Evertday Use
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published in 1973 as part of Walkers short story collection, In Love and Trouble.
The story is told in the first person by the “Mama” (Mrs. Johnson), a Black woman living in the Deep South with one of her two daughters. The story humorously illustrates the differences between Mrs. Johnson and her shy younger daughter Maggie, who still live traditionally in the rural South, and her educated, successful daughter Dee (or “Wangero”, as she prefers to be called), who scorns her immediate roots in favor of a pretentious native African identity.
A film version was released in 2003.
Plot”Everyday Use” is a widely studied and much-anthologized short story by Alice Walker. It was first
The story concerns a rare visit Dee pays to her mother and sister, after a long absence. As she waits for her daughter, Ms Johnson reflects on how much Dee hated her home life when she was a child–so much that the author hints that she set fire to the house, nearly killing Maggie and physically scarring her for life. After the fire, Ms Johnson raised money through the local church to send Dee away to school. Maggie, however, remained at home and learned traditional skills from her family. At the time of the story, she is preparing to marry a local farmer.
Dee arrives wearing a gorgeous wrapper and accompanied by a young American Muslim man whose name Ms Johnson cant pronounce. Dee offers an African phrase of greeting, then, like a tourist, immediately starts snapping polaroids of her mother and sister and their house.
The main purpose of the visit, it turns out, is to appropriate some of the familys belongings, which Dee wants to turn into museum pieces. First, she claims the top of the butter churn, still full of clabber, saying shes going to make the top of it into a centerpiece and do “something