are referred to in many of
The quilts are not,
however, the only device
When [
for a moment in my hands. You didn’t even have to look close to
see where
hands pushing the dasher up and down to make butter had left a kind of
sink in
the wood. In fact, there were a lot of small sinks; you could see
where thumbs
and fingers had sunk into the wood. It was a beautiful light
yellow wood, from a
tree that grew in the yard where Big Dee and Stash had lived.
(
When Mama takes the dasher handle in her hands, she is
symbolically touching the hands of all those who used it before her. Her
appreciation for the dasher and the quilts is based on love for the people who
made and used them.
Mama’s daughter Dee (Wangero)
has a much more superficial idea of heritage. She is portrayed as bright,
beautiful, and self-centered.
It is important to recognize that
... used to read
to us without pity; forcing words, lies, other folks’ habits, whole
lives upon us two, sitting trapped and ignorant underneath her
voice…[She}
pressed us to her with the serious way she read, to shove us away
at just the
moment, like dimwits, we seemed about to understand.
(
Later, Mama relates, “She wrote me once that no matter where
we ‘choose’ to live, she will manage to come see us” (410). In these two
examples Mama is pointing out that Dee sees herself as belonging to a higher
intellectual and social class than Mama and Maggie, and they should feel
honored by (and humiliated in) her presence.
Mama’s insights are verified when
explains:
She wants to make the
lid of the butter churn into a centerpiece for her table. She
wants to hang quilts on the wall. She wants, in short, to do what
white people do
with the cunning and quaint implements and products of the past. Wangero fails
to see the mote in her own eye when she reproaches her mother and sister
for a
failure to value their heritage – she, who wants only to preserve that
heritage as
the negative index to her own sophistication. (175)
Mama first describes Maggie’s nature by saying
“Maggie will be nervous until after her sister goes: she will stand hopelessly
in corners homely and ashamed of the burn scars down her arms and legs, eyeing
her sister with a mixture of envy and awe” (408). Maggie’s scars
are symbolic of the scars that all African-Americans carry as a result of the
“fire” of slavery. Mama gives a more detailed description later in
the story:
Have you ever seen a lame animal,
perhaps a dog run over by some
careless person rich enough to own a car, sidle up to someone who
is ignorant enough to be kind to him? That is the way my Maggie
walks. She has been like this, chin on chest, eyes on ground, feet
in shuffle ever since the fire that burned the house to the
ground. (409)
This depiction of Maggie is reminiscent of the “yes sir, no
ma’am” Negro heritage from before, and well after the Civil War. Eyes on
ground, feet in shuffle – Maggie will not be the poster girl for the Black
Power movement. They would prefer that she remain inconspicuously
in the corner. This denial of American heritage is evident in
Despite all the negative observations Mama makes
about her, Maggie is very aware of her heritage. This is evident from her
statement about the churn dasher: “‘Aunt Dee’s first husband whittled the
dash,’ said Maggie so low you almost couldn’t hear her. ‘His name was
Henry, but they called him Stash’” (412). It is significant that Maggie
knew the history of the dasher because Dee, who knew nothing of its history,
and was not even sure what she would do with it, took it with no thought for
either Maggie or Mama. Maggie’s understanding of her heritage also comes
through when she tells Mama that
This conflict between the two
daughters over who should rightfully own the quilts and how they should be used
is central to the theme of the story.
Mama reveals her ambivalence toward
from high school; black pumps to match a green suit she’d made from an old
suit somebody gave me. She was determined to stare down any disaster in
her efforts. Her eyelids would not flicker for minutes at a time.
Often I fought
off the temptation to shake her. At sixteen she had a style all her own:
and
knew what style was. (409)
Mama seems to admire her daughter’s determination, but
because it is motivated by selfishness, she wants to shake her.
Mama’s feelings toward Dee are also expressed
through her attitude toward
In rejecting Wangero,
Mama makes a choice to accept Maggie. Throughout the story, Mama has
described Maggie in terms that make it clear that she is disappointed and
possibly even ashamed of her. Mama is aware that Maggie’s condition is
the result of a fire over which she had no control, but she has not recognized
the incredible strength her younger daughter has required, just to
survive. After Maggie says, “She can have them, Mama…I can ‘member
Grandma Dee without the quilts,” Mama says,
I looked at her hard.
She had filled her bottom lip with checkerberry snuff and
it gave her face a kind of dopey hangdog look. It was Grandma Dee and Big
Dee
who taught her how to quilt herself. She stood there with her scarred
hands
hidden in the folds of her skirt. (413)
This scenario was foreshadowed in the beginning of the story when Mama said,
Maggie will be nervous until
after her sister goes: she will stand hopelessly
in corners homely and ashamed of the burn scars down her arms and legs,
eyeing her sister with a mixture of envy and awe. She thinks her sister
has
held life always in the palm of one hand, that “no” is a word the world never
learned to say to her. (408)
But now, Mama is looking at
Maggie “hard,” and she sees something in her she has not seen before. She
sees her mother and her sister – the two women whose name
Alice Walker is, as David Cowart argues,
“[satirizing] the heady rhetoric of late ‘60s black consciousness,
deconstructing its pieties (especially the rediscovery of
Works Cited
Cowart, David. “Heritage
and Deracination in
Studies in Short Fiction 33
(1996): 171-84.
Hoel, Helga. "Personal Names and
Heritage: Alice Walker’s 'Everyday Use'." 2000.
[Current editor's note:
since moved to http://home.online.no/~helhoel/walker.htm]
Showalter, Elaine. “Piecing and
Writing.” The Poetics of Gender.
Nancy K. Miller, Ed.
Walker,
Robert DiYanni,
Ed.
Walker,
Walker,