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

African American Review, Fall, 2000 by Sam Whitsitt

Dee returns, but delays her arrival. Only after a series of photos, of carefully lined up frames, of pictures which do not include her, does she then include herself in the scene. It's as if before entering that scene Dee wants to make sure that she has a picture of herself not being in the picture. She wants to frame that world, define its borders, give it a wholeness which then allows her to handle it without being a part of it. This is what the Bakers call Dee's "fashionably 'aesthetic' distance from southern expediencies," her "'framed' experience." The Bakers speak contemptuously of Dee's "world of pretended wholeness," of "framed and institutionalized art"--her "Polaroid" world. In what seems to be an afterthought, however, they indirectly acknowledge that framing is not in itself pejorative, since even quilters need frames, and quilters too bring to their work a "completeness" (161). The Bakers do not ask how one differentiates between good and bad, or authentic and inauthentic frames; they seem to a ssume that, since quilting is authentic, the very authenticity of its frame unframes it--that the authentic frame of a quilter is not really a frame at all, and what one can call the narrative frame of the story cannot be a frame since Mama, who narrates the story, is incapable of framing: "The mother's cognition contains no categories for framed art" (163-64). The Bakers polarize this world into one of good and bad framing: "aesthetic" wholes, which are false and inauthentic, and represented by Dee; and wholes which emerge from "social activity," like quilting, which are authentic and true, unframed, and represented by Mama and Maggie. In this argument, the politics of identity and wholeness seem to tighten the threads, as it were, of the quilt of true community, and it is not surprising that Dee, a wayward daughter, gets hounded out of the picture. Patricia Kane sees Dee as the prodigal daughter who, in what for her is Walker's parody of the prodigal son story, gets just the opposite of a welcome; Nancy Tut en claims that Mama has a "distaste for Dee's egotism" (126), that Maggie has only "disgust with her sister," and that, "in the end, Dee's oppressive voice is mute, for Mama has narrated her out of the story altogether." The Bakers are more vitriolic: Dee is evil, a "serpent" in Mama's "calm pasture" (159); inauthentic ("Dee is not an example of the indigenous rapping and styling out of Afro-America" [160]); and a traitor ("Individualism and a flouting of convention in order to achieve 'aesthetic' success constitute acts of treachery in 'Everyday Use'" [163]). Dee, however, is not to be repressed.

There are several compelling arguments for why the reader must attend to Dee more carefully. In an interview in 1974, a year after "Everyday Use" was published, Walker expanded on a poem she had written entitled "The Girl Who Died #2." It is about a girl who attended the same college as did Walker and who committed suicide. "I learned, "writes Walker, "from the dead girl's rather guilty-sounding 'brothers and sisters' that she had been hounded constantly because she was so 'incorrect' she thought she could be a black hippie. To top that, they tried to make her feel like a traitor because she refused to limit her interest to black men" (81). It takes no great leap to see that the Bakers' reading of Dee is not dissimilar to how the "brothers and sisters" read this girl, and it seems likewise clear that Walker has little sympathy for identity politics whose logic turns the contrary and the wayward into traitors. The stakes are, of course, raised as soon as one makes a link between Walker and the wayward, a link she herself does not shy away from. When referring to Dee, Walker calls her an "autonomous person," and she tells us that she, like Dee, has an "African name ... and I love it and use it when I want to, and I love my Kenyan gowns and my Ugandan gowns--the whole bit--it's part of me" (Washington 102). Moreover, the name Dee is given, "Wangero," is the same name Walker herself was given when she went to Africa (Christian 13).