The Importance Of Heritage In Alice Walker's Everyday Use

Mama's view of the importance of an education is much different from the importance

Dee Wangero holds on the necessity of being educated. In "Everyday Use" Momma describes at one point how Dee "burned us with a lot of knowledge we didn't necessarily need to know"(Walker 112). In the era Mama was raised, women were expected to cook and clean and find meaning in life through these daily household chores. Momma inherited her name and the typical role black African American women were socially fit to do, and this satisfied her. She saw no need for an education when everything was fine in the stagnant place she held in society. In Sam Whitsitt's In Spite of it All: Reading Alice Walker's "Everyday Use" he writes, that quilting

is "a gendered practice that change(s) from one generation to the next"(para. 5). However in the era Dee and Maggie are being raised in, women are progressing in society.

Given the opportunities to be educated and established in society, Dee sees this as an opportunity to progress from her expected role in society and pursue an education. In Heritage and Deracination in Walker's "Everyday Use" David Cowart writes how, " Wangero has realized the dream of the oppressed: she has escaped the ghetto" (22). Growing up in the South with Maggie and Momma, Dee saw what the typical African American life is like. But, growing up in this era she was also exposed to the positive factors education could bring. Dee at one point in the story tells Maggie, "It's really a new day for us"(Walker 167). Dee knows education is important, to establish herself from just being another black woman to inherit the cultural role expected of her.

Mama sees the quilts as symbols for the hard work her ancestors put in to make it in life through the struggles the African American race faced. In Sisters' Choices: Quilting Aesthetics in Contemporary African-American Women's Fiction Margot Anne Kelley explains, "quilts are one of the very few sites in which African American women's creative impulses have been preserved, such a family heirloom symbolically identif[ies] a tradition of black female artistry" (169). Mama is proud of these quilts and wants to put them into everyday use. She uses the quilts for the exact reason they were made. This relates to the way she looks at her heritage. Mama is proud of her background and wants to put the skills left behind from her mother's and grandmother's into everyday use because this is how she appreciates where she has come from.

In the story Mama seems confused because Dee seems offended by the fact that she is named Dee after so many women in her family that came before her. Mama in "Everyday Use" states how she "probably could have carried [the name] back beyond the Civil War," whereas Dee exclaims she couldn't bear to be named after "people who oppress her" (Walker 164). Dee Wangero does not view being named after several generations of people as positively as Mama does. She is ashamed of it. As Cowart writes, "she does not see the integrity of African American cultural institutions that evolved as the creative and powerful response to the general oppression" (24). Dee only sees the oppression experienced by African Americans in society and is therefore ashamed to be attached to the name. Mama, on the other hand, sees how her African American ancestors pushed through this oppression and proudly carries the name.

In their minds, Mama and Maggie place Dee on a pedestal because they feel inferior and unaccepted by her. In "Everyday Use" Mama talks about how she wishes to be united with Dee, she tells, "sometimes I dream a dream in which Dee and I are suddenly brought together on a TV program" (Walker 161). Mama views Dee as a star. However, unlike how most families would be proud of each other and where they come from, Mama knows she is not accepted by Dee. Dee makes it apparent there are many things she would like to change about Mama to make her acceptable in the type of society Dee lives in. In Fight vs. Flight, Susan Farrell explains how "Mama's vision of her light-skinned, slender, witty self is actually Dee's wish or only Mama's perception of what she imagines Dee would like her to be" (para. 4). However, the middle class society Dee associates herself with separates herself from the things Mama takes pride in. Mama takes pride in herself for having the ability and quality to handle a man's job. Farrell also tells "once it becomes fashionable to have rural poverty-stricken roots, Dee wants a record of her own humble beginnings" (para. 5). Mama wants to be accepted in her daughter Dee's eyes but knows in her world, being a part of and associating with the African American society is not something to be proud of.

Dee views Mama and Maggie with a view of shame and this oppressive view gives her a goal to continue to separate herself from the life she no longer wants to associate with. In Patches, Houston A. Baker Jr. and Charlotte Pierce Baker describe how for Dee "her goals include the appropriation of exactly what she needs to remain fashionable in the eyes of a world pretended wholeness, a world of ... Polaroid cameras- devices that instantly process and record experience as 'framed photographs'" (161). Dee's place in society takes precedent in her life and she discovers what seems to bring her to importance, which is ridding herself from the same society as Mama and Maggie. David Cowart points out that Dee does this because "Wangero's desire is to have a record of how far she has come" (24). At one point in "Everyday Use," when Dee arrives and snaps a Polaroid picture of Mama and Maggie waiting in front of the house, she purposefully excludes herself from the photo to separate herself from the low pedestal Mama and Maggie sit on in society. In the story when Dee now introduces herself to Mama as Wangero, her new African name, Mama asks "what happened to Dee" and Dee Wangero harshly responds, "she's dead"(Walker 164). Dee Wangero sees this society as dragging her down, so figuratively she kills Dee and becomes Wangero giving herself a name to take pride in. Although Dee Wangero dreads associating with Mama and Maggie, she shows sympathy for them in the story. Dee tells Maggie, "You ought to try to make something of yourself too, Maggie" (Walker 167). Dee Wangero shows care towards Maggie in this statement. Dee wishes Maggie would see the importance of establishing themselves in society so Dee could have the opportunity to recreate relationships with Mama and Maggie.

The quilts coveted by Dee Wangero in the story connect to the different ways Mama and Dee Wangero look at their heritage. David Cowart tells, "the quilts Dee Wangero desires link her generation to prior generations and thus they represent the larger African American past"(21) and that "the visitor [Dee Wangero] rightly recognizes the quilts as part of a fragile heritage, but she fails to see the extent to which she herself has traduced that heritage"(22). In a sense, Dee looks at these quilts in the same view she sees her heritage. Dee only wants these quilts for show and appreciates their beauty but does not understand the importance of where they came from, just as she does not understand the importance her heritage holds in establishing herself as a person.

Throughout the story Walker uses symbols that relate to each character in different ways and how they view heritage, one of which is the burned house.

Cowart illustrates how "this house represents more than a failed poverty...the fire is the American past, a conflagration from which assorted survivors stumble forward covered like Maggie with scars of the body or like Dee Wangero with scars of the soul"(23). Wangero makes it evident that she hates her past heritage and throughout the story it is even questioned if she burned the house herself. It is something she knows would scar her in society so she hides where she came from inside of her. In "Everyday Use" Mama tells that as the house burned down she wanted to ask Dee, "why don't you do a dance around the ashes... she had hated the house that much" (Walker 162). The burning of the house to Dee represents the burning up of her heritage. She escaped from this fire without any scars externally, just as she escaped from the societal restrictions of being an African American. However, her soul was scarred. Dee can deny her past all she wants and try to put it behind her, but the fact that she comes from an African American heritage will always have a restricting hold on her

life.

While Dee's soul was scarred on the inside by the burning of the house, Maggie was scarred on the outside. Her skin was burned and scarred. Mama explains, "sometimes I can still hear the flames and feel Maggie's arms sticking to me, her hair smoking and her dress falling off in little black peppery flakes" (Walker 162). Dee had escaped from their heritage, which only left her soul scarred. Maggie however, is stuck in the role set up for her by her heritage. Maggie did not make it out of the fire safely and it scarred her skin, just as she did not make it out of the ghetto, her African American heritage gives her an external scar in society's eyes.

The cultural differences that exist between Mama and Dee represent the passing of an old era and the coming of a new one. Mama represents the old era where black women take up the roles the previous women left for them. They take pride in the heritage of their role in society. Dee on the other hand represents the new innovative places in society women are now capable of taking. Farrell explains how "both Maggie and her mother react again with the fear of the unknown of something strange and different"(para. 9). Maggie and Mama represent this old era that is passing. In Mama's time it was a cultural tradition for women to stick to the roles of quilting, picking crops and taking care of the household. These are things Mama's ancestors did and they lived a sufficient life. Mama and Maggie went on to take this place in society.

However, with time changing a new era is progressing for women. Dee saw this and decided to make it her goal to break free from the African American cultural cycle Mama and Maggie are stuck in. Farrell points out how "Mama remembers Dee, as a self-centered and demanding, yes, but she also remembers this daughter as a determined fighter"(para. 6). Dee sees that she has the opportunity to escape from this African American heritage holding her back and she seizes that opportunity. Nancy Tuten in Alice Walker's "Everyday Use" writes that Dee had a "determination to be educated"(para. 2). Dee's determination to progress represents the new era that was developing at the time in which women could succeed to hold a place in society.

The difference in era's between Mama, Maggie and Dee Wangero demonstrate how society can impact a person's viewpoint on their own life and culture. Dee is an informed citizen with exposure to the real world. Her education provided her with a realistic view that exists for African Americans. Cowart states that Dee Wangero, "has progressed to an idea of nationality radically at odds with all that has hitherto defined the racial identity of African Americans" (23). The idea of the African American nationality Dee has come to view has given