Children born and raised in the United States often are unaware of the cultures and traditions that make their heritage unique and lasting, choosing instead to follow the ever changing pop culture of America. In her short story “Everyday Use,” Alice Walker explores the growing gaps between youth and the customs of their ancestors. Through the contrasting images of Maggie, her mother, and Dee, Walker shows a deep understanding and respect of the past and a fleeting interest in a trend.

Dee is portrayed as a shallow girl who makes her family feel “trapped and ignorant” (Walker, 100). Dee is a stubborn, independent girl who “wanted nice things” (100), and felt anger towards the poor conditions that left her unable to obtain them. When she is old enough she leaves her home for places more stylish than what it can offer. She comes back with a supposed new found love for her heritage, but she does not honor it. She asks her mother for the butter churn dash and top, but they will not be used for what they were created for. Instead, they will be used as a “centerpiece for the alcove table” (104) and she will “find something artistic to do with the dasher” (104). The pieces of the past are no long tools used to make life easier, but art pieces to make a home look trendy. When she claims the two quilts made by two generations of women in her family, and containing cloth from three, she holds them so tightly that even as her mother approaches them Dee “[moves] back just enough so that [she] couldn’t reach them” (Walker, 105). She claims she will honor them as no other will, but only a few years back she claimed that she didn’t want them because they were “out of style” (105). Dee doesn’t want the quilts or even the butter churn for their historical and familial significance, but instead because they will make her into the trendy person she always wanted to be.

Dee is an interesting character in such that she tends to hold power over the family through her education. She would read to her mother and sister, not because she cared for them, but to burn them “with a lot of knowledge” (100) while they were “trapped” (100) beneath her words. She uses the fact that she has a better education to show them that, in her eyes, they are backwards people, who are a constant embarrassment to her. Despite the fact that Dee has an amazing scholastic education, she has absolutely no knowledge of her heritage. She shows up at the house she would “never bring her friends” (101) to, and starts demanding things to prove her heritage without knowing what that is. Even her name isn’t good enough for her, instead she changes it to Wangero, a name she believes is her heritage, but her family’s name isn’t Wangero. She still doesn’t understand her roots, nor does she care to. She just wants to assume the appearance of a racially aware person, but she can’t even remember who she was named after or who created all the things in her house. The quilts and butter churns hold no sentimental value for her.

Maggie is a shy, quiet girl, who fears her sister’s dominance in the family. When Dee first comes out of the car she groans “like when you see the wriggling end of a snake in front of your foot on the road” (102). The power that Dee wields over the family causes Maggie to feel the same fear towards her as she would a snake. Maggie, however, is a living embodiment of the past. She knows how to use the butter churn and it was “Grandma Dee and Big Dee who taught her how to quilt herself” (Walker, 106). She learned the names of the past, she knows that it was “‘Aunt Dee’s first husband [that] whittled the dash,” (104) she even knew that “his name was Henry, but they called him Stash” (104). She will use the quilts as her grandmother meant them to be used, she will use the butter churn for the same purpose that Stash and Buddy whittled them for. In two years when the fad of being a root centered African-American dies out she won’t stop using the quilts or churn. She will use them as faithfully as the day she receives them. Because that is how her family used them for years. Not as decoration but as tools for survival.
Dee and Maggie’s mother who, unlike Dee, grew up oppressed by society, after all “who can even imagine [her] looking a strange white man in the eye?” (99). She learned to survive on her own:
[She] can kill and clean a hog as mercilessly as any man. [Her] fat keeps [her] hot in zero weather. I can work outside all day, breaking ice to get water for washing; I can eat pork liver cooked over an open fire minutes after it comes steaming from the hog. One winter I knocked a bull calf strait in the brain between the eyes with a sledge hammer and had the meat hung up to chill before nightfall (99).
Dee doesn’t see all the work that her mother does though, instead she sees a woman who “just [doesn’t] understand” (106) her heritage. In reality, her mother and Maggie understand much more of their heritage than Dee, because each day they live it. They fetch water for the washing rather than get a washing machine. And rather than going out and buying new blankets and household items for Maggie when she marries John Thomas, they hand down the same quilts that the great-grandmother made all those years ago. Dee thinks that her heritage is about the African peoples who were captured and sold as slaves, and while this is included in a person’s heritage, the heritage of the family itself is much more important than the heritage on a whole. Yes, Dee’s family was mostly likely slaves at one point, but they were also a strong, united family who lived their lives as people, not African-Americans.

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