Everyday Use

Leonardo Da Vinci once said, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” If that is the case, then Maggie wins hands down over her older sister, Dee, whom, from what seems the beginning, has been her family’s ultimate representation of the externally cosmopolitan, debased, and contemporarily delusional woman “getting-in-touch-with-her-inner-self-through-learning-about-her-heritage-in-a-white-and-�americanized’-educational-institution.” And, whereas Maggie is the soft, gentle, and truly “educated” woman of their ancestors as shown through Alice Walker’s quilt motif utilized in her story, “Everyday Use.”

First, consider Dee, also known as “Wangero,” as she likes to call herself because she says she can no longer bear being named (and called) after the people who oppress her (Walker 29). This woman, the very same person that was borne of the same mother as Maggie, has a totally different outlook of and approach to life than her counterpart. As mama describes it, she is the type of person that “wanted nice things” and one whom, from sixteen, “had a style of her own: and knew what style was” (26). Additionally, that she is a woman of “flair,” “brightness,” and “intense colorfulness of style which veritably blocks the sun,” as Houston A. Baker and Charlotte Pierce-Baker speak of in their critical essay on Alice Walker’s use of the quilt in “Everyday Use” (“Patches: Quilts and Community”159). Her outlook seems to be for great aesthetics and grandeur provided by and through her artificial (non-functional) definition of art and heritage illustrated, for example, in her want to use the churn top whittled by her Uncle Buddy as a centerpiece for her alcove instead of as an actual churn top, and, her mother’s quilt to be hung rather than used (Walker 31; 33). In her obvious misunderstanding of the term “heritage,” she defines it as objects (the bench, quilt, etc.) rather than the people who preserve its traditions through participation in them—people, like her sister, who has learned to quilt (Walker 33-34). She stands as the great opposite of Maggie.

Ever since the house that her sister hated burned down and she got partially burned by the fire, Maggie’s character, physical and mental difference, as well as ability, from her sister, Dee, has gotten more defined (Walker 25). As time from there passed and they grew into women, she got the darker skin color, the shallower figure, the uglier hair, the burn scars, and the academically ill-educated mind (Walker 25-26). And, at the same time, she also got the authentic culture, the ability to quilt, and the true and continuing connection to her cultural heritage through living in the same type of area that imaginably her ancestors had lived that Wangero (Dee) can now only appreciate from afar (Walker 33-34; 23). Additionally, as Barbara T. Christian says it in her critical essay, “Alice Walker: The Black Woman Artist as Wayward,” of her mother’s two daughters, she is the scarred and caring one, whereas her sister is the selfish and stylish, who “glibly delights in the artifacts of her heritage” (129).

And sure, her mother does reckon that she would be backward enough to use the quilts for everyday use, but at least she can continue to be authentic, not a fad like Dee—something that comes and goes as easily as a wind in springtime (Walker 33). At least she has no need to “remain fashionable in the eyes of a world of pretended wholeness, a world of banal television shows, framed and institutionalized art, and Polaroid cameras,” as the Bakers say (161). And, although she, like her mother, is not well educated in the manner of mainstream academia, at least she may truthfully say that she has no “faultfinding power” and does not put on sunglasses that hide everything above the tip of her nose and chin (Showalter 212; Walker 35). At least she, Maggie Johnson, can say that she is the living representation of the patchwork quilt that Wangero dubs “priceless”