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

African American Review, Fall, 2000 by Sam Whitsitt

Epiphany is like a "second thought." There is a difference, a lapse, between the two moments. To give or have a second thought, as it were, there must have been a first, distanced in time and space, but which comes to be first only secondarily. And for this to occur, there must be a certain detour, a departure; one must leave home in order to become aware of home, even though this departure holds no guarantee of a return. Epiphany would seem to necessitate this departure, this turning one's back on something. As Mama tells us as she waits for Dee, "I have deliberately turned my back on the house" (26), and on Maggie, too, her younger daughter, scarred by a fire which burned down the first house and which has left her ever since with "chin on chest, eyes on ground, feet in shuffle" (27). But this turning away does not eclipse or erase a link to what one leaves behind. As one turns the gaze of expectation away from what is then left behind, there is something which snags. And Maggie is there, right behind Mama 's back.

Dee, however, does not seem to be one who is snagged by anything. "She would always look anyone in the eye," even strange white men, and "hesitation was no part of her nature." Unlike Maggie, with her eyes on the ground, and unlike Mama, who looks up but cannot imagine "looking a strange white man in the eye" (25), Dee would never lower her eyes under the gaze of Whites. As Mama says, Dee "was determined to stare down any disaster. ... Her eyelids would not flicker for minutes at a time"(26). And Dee made it out, and seems to have made it in the South of the Sixties where, if the gaze itself of the Whites wasn't successful in making a Black lower his or her eyes and get back in place, there was no hesitation in using whatever means necessary. But making it, for Dee, and no doubt many others, had a price. The force required to stare the white world down was equaled by the intensity of a gaze, which burned her links to her past. If Dee didn't actually start the fire which burned down their first house, the "lo ok of concentration" (25) on her face as she watched it burn could have "stared" it down. And having burned that ground which she saw as suffocating, she sought a new ground in the burgeoning Islamic and Back-to-Africa movements of the time. When the flashy Dee finally does return, greeting her mother in Arabic and declaring that she no longer bears the name "Dee," but the African name "Wangero," and that "Dee," " 'She's dead'" (29)--it's as if there is not even a tombstone to mark the presence of her absence. Her return seems less a return than a passing by; she appears a curious visitor who has momentarily stopped off a road which began and ends elsewhere.

Yet Dee has returned. And Mama is mistaken about how Dee will react when she arrives. She believes that Dee still has an aversion for her home, and that when she sees the house, "she will want to tear it down" (27). But this is not what happens. She arrives, gets out of the car, approaches her mother and sister, but then stops short. While Dee's male friend attempts to hug Maggie, who shrinks back, Dee makes no physical contact; she touches no one and no thing. Not yet. She tells her mother just to stay put. Then she turns, goes back to the car, gets her camera, returns, and begins taking pictures: "She stoops down quickly and lines up picture after picture of me sitting there in front of the house with Maggie cowering behind me. She never takes a shot without making sure the house is included. When a cow comes nibbling around the edge of the yard she snaps it and me and Maggie and the house" (28-29). Then Dee goes back to the car, leaves the camera, and only then does she return, once again, this time to st ep into that world she has just framed, to greet her mother--not however with a dream-like hug, but with a kiss on the forehead.