In Spite of It All: A Reading of Alice Walker's "Everyday Use" - Critical Essay

African American Review, Fall, 2000 by Sam Whitsitt

Our mothers and grandmothers, some of them: moving to music not yet written. And they waited.

They waited for a day when the unknown thing that was in them would be made known; but they guessed, somehow in their darkness that on the day of their revelation they would be long dead. Therefore to Toomer they walked, and even ran, in slow motion. (Walker, "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens" 40)

"Everyday Use" begins with women waiting: Mama Johnson and her daughter Maggie, waiting at home, in the deep rural South, a place they had never left, for a visit from Dee, the daughter who had not waited, the daughter who could not wait to leave home. "I will wait for her in the yard that Maggie and I made so clean and wavy yesterday afternoon" (23), says Mama. But Mama and Maggie are not just waiting for Dee. They are waiting for redemption. Mama tells us that she has dreamed of a certain kind of redemption. In her dream, Dee, the daughter who has style, wits, and a cold determination to "get out," has made it big in the world out there; she is on some kind of Johnny Carson talk show, and Mama, having arrived backstage in a "soft-seated limousine," is ushered in, met by the Johnny Carson-type host, told "what a fine girl" she has, and brought on stage to be joined with her daughter Dee, who "is embracing me with tears in her eyes." In the dream, Mama is "the way my daughter would want me to be: a hundred po unds lighter, my skin like an uncooked barley pancake. My hair glistening... [and] Johnny Carson has much to do to keep up with my quick and witty tongue "But Mama is well aware that she isn't like that at all, and that the dream "is a mistake" (24). That she sometimes dreams this dream speaks, however, not merely of "her desire to be respected by her daughter" (Tuten 126), and her misdirected wish to measure up to standards of a White world, of the "Other"; it speaks more significantly of that desire to know, no matter how misdirected, some "unknown thing" inside her. But unlike the women Walker describes in the quote that prefaces this section of the essay, Mama is not moving toward someone like Toomer: Only in her dream does she move out of her place; in real life, as it were, she is waiting for her daughter in her yard, which is "like an extended living room" (23). She is at home. And it is at home, for Walker, that the unknown thing is finally to be found.

In Walker's writing, redemption will take one away and bring one back, in a perhaps humbling but empowering way, to something close to home. This form of redemption takes place as an epiphany: You realize that what can save you isn't out there, but has been nearby all along, beside you, even in you, but never noticed, never heard, or never given a second thought. Walker's well-known essay "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens" turns on the idea of epiphany. It is here that she mentions the oft-cited epiphanic moment in the Smithsonian Institution when she saw an exquisite quilt on exhibit "made by an anonymous Black woman in Alabama, a hundred years ago" (46). In her essay, however, as the title suggests, it is not the quilt itself, or not only the quilt, to which Walker attends, but rather her mother's quilts, flower gardens, storytelling, cooking, and the skilled and careful handling of everyday life, all of which represent a creative dimension that had been there all along, at home, nearby, but to which Walk er had not given that second thought.