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Heritage and deracination in Walker's "Everyday Use."
Studies in Short Fiction, Spring, 1996 by David Cowart
Everyday Use," a story included in Alice Walker's 1973 collection In Love and Trouble, addresses itself to the dilemma of African Americans who, in striving to escape prejudice and poverty, risk a terrible deracination, a sundering from all that has sustained and defined them. The story concerns a young woman who, in the course of a visit to the rural home she thinks she has outgrown, attempts unsuccessfully to divert some fine old quilts, earmarked for the dowry of a sister, into her own hands. This character has changed her given name, "Dee Johnson," to the superficially more impressive "Wangero Leewanika Kemanjo"--and thereby created difficulties for the narrator (her mother), who recognizes the inappropriateness of the old name but cannot quite commit herself to the new. She tries to have it both ways, referring to her daughter now by one name, now by the other, now by parenthetically hybridized combinations of both. The critic, sharing Mrs. Johnson's confusion, may learn from her example to avoid awkwardness by calling the character more or less exclusively by one name. I have opted here for "Wangero," without, I hope, missing the real significance of the confusion. Indeed, in this confusion, one begins to see how the fashionable politics espoused by the central character of Walker's story becomes the foil to an authorial vision of the African American community, past and present, and its struggle for liberation.
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Walker contrives to make the situation of Wangero, the visitor, analogous to the cultural position of the minority writer who, disinclined to express the fate of the oppressed in the language and literary structures of the oppressor, seeks a more authentic idiom and theme. Such a writer, Walker says, must not become a literary Wangero. Only by remaining in touch with a proximate history and an immediate cultural reality can one lay a claim to the quilts--or hope to produce the authentic art they represent. Self-chastened, Walker presents her own art--the piecing of linguistic and literary intertexts--as quilt-making with words, an art as imbued with the African American past as the literal quilt-making of the grandmother for whom Wangero was originally named.
The quilts that Wangero covets link her generation to prior generations, and thus they represent the larger African American past. The quilts contain scraps of dresses worn by the grandmother and even the great-grandmother, as well as a piece of the uniform worn by the great-grandfather who served in the Union Army in the War Between the States. The visitor rightly recognizes the quilts as part of a fragile heritage, but she fails to see the extent to which she herself has traduced that heritage. Chief among the little gestures that collectively add up to a profound betrayal is the changing of her name. Mrs. Johnson thinks she could trace the name Dee in their family "back beyond the Civil War" (54), but Wangero persists in seeing the name as little more than the galling reminder that African Americans have been denied authentic names. "I couldn't bear it any longer, being named after the people who oppress me" (53). She now styles and dresses herself according to the dictates of a faddish Africanism and thereby demonstrates a cultural Catch-22: an American who attempts to become an African succeeds only in, becoming a phony. In her name, her clothes, her hair, her sunglasses, her patronizing speech, and her black Muslim companion, Wangero proclaims a deplorable degree of alienation from her rural origins and family. The story's irony is not subtle: the visitor who reproaches others for an ignorance of their own heritage (a word that probably does not figure in the lexicon of either her mother or her sister) is herself almost completely, disconnected from a nurturing tradition.
Wangero has realized the dream of the oppressed: she has escaped the ghetto. Why, then, is she accorded so little maternal or authorial respect? The reason lies in her progressive repudiation of the very heritage she claims to revere. I say "progressive" because Walker makes clear that Wangero's flirtation with Africa is only the latest in a series of attempts to achieve racial and cultural autonomy, attempts that prove misguided insofar as they promote an erosion of all that is most real--and valuable--in African American experience. Wangero's mental traveling, moreover, replicates that of an entire generation. Her choices follow the trends in African American cultural definition from the simple integrationist imperative that followed Brown v. Board of Education (1954) to the collective outrage of the "long hot summer" of 1967 and the rise of an Islamic alternative to the Christianity that black America had hitherto embraced. Proceeding pari passu with this evolution was the rediscovery of an African past,(1) a past more remote--and putatively more authentic--than that of the preceding 200 years. The epochmaking decade of the 1960s was bracketed by two sensational defections to Africa. In 1961 the 93-year-old W. E. B. Du Bois, having been denied a passport and investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee, moved to Ghana and renounced his American citizenship. In 1968 Eldridge Cleaver-less distinguished and less principled than Du Bois but one of the culture heroes of his day-made a similar gesture when he left the United States on an odyssey that would eventually take him, too, to a new home on the African continent. Midway between these two dates, in 1964, Walker herself traveled to Africa, and one imagines her character Wangero among the enthusiastic readers of the enormously popular Roots (1976), in which Alex Haley memorably describes the researches that eventually led him to the African village from which his ancestor, Kunta Kinte, had been abducted by slavers.
