Alice Walker's short story "Everyday Use" first appeared in 1973. Many things have changed since then. Afro (or fro) hairdos are no longer popular and commonplace. Thirty-five years ago they were as common as the shaved heads of today's males, both Afro-American and caucasian.
My relatively current unabridged dictionary does not have an entry for "dashiki," the once very popular male shirt and female dress style that Walker refers to in her story - a style that had brief popularity with caucasian purchasers as well as ethnically diverse contemporaries.
Although Arabic- or African-sounding names remain commonplace among those we today refer to as African-Americans, I have not recently heard the foreign greetings Asalamalakim and Was-su-zo-Tean-o that Walker employed with her characters Wangero and Hakim. Their use makes the story seem "dated." Styles and haircuts change. Look at the haircuts and flared trousers worn by professional golfers in replays of tournaments in the mid-70's and try to repress your giggles.
All of that set aside, Walker's story addresses real human concerns that are timeless and universal. The theme or unifying concept of the story is that a mother ingrained with tolerance of a willful and demanding child will take a stand in defense of justice and fairness when a weaker and more timid offspring is about to be victimized.
The narrator and hero of the story is an uneducated black woman, Mama Johnson. There is no appearance or reference to the sire of Mamma's grown daughters, Maggie and Dee, who has adopted the name Wangero Leewanika Kemanjo.
Mama describes herself with simply worded accuracy. She had no education after second grade when her school closed down. "I am a large, big-boned woman with rough, man-working hands. . . . I wear flannel nightgowns to bed and overalls during the day. I can kill a hog as mercilessly as a man. My fat keeps me hot in zero weather. I can work outside all day, breaking ice to get water for washing; I can eat pork liver cooked over the open fire minutes after it comes steaming from the hog. One winter I knocked a bull calf straight in the brain between the eyes with a sledge hammer and had the meat hung up to chill before nightfall."
Not a demonstratively affectionate mother, Mama is accurately perceptive about her two daughters. Maggie is "homely and ashamed of the burn scars down her arms and legs." She is like a "lame animal, perhaps a dog run over by some careless person rich enough to own a car." She walks "chin on chest, eyes on ground, feet in shuffle," painfully shy and non-assertive.
In startling contrast to both mother and sister, Dee (Wangero) "is lighter than Maggie, with nicer hair and a fuller figure." With help from the church, Mama raised the money to send Dee to school in Augusta. "At sixteen she had a style of her own: and knew what style was." Dee was ashamed of the family home, and there is a suggestion that she may have caused the first house to burn down, badly injuring her sister. She lives elsewhere and comes occasionally to visit.
Though she once said she would never bring her friends to the reconstructed three-room
house in the pasture, she arrives this time with a male companion whose name Mama finds unpronounceable. He suggests they call him Hakim-a-barber, but Mama refers to him by his Arabic greeting Asalamalakim. "Hair is all over his head a foot long and hanging from his chin like a kinky mule tail." After Maggie recoils from his attempted hug of greeting, he attempts a fancy handshake that is also a failure. We never learn whether he is married to Dee or merely an acquaintance. He is a Muslim and has adopted the religion's dietary restrictions.
Dee is wearing what Mama describes as "A dress down to the ground. . . so loud it hurt my eyes. There are yellows and oranges enough to throw back the light of the sun. . . . Earrings gold, too, and hanging down to her shoulders. Bracelets dangling and making noises. . .The dress is loose and flows. . . I like it." Maggie is astonished at her sister's hair, which "stand 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."
Mama understands what Dee is doing with her Polaroid camera shots of mother and cowering sister, all of which include the house as well. In youth she had been ashamed of her home, her illiterate mother and homely sister. Now she seems bent on assembling a pictorial record of the origins she has transcended to become her stylish and glamorous self. She lays claim to the churn top whittled by a tree by Uncle Buddy. She will display it as a centerpiece on her alcove table. She also takes the churn dasher for which she will find some artistic use. It was whittled, Maggie recalls, by Aunt Dee's first husband. On the handle are sunken depressions caused by thumbs and fingers using the dasher to make butter.
The climax of the story comes as she tries to add to her plunder two handmade quilts made by her ancestors from scraps of dresses, pieces of Grandpa's shirt and Great Grandpa's Civil War uniform. Mama remembers that Dee refused to take one of the quilts with her when she went off to college, saying they were old-fashioned. But Mama puts her foot down. Those quilts have been promised to Maggie as hope chest items for her scheduled marriage to a local man.
Dee protests, "Maggie can't appreciate these quilts. . . . She'd probably be backward enough to put them to everyday use." Dee's plans are to hang them as art objects; certainly not to put them on beds for warmth. We know Maggie is upset by her sister's presumptuous demands. She makes no verbal protest but we hear something fall in the kitchen and a door slam. To Maggie the quilts are reminders of grandparents and great grandparents. Still she is willing to part with them.
When Mama sees her homely, scarred daughter's resigned acceptance of the divinely ordained precept that Dee always gets whatever she wants, she did "something [she] never had done before: hugged Maggie. . . , then dragged her on into the room, snatched the quilts out of Miss Wangero's hands and dumped them into Maggie's lap."
Dee protests that Mama and Maggie don't understand their "heritage." She gives Maggie a farewell kiss, dons a pair of stylish sunglasses and drives off with Hakim. As their car disappears, Maggie smiles her first real smile, and she and Mama together enjoy a dip of snuff.
That summary fails to include aspects of Mama's humorous self-characterization. While awaiting Dee's arrival, she relates her dream of appearing on a televised "This Is Your Life Show" to shake hands with a Johnny Carson-type and be introduced to her svelte, stylish, successful daughter. In her fantasy Mama is "the way my daughter would want me to be: a hundred pounds lighter, my skin like an uncooked barley pancake." Her hair would glisten in the lights and she would exchange witty remarks with the suave TV host. Returning to reality, she realizes she's never been able to look a white man in the eye much less trade clever conversation. Such confidence belongs to daughter Dee, not to Mama Johnson.
Illiterate Mama reads people as well as a trained psychologist. She sees the artificiality of Dee's trendy adoption of African heritage. She still has a mother's love for this daughter whose visit proves to be motivated by little more than antique-gathering. Those hand-pieces quilts are to Mama significant and valuable in ancestral connections dating to the Civil War (not to Africa) and craftsmanship and usefulness beyond anything imaginable by her sophisticated daughter, who speaks of them as "priceless." Let Dee Wangero impress her upscale acquaintances with the quaint churn top and dasher. For Mama and Maggie, satisfaction resides in the raked clay of her yard, lips packed inelegantly with checkerberry snuff, and secure knowledge of justice and fair treatment of family.