Everyday Use, Walker When Reading

Everyday Use, Walker When reading the biography of Alice Walker, it is not difficult to see her past within her written prose. Just as she speaks about weaving and texture in her literary works, she is weaving her own past into her words. Throughout Walker's books and stories, she continually displays her pride and support of her African-American and female heritage. She emphasizes that no one can leave to others the responsibility of continuing the past heritage.

Rather, as she notes in "Everyday Use," it is up to everyone who is part of a culture to do so. Walker was born and raised in Eatonton, Georgia. Her father was a sharecropper. When she was eight years old, her brother accidentally shot her eye out with a BB gun. She was left blind in one eye, that made her shy and self-conscious. She turned to writing as a means to express her inner self.

Despite her disadvantaged childhood, she won a This dramatization of the Walker short story "Everyday Use" deals with the value of traditions. The matriarch of a southern African-American family considers whether to keep her promise to give a treasured family quilt to her daughter Maggie, who sees the quilt as having "practical utility as well as tradition," or to offer it to her other daughter, a well-educated social activist who is purely interested in the quilt as a piece of folk art.

A scholarship to Spelman College and then transferred to Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York. Since then, her poems, short stories and novels combine a pride for black women and the African-American heritage. Everyday Use," a story in Alice Walker's 1973 collection in Love and Trouble, looks at the issue of African-Americans who try to escape prejudice and poverty and, in the process, are at risk of losing their own heritage and past that has made them who they are.

A young woman, Dee Johnson, has moved away from her family home and changed her given name to "Wangero Leewanika Kemanjo." When she visits this country home she believes she has outgrown, Wangero unsuccessfully tries to divert some beautiful old quilts, which are to be part of her sister's dowry, into her own hands.

Walker compares this desire of Wangero with a modern African-American author: "Only by remaining in touch with a proximate history and an immediate cultural reality can one lay a claim to the quilts -- or hope to produce the authentic art they represent" (Cowart). Quilts are mentioned in many of Walker's works. For example, in the Color Purple, the character uses a quilt to help a dying woman recall the mother of her adopted daughter.

In "In Search of our Mother's Gardens," she mentions a quilt from the Smithsonian Institute made by an unknown black woman "If we could locate this anonymous black woman from Alabama, she would turn out to be one of our grandmothers." (14-15) The quilts that Wangero desires connect her generation to her ancestors and therefore represent the wider African-American past. They contain scraps of dresses worn by a grandmother and even great-grandmother, as well as a uniform of the great-grandfather serving in the Union Army in the Civil War.

Although Wangero realizes how important these quilts are to her heritage, she does not notice how much she, herself, negates this history, such as by changing her name, Dee, that can be traced "back beyond the Civil War" (54). 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 before her (White). The problem is that Wangero wants to commodify her black heritage.

As Cowart explains: "She wants to make the.