Heritage and Culture in Everyday Use by Alice Walker

Everyday Use
In Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use,” Dee is searching for cultural authenticity but in her search, she latches on to material possessions the relics of her family heritage, thinking these represent the identity she is after. However, Dee’s search is frustrated by her own superficial understanding of what culture really and truly is: she believes it is a construct that can be concocted over night—or re-claimed by way of artifice. The reality is that, as the mother shows, culture comes from the heart and its attachment to one’s true heritage—which is why Maggie is awarded the quilt coveted by Dee. Maggie has the heart to love it because it comes from her family, and she has the sense to make use of it; Dee wants it only because she thinks it represents her ancestral blackness—beyond that it means nothing to her. Mother’s role in awarding the quilt to the most deserving daughter reinforces the main idea of the story, which is that real culture is lived, whereas fake or superficial culture is merely talked about. Maggie has the real culture of the family: she is fond of her heritage; Dee is simply posing, attempting to create a hyper-heritage that extends beyond her immediate family history and goes all the way back to a continent she doesn’t even really know.
Walker confirms Dee as a poser when she points out that Dee’s given name comes from a long line of women in the family: she is named after her aunt, who was named for their grandmother and so on—yet for Dee, who has learned at college how white culture has oppressed her people, rejection of her given name is part and parcel of what she is doing now: rejecting everything that defined her previously and setting about constructing an authentic African identity—or at least so she thinks. As Helga Hoel points out, Dee’s “African name”—Wangero Leewanika Kemanjo—is inauthentic. It might sound like it originates in Africa, but it has no more connection to that continent, its people and their history than the local dairy mart down the street. Her new self-applied and self-constructed name only serves to reflect Dee’s socio-political rejection of white culture and her white oppressors. It is not a legitimate claim to blackness, heritage or true culture, as Dee would like to think it is.
Dee misses the real meaning of heritage and culture when she arrives at the Johnson homestead fresh from college. The objects in the home—such as the quilt and the butter churn—have an everyday, practical use on top of being things that have been in the family’s possession for generations. They tell something of the story of the Johnson family. Dee sees them only as relics or artifacts of black culture. For Maggie and Mama, they represent real memories and they respect these objects for that reason. For instance, Maggie learned to quilt from her grandmother, as Walker points out, and the butter churn was something that their uncle carved with his own two hands: that is why they are important to Maggie and Mama. To Dee, they are like items in an antique mall that would look good in her dorm because they symbolize something old and rural, not because they remind of her loved ones lost.
This is not to suggest that Dee’s longing for heritage is unreal. She truly does want to embrace her blackness—but blackness for her is an identity concept that is not shared by Mama and Maggie. Their identity concept is family and their heritage—their history in their home in the U.S. rather than an idealized history stretching back to Africa. Dee wants to break out of her American heritage, as Nancy Tuten explains, and create a new one for herself; this desire comes from her sense of oppression. Neither her mother nor her sister share this sense, as they have neither learned it at school nor felt it in their own simple lives. As Houston Baker and Charlotte Pierce-Baker state, the family quilt “is a vestige of wholeness that stands as a sign of loss and a challenge to creative design”—it is a reminder of the past (706). Dee sees them only as “old quilts” that she wants because she they were hand-stitched and thus represent authenticity. She claims that Maggie cannot have them because “Maggie can’t appreciate these quilts…She’d probably be backward enough to put them to everyday use” (Walker 195). Of course, that is just what one should do, according to Mama—and that is why the quilts stay with Maggie. She appreciates them not for their “authenticity” but rather because she is truly attached to her own family history. Dee is not.
What is most important to remember, however, is that the mother does not judge Dee. The mother represents the true heart that supports any and all cultures, even if they are fake, superficial or misguided. The mother’s heart is full of love, even if it cannot fully embrace Dee’s waywardness. The mother appreciates her children—her heart is pure—but it is also fair and just and will not allow a child who is bent on being superficial take from one whose love for family is real and authentic that which is prized by the latter. Dee thinks she understands heritage, but it is really Mama and Maggie who not only understand it and possess it but who actually enjoy it. Dee is only seeking to escape her own and make a new one. She says, “It’s really a new day for us,” to both Maggie and Mama (Walker 196), indicating that they need to stop being so true to their family history and start being more like her—reinventing themselves and their black identities with new names and a new socio-political perspective. As Walker shows, however, Maggie and Mama are just fine: they can sit there on the porch enjoying their time because it is theirs and they do not feel the need to chase after an idealized image of themselves in some far off place.

Works Cited
Baker, Houston A., and Charlotte Pierce-Baker. “Patches: Quilts and Community in
Alice Walker’s ‘Everyday Use’.” The Southern Review, vol. 21, no. 3 (1985): 706.
Hoel, Helga. “Personal Names and Heritage: Alice Walker’s ‘Everyday Use’.”
American Studies in Scandinavia, vol. 31, no. 1 (1999), 34-42.
Tuten, Nancy. “Alice Walker’s ‘Everyday Use.’” The Explicator, vol. 51, no. 2 (1993),
125-128.
Walker, Alice. “Everyday Use.”
http://www.nlsd.k12.oh.us/userfiles/111/Classes/3450/Walker-Everday%20Use.pdf