Everyday Use

“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.” 

Mrs. Johnson’s descriptions of herself tend to stress her physical strength and toughness. She needed these qualities to get by in life, and they’re also qualities that she takes genuine pride in. Although she imagines herself as Dee “would want [her] to be” when dreaming about appearing on Johnny Carson (Paragraph 5), these fantasies do not fundamentally reflect her values; later in the story, for instance, she talks about how much she loves the “soothing” work of milking cows (Paragraph 13). This physicality and frank appreciation of manual labor compares favorably to the snobbish intellectualism of figures like Hakim-a-barber, and it underscores both the story’s suspicion of formal education and its defense of the useful and everyday. 

“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 turned in whichever way is farthest from them. Dee, though. She would always look anyone in the eye. Hesitation was no part of her nature.”

As confident as Mrs. Johnson is in some respects, she has necessarily internalized the racism of the society she grew up in. In the Jim Crow South, “looking a strange white man in the eye” would have been seen as unthinkable presumptuousness on the part of a black woman, and it could conceivably have even gotten her killed. It isn’t surprising that Mrs. Johnson behaves with deference where white people are concerned, but it does contrast markedly with Dee. Although the era in which Dee grew up was unquestionably still a racist one, the advent of the Civil Rights Movement at least made Dee’s defiant attitude more possible than it would have been in decades past.

“And Dee. I see her standing off under the sweet gum tree she used to dig gum out of; a look of concentration on her face as she watched the last dingy gray board of the house fall in toward the red-hot brick chimney.”

Dee’s response to seeing her childhood home destroyed reflects her attitude toward her family heritage more broadly. Far from finding the sight of the burning house traumatic, Dee almost seems to be egging on its destruction with her “look of concentration” (a phrase that also points to the relationship between eye contact and power). Similarly, Dee views the poverty and oppression that characterize her family’s past as something to escape or suppress, rather than as experiences that are deeply—if painfully—intertwined with her identity as a black woman. 

“She washed us in a river of make-believe, burned us with a lot of knowledge we didn’t necessarily need to know. 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.” 

The above passage is central to Walker’s critique of traditional education. In reading to her mother and sister, Dee is not sharing the benefits of her schooling, but wielding the power that she—as someone now on a trajectory towards a comfortable middle-class—enjoys. In fact, whenever her family seems to be on the verge of benefiting from her reading, she “shoves them away” to preserve her position of superiority. Mrs. Johnson’s frustration with the “make-believe” stories Dee reads is also significant. Part of what makes art valuable in “Everyday Use” is its relevance to day-to-day existence. The fact that Dee presents her family only with art that is detached from the realities of their lives is another indication that these interactions are fundamentally about shoring up her own privileged position.

“After second grade the school was closed down. Don’t ask me why: in 1927 colored asked fewer questions than they do now.”

The stark contrast between the opportunities Dee has enjoyed and the obstacles her mother faced becomes particularly clear in this passage; whereas Dee is college-educated, Mrs. Johnson wasn’t even able to complete elementary school. This has profound implications for the relationship between the two women, because Dee condescendingly assumes that this lack of formal schooling means her mother is hopelessly backwards and ignorant. The passage also speaks to the very different attitudes each woman has towards race. Mrs. Johnson grew up in the era of Jim Crow, and (as she notes here) learned early on in life that it was dangerous to challenge racism in the way that Dee feels comparatively free to do. The generational divide even manifests in Mrs. Johnson’s use of the word “colored,” which by the 1970s, was beginning to fall out of use in favor of terms like “black” and “African-American.” 

“A dress so loud it hurts my eyes. There are yellows and oranges enough to throw back the light of the sun. I feel my whole face warming from the heat waves it throws out. Earrings gold, too, and hanging down to her shoulders. Bracelets dangling and making noises when she moves her arm up to shake the folds of the dress out of her armpits.”

Dee’s appearance when she arrives at her mother’s house is significant for several reasons. For one, the style of dress she has adopted is the first indication that her attitude towards her heritage has shifted; where she formerly favored conventional professional wear—“black pumps,” a “green suit,” etc. (12), she is now wearing clothes that reflect her African ancestry. As Walker describes them, however, these clothes also hint at Dee’s overbearing personality, with their brightness and loudness quickly overwhelming Mrs. Johnson’s senses. That said, it’s noteworthy that Mrs. Johnson eventually concludes that she likes Dee’s dress; her willingness to tolerate and even appreciate Dee’s choices stands in contrast to Dee’s impatience with the way her mother and sister live.

“She stoops down quickly and lines up picture after picture of me sitting there in front of the house with Maggie cowering behind me. She never takes a shot without making sure the house is included. When a cow comes nibbling around the edge of the yard she snaps it and me and Maggie and the house.” 

The way in which Dee frames these photographs of her mother and sister is characteristic both of her relationship to her family and of the way sight and power function in the story. Dee sees herself as standing outside her family rather than belonging to it; she doesn’t approve of the way her mother and sister live, but she does take a condescending, intellectual interest in it as a member of the educated middle class. Rather than asking Hakim-a-barber to photograph the entire family, Dee takes a series of shots that emphasize her mother and sister’s rural, working-class existence.  

“‘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.” 

This exchange between Mrs. Johnson and Dee encapsulates two different notions of heritage. Whether used as a first name or a surname, “Dicie” can be traced back to the British Isles; it is only via slavery that the name entered Dee’s family, and it’s possible it was even the family name of their former masters. This, however, is a viewpoint Mrs. Johnson struggles to understand because she looks not to the distant past but to her immediate ancestry for a sense of identity and pride. For that reason, she sees Dee’s rejection of the name as an erasure of the lives and achievements of women like her sister and grandmother. Nevertheless, Mrs. Johnson acknowledges Dee’s request and addresses her as “Wangero,” once again signaling her willingness to respect views that differ from her own.  

“‘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 folk poisoned some of the herd the men stayed up all night with rifles in their hands.” 

The above passage is key to understanding the story’s attitude towards the kind of black identity Dee and Hakim-a-barber have embraced. Like Hakim-a-barber, the people Mrs. Johnson describes here are implied to be converts to Islam and perhaps share his interest in recovering a more authentically African form of identity and culture. Importantly, however, they pair their beliefs with real-world action—not just the manual labor of farming, but also active opposition to the surrounding community’s racism. By contrast, Hakim-a-barber seems uninterested in putting his ideas into action, saying that agricultural work “isn’t [his] style” (Paragraph 44).

“‘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 churn top as a centerpiece for the alcove table.’”

Like her mother, Maggie clearly feels a personal connection to objects like the dasher; because these items are the product of her ancestors’ time and labor, they both reflect the character of their makers and evoke memories of them. Dee, by contrast, only cares about the dasher as a decorative piece; she does not seem to appreciate the dasher’s familial significance, and she doesn’t even know which member of her family whittled it. What’s more, she responds contemptuously to the fact that Maggie does know these details, laughing that Maggie has a brain “like an elephant’s”—a reference to the adage “An elephant never forgets” that nevertheless reads, in context, like a coded insult. 

“‘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 quilts Dee demands from her mother are likely the most important symbol in the story, crystallizing Walker’s ideas about both art and heritage. As Mrs. Johnson explains here, the fabric that she, her sister, and their grandmother used to make the quilts originally came from clothes worn by themselves and their ancestors. These scraps were then stitched together by hand into bed clothes. From start to finish then, the quilts embody the notion that art bears the signature of its creators’ time and labor, as well as the related belief that art should be functional and embedded in daily routine. On the face of it, Dee seems impressed by this; when she learns the full history the quilts represent, she is more determined than ever to have them for herself. It’s telling, however, that her response to her mother’s words is “Imagine!”; because she sees the quilts as abstract symbols, Dee is in some sense unable to grasp the reality of them and their history.   

“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.” 

Maggie’s connection to the quilts goes beyond even the personal significance they hold as mementos of beloved family members. Rather, they also represent the art of quilt making, which has been passed down in her family through generations, and which she herself learned from the very women who made these quilts. In this sense, Maggie is much better poised to appreciate the quilts than Dee; even if the quilts wear out, she can remake them, thus preserving and participating in this family legacy. Nevertheless, she has learned to expect so little from life that she is prepared to surrender her claim to this legacy without a fight, and it is this, more than anything, that leads Mrs. Johnson to put her foot down; she does not want her daughter to simply accept subservience and deprivation as her lot in life.

“‘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.’”

Dee’s parting words to her family are deeply ironic. Because she believes so strongly in the quilts’ symbolic significance as representations of African-American history writ large, she fails to understand the meaning they derive from her family’s history in particular. What’s more, her insistence on preserving the quilts in their current form overlooks what are to Walker two fundamental features of much of black women’s craftsmanship: its intergenerational nature and its functionality. Dee’s remarks to Maggie are similarly lacking in self-awareness; her suggestion that Maggie should “make something of herself” not only betrays her disdain for the way her mother and sister live, but also ignores the extent to which Dee’s own behavior has contributed to Maggie’s sense of personal inadequacy and hopelessness.