Heritage and deracination in Walker's "Everyday Use."

Studies in Short Fiction, Spring, 1996 by David Cowart

In other words, the Africa-smitten Wangero one meets in the opening pages of the story is a precipitate of the cultural struggles of a generation--struggles adumbrated in the stages of this character's education. She had left home to attend school in Augusta, where apparently she immersed herself in the liberating culture she would first urge on her bewildered mother and sister, then denounce as oppressive. Now, with her black Muslim boyfriend or husband in tow (her mother hears his name as "Hakim-a-barber"), she has progressed to an idea of nationality radically at odds with an that has hitherto defined the racial identity of African Americans.

Though Walker depicts "Hakim-a-barber" as something of a fool, a person who has embraced a culture as alien as anything imposed on black people by white America, her quarrel is not with Islam, for she hints (through the perceptions of Wangero's mother) that a nearby Muslim commune is an admirable, even heroic, institution. But the neighboring Muslims have immersed themselves in agrarian practicality. They are unlikely to view relics of the rural life as collectors' items. Their sense of purpose, their identity, seems to contain no element of pose. Wangero and her companion, on the other hand, are all pose.

Wangero despises her sister, her mother, and the church that helped to educate her. Her quest is ultimately selfish, and Walker focuses the reader's growing dislike for the heroine in her indifference to Maggie, the pathetic sister she seems prepared to ignore in a kind of moral triage. Maggie represents the multitude of black women who must suffer while the occasional lucky "sister" escapes the ghetto. Scarred, graceless, "not bright" (50), and uneducated, Maggie is a living reproach to a survivor like her sister. Maggie is the aggregate underclass that has been left behind as a handful of Wangeros achieve their independence--an underclass scarred in the collective disasters Walker symbolizes neatly in the burning of the original Johnson home. Wangero had welcomed that conflagration. Her mother remembers the "look of concentration on her face as she watched the last dingy gray board of the house fall in toward the red-hot brick chimney. Why don't you do a dance around the ashes? I'd wanted to ask her. She had hated the house that much" (49-50). Wangero did not set the fire, but she delighted in its obliteration of the house that represented everything she sought to escape. When, predictably, the house reappears as before, she may have understood that fire alone cannot abolish a ghetto. This burned house, however, represents more than a failed attempt to eradicate poverty. It subsumes a whole African American history of violence, from slavery (one thinks of Maggie's scars multiplied among the escaped or emancipated slaves in Morrison's Beloved) through the ghetto-torching riots of 1964, 1965, 1967, and 1968 ("Burn, Baby, Burn!") to the pervasive inner-city violence of subsequent decades. The fire, that is, is the African American past, a conflagration from which assorted survivors stumble forward, covered like Maggie with scars of the body or like Wangero with scars of the soul.