Everyday Use
Directed by	Bruce Schwartz
Produced by	Bruce Schwartz
Written by	writer Bruce Schwartz short story Alice Walker
Starring	Karen ffolkes Rachel Luttrell
Music by	Rocky Davis
Cinematography	Brian C. Glover
Editing by	Stephen Goetsch Kristofer Lindquist
Studio	Films for the Humanities and Sciences
Country	United States
Language	English

"Everyday Use" is a widely studied and frequently anthologized short story by Alice Walker. It was first published in 1973 as part of Walker's short story collection, In Love and Trouble.

The story is told in 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.

Contents 1 Plot 2 Characters 2.1 Maggie 2.2 Mama (Ms Johnson) 3 Discussion 3.1 Title Meaning 4 External links

[edit] Plot

The story concerns a rare visit Dee pays to her mother and sister, after a long absence. As she waits for her daughter, Mrs. 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, Mrs. 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 Mrs. Johnson can't pronounce. Dee offers an African phrase of greeting, and then, like a tourist, she immediately starts snapping polaroids of her mother, sister, and their house.

The main purpose of the visit is to appropriate some of the family's belongings, which Dee wants to turn into museum pieces. First, she claims the top of the butter churn, still full of clabber, saying she's going to make the top of it into a centerpiece and do "something artistic" with the dasher. Maggie winces at this because she loves the churn and knows its whole history, but she barely protests.

Mrs. Johnson looks at Maggie standing in the doorway, miserable but already resigned to her loss. In a sudden rush of almost religious feeling, she snatches the quilts from Dee and gives them to sad Maggie.

Dee snaps, absurdly, "You just don't understand...your heritage!" and leaves. Maggie and her mother, relieved, spend the rest of the day dipping snuff and enjoying each other's company.

[edit] Characters

[edit] Maggie

Maggie- The younger daughter that stays with mama, while Dee is in school. Maggie is also a very innocent, beautiful and humble character.

[edit] Mama (Ms Johnson)

'Mama' - The narrator of the story. She is a middle-aged or older African-American woman living with her younger daughter, Maggie. Although poor, she is strong and independent, and takes great pride in her way of life. She is over weight, and built more like a man than a woman. She has strong hands that are worn from a lifetime of work. Played by Lyne Odums in the film adaptation.

[edit] Discussion

The humble Maggie, with her shuffling gait and habit of cringing in corners, is a caricature of a different type. However, although she lacks most of Dee's advantages, she is able to carry on family traditions and appreciate the true meaning of the things Grandma Dee left behind.

Although Dee is portrayed in a negative light in the story, Walker based both sisters on aspects of her own character. Like Maggie, she suffered an injury in childhood that left her partially disfigured and very self-conscious. Like Dee, she rose from poverty, got an education, explored her African tribal ancestry, and participated in the Civil Rights Movement. Walker also resembles the level-headed mother, who turns a slight incident into a story, and who is able to show Maggie's hidden worth while casting a sardonic gaze on the glamorous Dee.

Alice Walker grew up in the rural South, and "Everyday Use" pays homage to her sharecropper ancestors.

Another important theme is standing up for what's right – not just for yourself, but for others too. Mrs. Johnson stands up to Dee at the end by snatching the quilts from her and restoring them to Maggie. She understands how much the quilts mean to Maggie; she also understands that Dee's reason for wanting the family's belongings is because the new fashion is African, and Dee really wants to be popular, and fit "in" with the "in-crowd." That is why she rejected the name her mother gave her and became "Wangero." In former days, she didn't even care about the house or any of its contents; in fact, she hated it and may even have burned it down to get away from it.

[edit] Title Meaning

The meaning of the title requires the reader to read deeper within the short story. The phrase "Everyday Use" brings about the question whether or not heritage should be preserved and displayed or integrated into everyday life. "Everyday Use" pertains not only to the quilt, but more so to people's culture and heritage and how they choose to honor it.

Walker develops a critique of postmodern ideals and the detachable nature of symbols. In hanging the quilts, Dee would be effectively removing them from their "everyday" embedded contextual meaning and creating a symbol out of what was a storytelling device. Maggie, in opposing Dee's intentions, advocates the real African tradition: the oral tradition.

[edit] External links

• A scholarly article by Helga Hoel about "Everyday Use" with links to similar articles

v • d • e Works of Alice Walker Novels and short story collections The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970) • Everyday Use (1973) • In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women (1973) • Roselily (1973) • Meridian (1976) • The Color Purple (1982) • You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down: Stories (1982) • Beauty: When the Other Dancer Is the Self (1983) • Am I Blue? (1986) • To Hell With Dying (1988) • The Temple of My Familiar (1989) • Finding the Green Stone (1991) • Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992) • The Complete Stories (1994) • By The Light of My Father's Smile (1998) • The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart (2000) • Now Is The Time to Open Your Heart (2005) • Devil's My Enemy (2008) Poetry collections Once (1968) • Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems (1973) • Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning (1979) • Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful (1985) • Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthling Poems (1991) • Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth (2003) • A Poem Traveled Down My Arm: Poems And Drawings (2003) • Collected Poems (2005) • Poem at Thirty-Nine • Expect nothing Non-fiction In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983) • Living by the Word (1988) • Warrior Marks (1993) • The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult (1996) • Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer's Activism (1997) • Go Girl!: The Black Woman's Book of Travel and Adventure (1997) • Pema Chodron and Alice Walker in Conversation (1999) • Sent By Earth: A Message from the Grandmother Spirit After the Bombing of the World Trade Center and Pentagon (2001) • Women • We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For (2006) • Mississippi Winter IV See also The Color Purple (film) • The Color Purple (musical)