Instead, Wangero continues to only see that her name is a reminder that African-Americans were denied their authentic names. "I couldn't bear it any longer, being named after the people who oppress me" (53).
Walker is not by any means condemning the Black Power movement when she challenges Wangero's viewpoint. Instead, she is questioning that part of this movement that does not acknowledge and, more importantly, respect the scores of oppressed African-Americans who went through decades of physical and emotional abuse in order to survive, give birth to and raise future generations -- of which Dee is one. Instead, Walker is emphasizing that it should not only be those involved with the Black Power movement who should define African-American heritage. "African-Americans must take ownership of their entire heritage, including the painful, unpleasant parts (White).
Wangero also dresses in the Africanism fads, thereby only looking like an American who is trying to look like an African. With her new name, clothes and hairstyle and black Muslim companion, she is ironically turning her back on her rural origins and family. Walker understands the need to preserve artifacts of the African-American past, but does not agree with Dee's selfish and misguided reasons for doing so. The butter churn is a similar symbol of Dee's mother's onnection with the past that Walker uses for this reason. "When [Dee] finished wrapping the dasher the handle hand stuck out. I took it for a moment in my hands. You don'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...from a tree that grew in the yard where Big Dee and Stash had lived (412). Here, Mama is symbolically touching the hands of those who came...
As Cowart explains: "She wants to make the lid of the butter churn into a centerpiece for her table. She wants to hang quilts on her wall. She wants, in short, to do what white people do with cunning and quaint implements and products of the past (175). Instead, African-Americans, Walker says, should take pride in the living tradition of their folk art, seen with the example of the quilts and butter churn. In addition, they can learn from the literature like hers that is committed to political responsibility and to the means -- through simple appropriation of linguistic tools -- of its own permanence. As critic Barbara Christian notes, two central themes are always in Walker's writing: "the importance of the quilt in her work... [and] the creation of African-American Southern women as subjects in their own right."
References
Christian, Barbara, T. Alice Walker: The Black Woman Artist as Wayward." "Everyday Use. Ed. New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 1994.
Cowart, David. "Heritage and Deracination in Walker's 'Everyday Use.'"
Studies in Short Fiction 33 (1996): 171-184.
Walker, Alice. "Everyday Use. Literature: Reading Fiction, Poetry, Drama and the Essay.
Robert DiYanni, Ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1998. 408-413.
Walker, Alice. "In Search of our Mother's Gardens." Ms. Magazine. Sept-Oct. (1997): 11-15
Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982.
White, David. "Everyday Use.' Defining African-American Heritage. 2001,
Anniina's Alice Walker's Page. 15 April 2008. http://www.luminarium.org/contemporary/alicew/davidwhite.htm
