In Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use,” Dee’s life is a pieced together quilt of cultural ideals and her own skewed perceptions of heritage. As a child she viewed her family with shame. As an adult, Dee sees them with interest but with the remove of an anthropologist, embracing of the symbols of family and hard life but contemptuous of the reality in her mother and sister.
Even as Dee embraces the history of her family through objects such as the food, furniture, and quilts she is unable to reconcile these objects with her family and the lives they live.From the outset of the story, Dee is shown to be the stronger and more capable of the sisters. Dee is liberated by her education and changing persona; she changes from feeling shame at her poor background and blackness to a feeling of pride in her African roots and by extension her poor family’s roots. From her mother’s narrative, it is easy to see that education was a tool Dee used to separate and place her above her mother and sister, “She used to read to us without pity; forcing words, lies, other folks habits, whole lives upon us two, sitting trapped and ignorant underneath her voice” (Walker).
Rather than enriching her household with the things she learned, passing her knowledge onto her sister and mother, Dee used this knowledge as proof that they lacked her intelligence. Even though separated for some time prior to when the story takes place, Dee has been able to continue imparting on her sister and mother the feeling of not being good enough. As her mother explains, “She wrote me once that no matter where we ‘choose’ to live, she will manage to come see us. But she will never bring her friends” (Walker).
Dee views the circumstances in which her mother and sister live as a matter of choice, not economics.They are not roots that she has felt pride in. Despite their lack of money, proven through not only the details of their home but the need to seek money for Dee’s education elsewhere, Dee still wishes for her family to be different, and failing this, to be unseen in their difference. When Dee arrives for her visit, her physical difference is what first strikes Maggie and her mother.
Dee “who wanted nice things. A yellow organdy dress to her graduation from high school” (Walker), exits the car dressed in African inspired clothes. Even her hair is different, “It stands straight up like the wool on a sheep.It is black as night and around the edges are two long pigtails that rope about like small lizards disappearing behind her ears” (Walker).
While no description is provided of what Dee’s hair had looked like before, Maggie’s reaction of “Uhnnnh” is illustrative in showing the change. She is no longer attempting to gain acceptance into white society but instead seeks to be embraced by the African side of her culture. Looking for acceptance and possibly finding something of herself in African American culture that she did not find in her previous searches, Dee dons another persona.Part of her new persona, Dee’s change in attitude is as bright as her new clothing.
From the outset she greets them cheerfully and shows immediate interest in capturing the trip using her Polaroid camera. Prior to her arrival, her mother anticipated Dee’s disapproval of the house, “It is three rooms […] There are no real windows, just some holes cut in the sides […] The house is in a pasture, too […] No doubt when Dee sees it she will tear it down” (Walker). However, Dee’s enthusiasm in photographing the very things thought to bring her shame, show her new attitude towards her mother’s home.However, Dee’s insistence on each picture containing the house though, is telling of her attitude towards the objects of poverty and reality of her family’s daily life.
Though the photographs are of her mother and sister, the living reality of her home and family life, she concentrates on the house and uses its poverty to highlight them. Dee can no more separate her mother and sister from the house than she ever could. It is not a change in her view of her mother and sister that allow her to celebrate rather than feel shame at their circumstances.Instead it is her view of their circumstances from being shameful to authentic, which has brought about the change.
Further showing that Dee’s viewpoint may have changed but her view of her sister and mother has not is the discussion that surrounds Dee’s name change. No longer is she Dee but Wangero Leewanika Kemanjo. The name Dee, she says, is dead and was a connection to the people who oppress her. Her new opinion of her old name strikes her mother as strange, “’You know as well as me you was name after your aunt Dicie’” (Walker).
When asked to trace the name backward after her sister, Dicie, Dee’s mother lists the list of people who were named it before but stops after her Great grandmother Dee. She does not see Dee’s (now Wangero) point; the name is a family name. Regardless of the original basis for the name, whether from the family’s roots in slavery or before that, the name has become something that has been passed down from mother to child. By changing her name, Dee feels she is connecting herself more closely to the African part of her history but is also distancing herself from the reality of her family’s history.
Sensing the condescending attitude of Dee and Hakim-a-barber, through the “eye signals”(Walker) sent over her head, Dee’s mother consents to learn Dee’s new name. Perhaps this condescension felt familiar to Dee’s mother, in the sea of Dee’s other changes of style and attitude. It is here that the changes made by Dee to her clothes and hair are first shown to be superficial. Though she continues to celebrate the circumstances of her mother and sister, it is obvious that Dee still feels herself to be above and removed from Maggie and her mother.
Dee’s enthusiasm for all things traditional continues as the story moves on. Even the food, though probably something that in the past she had grumbled over, now has novel appeal. As her mother notes, “She talked a blue streak over the sweet potatoes. Everything delighted her” (Walker).
It is from here that Dee begins her accruement of everyday items, deemed by her as artistic. The two quilts, hand sewn by the women in her family using pieces from her great great grandfather civil war uniform, are the centerpiece of Dee’s accumulation.However, for my purpose, Dee’s claims to the butter churn lid and dasher are far more telling of her wish for pieces of rather than the whole picture. From her mothers description of the butter churn, it is obvious that it was no mere decoration, “the milk in it crabber by now” (Walker).
It, like the quilts, was meant for and, unlike the quilts, was used for every day use. However, Dee intends to take the churn top, which was whittled by a family member and use it as a centerpiece. The dasher she will just find something artistic to do with.Like the quilts, which were made for warmth and not decoration, the butter churn pieces will be turned into things to point out to guests and frame a charming story around.
Why only the pieces and not the whole of the churn? Dee pays no mind to the top being only part because it is in her nature that Dee sees only parts of the whole. Throughout the story, Dee’s shame in her family is illustrated in any number of ways. Her mother’s narrative tells of a girl who the mother wishes, for fantasy sake at least, that she were good enough for.As Dee’s adult self presents itself in the larger part of the story, it is obvious that though the words have changed her tune has stayed the same.
Dee says to her mother before she leaves, “You don’t understand. ” “What don’t I understand? ” her mother asks. “Your heritage,” Dee replies (Walker). To Dee heritage is an abstracted idea, written by historians and scientists, activists and politicians.
To her mother and Maggie, heritage is the people who came before made real through memory and shared living.To Dee this is a foreign idea; the distance she has created between herself and her family has allowed no room for memory and no wish for a shared life. Dee still holds herself apart and at a higher esteem from her mother and sister, even as she glories in artistic potential of the remnants of their memories and lives. “You ought to try to make something of yourself too, Maggie, it’s a new day for us.
But from the way you and Mama still live you’d never know it” (Walker) are her parting words, showing that even as Dee embraces the objects of her heritage, she still holds herself at a shameful remove from all that created them.
