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

Studies in Short Fiction, Spring, 1996 by David Cowart

Assimilation, torching the ghetto, Islam, the Africanist vision--Walker treats these alternatives with respect, even as she satirizes her character's uncritical embracing of one after another of them. The author knows that each represents an attempt to restore a sense of identity terribly impaired by the wrongs visited on black people in the new world. Wangero, however, fails properly to appreciate the black community's transformation of these wrongs into moral capital. She does not see the integrity of African American cultural institutions that evolved as the creative and powerful response to the general oppression. In simpler terms, she is ashamed of a mother and a sister who, notwithstanding their humble circumstances, exemplify character bred in adversity.

"It all comes back to houses," Walker remarks in her essay on Flannery O'Connor (In Search 58). Freud associates houses with women, and this story of three women is also the story of three houses, one that burned, one that shelters two of the fire's survivors, and one, never directly described, that is to be the repository of various articles of this family's past, its heritage. This last house, owned by and symbolic of Wangero, embodies also the cultural problem Walker seeks to address in her story. How, she asks, can one escape the margins without a catastrophic deracination? Is the freedom Wangero achieves somehow at odds with proper valuation of the immediate cultural matrix out of which she comes? Can she, like Dickens's Pip, embrace a grand heritage only by betraying the simpler heritage necessary to emotional and psychological wholeness?

Wangero claims to value heritage, and Walker is surely sympathetic to someone who seems to recognize, however clumsily, the need to preserve the often fragile artifacts of the African American past. But Walker exposes Wangero's preservationism as hopelessly selfish and misguided. Though the author elsewhere laments the paucity of photographs in the African American historical record (Living by the Word 63), she evinces little patience with Wangero's desire to photograph mother and cow in front of the house. Wangero's desire is to have a record of how far she has come. No doubt she will view as "quaint" these images of a rural past. She wants the photographs--and presently the churn lid, the dasher, and the quilts--for purposes of display, reminders that she no longer has to five in such a house, care for such a cow, have daily intercourse with such a mother and sister. She "makes the mistake," says Donna Haisty Winchell, "of believing that one's heritage is something that one puts on display if and when such a display is fashionable" (81). Wangero seems to think the African American past can be rescued only by being commodified. She wants to make the lid of the butter churn into a centerpiece for her table. She wants to hang quilts on the wall. She wants, in short, to do what white people do with the cunning and quaint implements and products of the past. Wangero fails to see the mote in her own eye when she reproaches her mother and her sister for a failure to value their heritage--she, who wants only to preserve that heritage as the negative index to her own sophistication.