Alice Walker "Everyday Use"

The small African American family of a mother and two girls evolves thought time. The two sisters are as different as could be, one who is a wallflower, with scars from a house fire many years back, while the other seems to be aggressive, over confident, and conceited. The mother is on the heavier side. The mother reminisces over Dee’s longing for the finer things in live, and her desire to dress more stylish, perhaps more “white”. After her graduation she moves and on this particular return home, her attitude is complete altered. She comes home changing her name to Wangero, insisting that Dee is a slave name. She is all about her heritage, and the importance of all the handmade items at the house. After dinner she starts summoning various items from the house, the mother is ok with it until she asks for a particular set of quilts that she promised to give Maggie the other sister. Wangero wont be putting them to everyday use but hanging them. Maggie has no problem complying for she believes that sacrifice is godly, only then does the mother snap, and tell Wangero, the daughter who never hears ‘NO’ that she in fact cannot have these particular quilts. Perhaps the mother felt that like the “white” people around her, Dee was used to getting everything she wanted, and that now when she had priorly rejected her heritage, and refused the quilts, now she decided she wanted them, and maybe that reminded the mother of a similarity to a “white” person in her eyes.