Everyday Use By

Everyday Use by Alice Walker is a short 1. story about the struggle for identity and the ability to translate that identity between a mother and daughter. Taking place in rural Georgia, the story is narrated by the mother as she awaits a visit by her daughter Dee, returning home after a long absence. From the opening paragraphs the reader is aware of an unspoken tension existing between the mother and her daughter. The mother fantasizes about their reunion taking place on a This Is Your Life kind of show in which she is brought forth from the back of a limo and introduced to a celebrity before the reunion takes place.

Back to reality we learn that she is instead a large, poor, working woman. She also has another daughter, Dee's sister Maggie, who was severely burned years earlier when their house burned down. Through the mother's remembrances, we learn that Dee considered herself more sophisticated and stylish even before she fled away to school.

When Dee finally shows up she is wearing a fancy dress down to the ground even in the sweltering summer, she is wearing gold earrings and bracelets dangle, she is with a man whose Islamic name her mother cannot pronounce, and she has changed her name. She now calls herself Wangero Leewanika Kemanjo, having decided to give up the slave name handed down to her through her oppressors.

While eating Dee/Wangero announces that she wants to take with her the milk churn top and dasher as well as two quilts, artifacts from her family's past. She especially wants the quilts because they were stitched by hand by her grandmother from her grandmother's dresses, but her mother announces that she has promised to give Maggie the quilts when she gets married.

Dee/Wangero argues that Maggie is such a dolt that she would actually use the quilts to keep warm whereas she would hang them up for show. Maggie, having heard the argument, tries to play peacemaker and tells mother to let Dee/Wangero