Department of English

Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University

 

"Everyday Use"

(1973)

 

Alice Walker

(February 9, 1944 – )

 

Notes

48  Johnny Carson: U.S. TV personality best known as the long time talk show host of NBC's Tonight Show (1962–1992)
  • Joel Sternberg, "Carson, Johnny," Museum of Broadcast Communications (brief biography)
    Johnny Carson is best known as America's late night king of comedy. As thirty year host of NBC television's Tonight Show, his topical monologues, irreverent characters, comical double takes and frivolous sketches entertained more people than any other performer in history. His late night arena provided plugs for untold books, films and products, created a springboard to stardom for an infinite number of new performers and, more than occasionally, offered a secure refuge for aging legends.
  • Scott Collins and Brian Lowry, "Johnny Carson Defined Late-Night TV," Los Angeles Times (2005 obituary)
    But as an interviewer, Carson was as gentle as he was effective. He asked guests questions that viewers wanted answered, but he managed to avoid seeming prying or mean-spirited.
  • "Goodnight, Johnny," MSNBC Special (2005 tribute; video clips, part 1 10:02 min., part 2 10:02 min., part 3 10:12 min., and part 4 8:05 min.)
  • "The Kennedy Center Honors Johnny Carson," CBS Special (1993; video clips, part 1 9:58 min., part 2 9:03 min., and part 3 5:02 min.)
  • "Here's Johnny..." (Mike Wallace interviews Carson; video clips, part 1 9:34 min. and part 2 7:12 min.)
  • "Johnny Carson: King of Late Night," American Masters, PBS (2012 documentary; video clip, 1 hr. 54:03 min.)
  • Bill Zehme, "Biographical Essay about Johnny Carson," American Masters, PBS (2012)

 


48  tacky:

50  church songs: See African American Music below.
 
51  hooked: kicked
 
52  Wa-su-zo-Tean-o: 56  quilts:

56  Lone Star pattern: a well-known quilt pattern
lone star pattern



56  Walk around the Mountain: a quilt pattern
 
58  Hang them:
 
58  checkerberry: a low shrub belonging to the more commonly known group called wintergreen, a traditional flavoring for dip snuff


Art

I think Mordecai Rich has about as much heart as a dirt-eating toad. Even when he makes me laugh I know that nobody ought to look on other people's confusion with that cold an eye.

"But that's what I am," he says, flipping through the pages of his scribble pad. "A cold eye. An eye looking for Beauty. An eye looking for Truth."

"Why don't you look for other things?" I want to know. "Like neither Truth nor Beauty, but places in people's lives where things have just slipped a good bit off the track."

"That's too vague," said Mordecai, frowning.

"So is Truth," I said. "Not to mention Beauty."


--Alice Walker, "'Really, Doesn't Crime Pay?,'" In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women (Harvest, 2001): 14.


[...] Walker's statement in the 1973 interview (which took place in her home in Jackson, Mississippi) of the way she sees the story "Everyday Use" as a reflection of her own struggles as an artist, an admission that suggests that female conflicts over art are not so easily resolved as they are in "A Sudden Trip Home..." In "Everyday Use" (published in 1973) all three women characters are artists: Mama, as the narrator, tells her own story; Maggie is the quiltmaker, the creator of art for "everyday use"; Dee, the photographer and collector of art, has designed her jewelry, dress, and hair so deliberately and self-consciously that she appears in the story as a self-creation. Walker says in the interview that she thinks of these three characters as herself split into three parts:

...I really see the story as almost about one person, the old woman and two daughters being one person. The one who [end of page 101] stays and sustains—this is the older woman—who has on the one hand a daughter who is the same way, who stays and abides and loves, plus the part of them—this autonomous person, the part of them that also wants to go out into the world to see change and be changed....I do in fact have an African name that was given to me, 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 a part of me. But, on the other hand, my parents and grandparents were part of it, and they take precedence.

Walker is most closely aligned in the story with the "bad daughter," Dee, "this autonomous person," the one who goes out in the world and returns with African clothes and an African name. Like Dee, Walker leaves the community, appropriating the oral tradition in order to turn it into a written artifact, which will no longer be available for "everyday use" by its originators.


—Mary Helen Washington, "A Postscript to My 1979 Essay on Alice Walker," "Everyday Use," ed. Barbara T. Christian (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1994): 100–3.


African American Music


The Long Road to Freedom: An Anthology of Black Music

George Marek, of Austrian extraction, was impressed by the enormous influence African American Music had on musicians who were not Black. He cites, among many, a young Stephen Foster; the son of the mayor of Allegheny, Pennsylvania; and "one Antonín Dvořák, who, in an article in the New York Herald in 1893, called attention to 'the beautiful Negro Music of America.'" (60)


Marek speaks of the overwhelming influence of African American music's discrete musical nuances, and the Black experience itself, on Gershwin and his Concerto in F, his Rhapsody in Blue, and Porgy and Bess. He also refers to the development of jazz from earlier Black music as a completely original facet of American music. We concur with Marek that popular music of our day, good and bad, could not exist without the antecedent of Black or African-matrixed music. He goes on to say that "the Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, Jefferson Airplane, Elvis and a legion of other non-Black musicians and composers "all must and many do acknowledge their debt to the sounds that were heard long ago on the plantations." (60)


Alan Lomax, preeminent cultural anthropologist, writing of African and slave musics and ceremonies, says slave "spirituals invoke the powerful names of the biblical heroes in a context of ecstasy and veiled allusion. The earliest type (e.g. "Kneebone," "Daniel," and "Read 'Em, John") demands that the worshipper "shout," that is, dance his praise in a prescribed fashion leading to trance. The older shouts were dramatic; the dancers flapped their arms to imitate angels' wings or held out their hands as if reading from the Bible, like John the Reveltor. The whole performance was extremely African in style. The participants danced in a loose circle, counterclockwise, in tight rhythmic coordination, but not in unison, each one improvising, in his own way, on the movement's pattern. They leaned forward facing the earth, knees bent ("gimme the kneebone bend"), feet flat to the floor, moving in a sliding, shuffling step, seldom lifting and never crossing their feet. Foot crossing, the prominent trait of European dance, was regarded as sinful and was forbidden in the "shout" or sacred dance of the Blacks.

"All dancers clapped and sang, their voices breaking out in individualized but familiar patterns of rhythm, melody, and changing vocal quality that complemented the lead. The short-phrased leader-chorus form, so typical of Africa, invited total participation and permitted endless experiments in syncopation, in brief tonal and rhythmic comment, [end of page 72] in textual improvisation. During the service, the performance ran long—ten minutes to an hour—so that the brief melodies and their shifting polyrhythmic and polyparted support received a high polish before people sang and danced themselves out or got happy and shouted all over the church. Just as the singers were not restricted to one tonal quality but could play over the whole range of vocal qualities (moaning, cooing, sobbing, growling, and so on), so the dancers were not limited to repetitive movement but could break out into brief, surprising improvisations. Yet the whole group was united in its strict adherence to the beat of the feet on the floor and the orchestra of hands.

"This special amalgam of (early) Christianity and African religious style gave the blacks a feeling of unity, hope, at times even of joy, in spite of slavery and its aftermath during Reconstruction. It also produced a large body of noble and touching songs, probably unmatched for singability and worldwide popularity. They came from a people generally regarded in that period as ignorant, uncouth and hopelessly miserable. (74)


Music was used to communicate; it did much more than pleasure the soul: it worked as a language. It was important to the success of the volunteer and dangerous system of the Underground Railroad.

These are some of the songs used to provide escaping slaves with information, to pass along warnings, escape signals and the like, or to cover up clandestine, escape-connected activities. (86)


The spiritual "Steal Away to Jesus," as might be imagined, had ongoing import to the slaves. Not allowed to converse in the fields, they used songs to share information. Songs or segments were hummed or sung from one to another until the group understood that a meeting would occur in the plantation's "invisible church" that night. The "invisible church" was a fact of slave life, not a figment of some writer's imagination. Slaves worshipped wherever and as often as they could secretly gather. "Steal Away to Jesus," while unequivocally spiritual in intent, supported the slave's focus on death as surcease from travail, God as deliverer, and heaven as home. In another context, it was also a covert signal used to suggest the timeliness and wisdom of escape. Another interpretation might be escape motivated by an overwhelming fear of death at the hand of the slave owner or his minions. (88)




The Trope of the Talking Book


"The literature of the slave" is an ironic phrase, at the very least, and is an oxymoron at its most literal level of meaning. "Literature," as Samuel Johnson used the term, denoted an "acquaintance with 'letters' or books," according to the Oxford English Dictionary. It also connoted "polite or human learning" and "literary culture." (127)


The slave's texts, then, could not be taken as specimens of a black literary culture. Rather, the texts of the slave could only be read as testimony of defilement: the slave's representation and reversal of the master's attempt to transform a human being into commodity, and the slave's simultaneous verbal witness of the possession of a humanity shared in common with Europeans. [...] The slave wrote not primarily to demonstrate humane letters, but to demonstrate his or her own membership in the human community. (128)



--Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (Oxford UP, 1989).
 


Quilting


In an interview with Walker for his book on African-American quilters, Roland Freeman asks her "what she would like to say to people in general about quilting." Walker replies,
 
"That they should learn to do it. That they should think less about collecting quilts and give more thought to making them. It may do all kinds of good things, too, to collect what others have made, but I think that it is essential that we know how to express, you know, our own sense of connection. And there is no better sense of understanding our own creation than to create, and so we should do that."[3]


 

Wangero Leewanika Kemanjo


African Images, Glimpses from a Tiger's Back


i

Beads around my neck

Mt. Kenya away over pineappled hills

Kikuyuland.


ii

A book of poems

Mt. Kenya's

Bluish peaks

"Wangari!"

My new name.


[...]


—Alice Walker, Once, Open Road, 1968.



The footnote on the page says "Wangari is a Kikuyu clan name indicating honorary acceptance into the Leopard clan." In "Everyday Use" Alice Walker lets the educated sister Dee introduce herself as "Wangero Leewanika Kemanjo." The uninformed reader may thing this is an ordinary African name. I assure you it is not.

[...]

These important names Dee bases her new-found identity on resemble Kikuyu names, but at least two of them are mispelt. Wangero is not a Kikuyu name, but Wanjiru is. It is one of the other original nine clan names of the Kikuyus. (Cf. Jomo Kenyatta's Facing Mount Kenya). The last of the three names is also distorted. The correct Kikuyu name is Kamenju. The middle name is not a Kikuyu name at all. One of my Kikuyu informants told me he knew a lady from Malawi who was called Leewanika, so it is at least a mixture of names from more than one ethnic group and maybe that is the point. Dee has names representing the whole East African region. Or more likely, she is confused and has only superficial knowledge of Africa and all it stands for.


—Helga Hoel, "Personal Names and Heritage: Alice Walker's 'Everyday Use,'" American Studies in Scandinavia, vol. 31, 1999, pp. 34–42.



A lecture that Alice Walker delivered on September 13th 2010 at the University of Capetown in South Africa, apparently puts a lot of questions regarding the name "Wangero" to rest. On this date, at the Eleventh Annual Steve Biko Lecture, in the lecture titled, "Coming to See You Since I was 5 Years Old: A Poets Connection to the South African Soul," Walker credits her college undergraduate Ugandan friend Constance Wangero for her inquisitiveness and fascination with Africa and her peoples:

"...the most important friendship I encountered during my student years...an African woman named Constance Wangero...from Uganda. ...Constance and I were sisters...developed my...interest...and concern for Africa and its peoples. ...I was still 19 or 20...made my way to the land of Constance Wangero...to discover...what made her...a wonderful person, wise and gentle beyond her years and...those of any of the other girls at our school. Uganda...people’s gentle courtesy and kindness. ...a land of the greenest valleys and hills. ...a...feeling of peace and patience with a stranger. I was taken in...by a Ugandan family...sheltered and cared for...dispelling...any sense...that I would not be recognized as one of Africa’s children."

Alice Walker transferred from Spelman College (Atlanta, Georgia) to Sarah Lawrence College (Bronxville, NY) in 1963. At Spelman, Constance Wangero became Walker's room-mate and closest friend. In 1964, after her junior tenure in college, Walker journeyed to Uganda as a summer exchange student. Amy Goodman interviewed Walker during the Organization of Women Writers of Africa conference at New York University in 2004. Walker says, without mentioning the name "Wangero":

"...at Spelman my roommate...wonderful woman from Uganda who made me care deeply about Africans and African women. ...I went to Uganda trying to understand how Constance had been created and produced by this country which...was very beautiful...tranquil...green."

It therefore turns out that Wangero is an African personal name. There is a place in Uganda named Wangero. In Luganda, one of the main languages of Uganda, the root '-ngero' means "stories" or "proverbs." Wangero can therefore mean, "place of stories" or "person of stories."


—Jonathan Musere, "Alice Walker's 'Everyday Use': The Emergence of the Name Wangero," Jonathan Musere the Scribbler, Overblog, 7 Sep. 2011.



 

 

Study Questions

  • Kinship
    • The story’s subtitle indicates that it is “For Your Grandmama.” Why do you think this is? Who is the speaker? If the speaker is Mama, the narrator, explain who the intended audience is from this phrase which specifies “Your Grandmama.” Who is Mama speaking to? Why your and not my? Why Grandmama rather than Mama or any other relation? What difference does the wording make in referring to, presumably, the same person? Consider the presence of “Your” in this short subtitle which seems to address or link at least two generations of women. How are they positioned in relation to each other? Which generation(s) is/are being spoken to? Which is/are being spoken about? How is each generation described in the story as being different from one another? Which generation(s) can write? Which generation(s) can read? Does it make sense that this short story is given/gifted to a woman of a generation that, possibly, cannot read it?
    • Is there a difference between kinship terms like sister or mother when Mama says that Dee is Maggie's sister and when Hakim-a-barber says "Asalamalakim, my mother and sister!"? Does "sister" mean the same thing in these instances? Explain.
  • Names and Naming
    • Make a list of all the ways Dee is referred to in the story. Why does she have such a proliferation of names compared to other characters in the story?
    • Consider the sequence of Dee's reference in the story. What is the significance of an unnamed "her" being the first instance she is mentioned? Next she is mentioned as "her sister." What is the effect of defining her identity in this second instance as the sister of Maggie, with Maggie as the point of reference and Dee understood in relationship to that named entity?
    • What does it mean to be named after someone? Does it diminish your self or uniqueness? How so, or how not?
    • What does it mean that Dee eventually names herself? What does the name Wangero Leewanika Kemanjo reflect about Dee?
    • What do nicknames signify compared to official names?
    • How are people's names related to their history?
  • Consider the meaning(s) of some terms or ideas presented in the story. How does Walker define, revise, rewrite, reconsider, change, question, critique, or "resignify" them? Look at, for example, some of the following:
    • yard
    • house
    • dream
    • education
    • friend
    • choice
    • style
    • beauty
    • kinship
    • butter churn; churn top; dasher
    • quilt
    • preservation
    • heritage
  • What significance do you find in the frequent similes and, to a lesser extent, metaphors that Walker uses to describe characters and things? What do these comparisons (ex. "It is like an extended living room," "I can kill and clean a hog as mercilessly as a man," "Have you ever seen a lame animal...That is the way my Maggie walks" or "Like when you see the wriggling end of a snake just in front of your foot on the road") add to the idea of the person or thing being presented?
  • Looking and Seeing
    • Compare Dee's views of her home and life before and after college. What assumptions and set of values lie behind each view? Consider, for example, some of the following contrasts:
      • "a look of concentration on her face as she watched the last dingy gray board of the house fall in toward the red-hot brick chimney" and "She had hated the house that much"
        vs.
        "She never takes a shot without making sure the house is included," "Everything delighted her," and "She looked at the churn and looked at it."
      • "I had offered Dee (Wangero) a quilt when she went away to college. Then she had told me they were old-fashioned, out of style."
        vs.
        "'But they're priceless!' she was saying now, furiously"
    • What does Dee understand heritage to mean? By contrast, how does Mama perceive it, and how is it related to the way she and Maggie "still live"? Consider Mama's opinion of her daughters and the kind of heritage associated with each. How does Mama's final decision regarding the quilts reflect her understanding of heritage and its values?
  • Students have raised thoughtful questions in their responses about the role of education in this short story and in our lives. How much is "education" to "blame" for the kind of understanding and appreciation it fosters in learners about their identity and heritage? How much does reading or "studying" enable someone to understand a culture, whether theirs or another's? Compare reading about it with "learn[ing] to do it," as Walker suggests, regarding quilting. Then read one or more of the following real-life stories, each having to do with an individual's struggle in education.
    • ร้อยดาว, "แม้ทุนน้อย เจ้าเรียนร่ำ ทำจนเต็ม: จิณวัฒน์ แก่นเมือง," พลอยแกมเพชร (page 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5)
    • ชัชวลี, "เสียงเรียกจากยอดสูง," พลอยแกมเพชร (page 1, 2, 3, and 4)
    • ปริยา, "ผู้ช่วยศาสตราจารย์รัศมี กฤษณมิษ," พลอยแกมเพชร (2012 interview; page 1 and 2)

            

 

 

Review Sheet

Characters
Mama Johnson – "I am a large, big-boned woman with rough, man-working hands"; "My fat keeps me hot in zero weather."; "I never had an education myself. After second grade the school closed down. Don't ask me why: In 1927 colored asked fewer questions than they do now"
Maggie Johnson – "She will stand hopelessly in corners, homely and ashamed of the burn scars down her arms and legs, eyeing her sister with a mixture of envy and awe"; "Sometimes Maggie reads to me [Mama]. She stumbles along good-naturedly but can't see well. She knows she is not bright. Like good looks and money, quickness passed her by"
Dee Johnson, Wangero Leewanika Kemanjo, Dicie – "Dee is lighter than Maggie, with nicer hair and a fuller figure."; "At sixteen she had a style of her own: and knew what style was"; "A dress down to the ground [...] so loud it hurts my eyes [...] Earrings gold, too, and hanging down to her shoulders. Bracelets dangling and making noises when she moves her arm up to shake the folds of the dress out of her armpits"
Hakim-a-barber, Asalamalakim – "a short, stocky man. Hair is all over his head a foot long and hanging from his chin like a kinky mule tail"
John Thomas – "She [Maggie] will marry John Thomas (who has mossy teeth in an earnest face)"
Aunt Dicie, Big Dee – "Dicie is my sister. She named Dee. We called her 'Big Dee' after Dee was born"
Grandma Dee –
Jimmy T – courted by Dee when she was young; "He flew to marry a cheap city girl from a family of ignorant, flashy people"
Stash – "'Aunt Dee's first husband whittled the dash,'...'His name was Henry, but they called him Stash'"

Setting

house –

yard – "I will wait for her in the yard that Maggie and I made so clean and wavy yesterday afternoon"

 

 


 

Vocabulary

irony, ironic

setting

diction; denotation, connotation

imagery

metonymy

symbol, symbolic, symbolism


Character, Characterization

major characters
minor characters
stock or type characters
stereotypes
confidant(e)
villain
hero
anti-hero
foil
self-revelation
personality
consistency in character behavior
motivation
plausibility of character: Is the character credible? Convincing?
flat character
round character, multidimensional character
static character, unchanged
developing character, dynamic character, active character

show vs. tell

indirect presentation of character, indirect characterization

direct presentation of character
direct methods of revealing character:


Plot

Freytag's Pyramid
beginning, middle, end
scene
chance, coincidence

plot, main plot, minor plot, subplot, underplot, double plot, parallel plot

story
conflict, internal conflict, external conflict, clash of actions, clash of ideas, clash of desires, clash of wills, major, minor, emotional, physical

protagonist
antagonist (antagonistic)
suspense (suspenseful)
mystery (mysterious, mysteriously, mysteriousness)
dilemma
surprise (surprising, surprised)
plot twist
ending

artistic unity (unified)
time sequence
exposition
in medias res
complication (complicate)
rising action
falling action
crisis
climax
anti-climax (anti-climactic)
conclusion (conclude, conclusive)
resolution (resolve, resolving)
denouement
flashback, retrospect
back-story
foreshadowing
causality
plot structure
initiating incident
epiphany
reversal
catastrophe
deus ex machina
disclosure, discovery
movement, shape of movement
trajectory
change
focus


Point of View 
third-person point of view
intrusive narrator
unintrusive/impersonal/objective narrator
limited  point of view
omniscient point of view
editorial omniscience
neutral omniscience
selective omniscience
limited omniscient
second-person point of view
first-person point of view
self-conscious narrator
fallible, unreliable narrator
first person observer
first person participant
innocent eye

 

FAQ and Discussion
Q: What is the significance of the quilt?

D1:


Sample Student Responses to Alice Walker's "Everyday Use"


Prompt: (in-class writing, 20 minutes)  Close read the passage in Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use” beginning with “‘Mama,’ Wangero said sweet as a bird. ‘Can I have these old quilts?’” to “This was the way she knew God to work.” (pp. 56–58), then answer the following question. Maggie is silent and voiceless. Do you agree with this statement? Explain.


Response 1:


Student L

This “Everyday Use” passage shows that Maggie has a voice and that it is timely, expressive, and multivocal. As soon as Wangero asks for the quilts, Mama “heard something fall in the kitchen” (56). This is not a shy person who hesitates to reveal her mind. “And a minute later the kitchen door slammed” further confirms that this is a person who, not only can make herself heard, but resoundingly and eloquently. By the end of the passage Maggie gives a small speech, showing her decisiveness (“She can have them, Mama” 58) and a heritage stronger and deeper than Dee’s (Wangero’s) “I can ’member Grandma Dee without the quilts.” This short scene illustrates that, unlike her sister Dee’s possessive and self-centered loudness, Maggie’s voice comes from everything around her and of her. She speaks through everyday objects like what she holds in her hand (that is dropped), though parts of the place she lives in like the door, and through her own voice, showing a self-assertiveness and generosity by releasing Mama from guilt of breaking a promise (“She can have them, Mama”) and inner strength through her resolve from the surprise of Dee wanting the quilts to eventually making peace with letting the objects go because what they stand for is already in her: “I can ’member Grandma Dee without the quilts.” Maggie is neither silent nor voiceless. The question is, rather, can you hear her?

        


Response 2:


Student T

This scene illustrates the voicelessness of Maggie. It begins with Wangero’s “sweet as a bird” coaxing: “Mama…Can I have these old quilts?” (56). Despite “something fall[ing] in the kitchen” and “the kitchen door slamm[ing],” both quite distinctive and loud, Dee (Wangero) carries on as if there were no protest from Maggie, reacting only to Mama: “No…I don’t want those” (57). In the new day of African American renaissance, Dee can, ironically, value “all this stitching by hand” but cannot “Imagine!” (58) the value of her own sister still being able to do it. She “gasps like a bee had stung her” when she does not get her way, as if Maggie or Mama is the guilty bee who hurt her for no apparent reason, and despite her exclamation of “priceless!,” she does not appreciate the price that her demand to possess quilts to “hang” has in depriving her sister Maggie of her wedding present and in forcing her mother to break a promise.
Maggie can make all sorts of noise that show her presence, identity, and emotion, but, like “the sound her feet made as they scraped over each other” which Mama “could almost hear,” (58) they are silent to characters such as Dee who cannot accept a meaning of heritage other than what she believes, will not see a way of living other than what she approves, and does not listen to voices that disagree with her desires. Ironically, in this new day of loudly proclaimed cultural pride, for the educated and enlightened, Maggie and the everyday world she represents, remain silent and voiceless.
        

 

 

Reference

 

Link
Story Text
Other Work
 Critical Essays
 Other Resources

 

 

Media

 Interview
  • Alice Walker: A Stitch in Time, interview by Evelyn C. White, Films for the Humanities (2004; preview clip 1:33 min.)

  • "An Interview with Alice Walker," BBC, Cengage Learning (2018; 5:00 min.)

  • "Profile: Alice Walker," Open Road Media (2011; 2:16 min.)

  • Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth, directed by Pratibha Parmar (2013 documentary; 59:23 min.)

  • "How Black Union Soldiers Went from Slavery to Forever Free," Smithsonian (2014; 3:10 min.)

  • While I Yet Live, directed by Maris Curran, The New York Times (2018; 14:25 min.)

  • "Smithsonian National Quilt Collection: An Overview," National Museum of American History (2011; 11:02 min.)

 

 

Alice Walker

 


Reference

Alice Walker: Stitches in Time. Interview with Evelyn C. White, Films for the Humanities and Sciences, 2004.

Hoel, Helga. "Personal Names and Heritage: Alice Walker's 'Everyday Use,'" American Studies in Scandinavia, vol. 31, 1999, pp. 34–42.

Walker, Alice. "Everyday Use." In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women. 1973. Harvest, 2001, pp. 47–59.


Further Reading

Baker, Houston A., and Charlotte Pierce-Baker. "Patches: Quilts and Community in Alice Walker's 'Everyday Use.'" Alice Walker: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. Eds. Henry Louis Gates and K. A. Appiah. New York: Amistad, 1993. Print.

Freeman, Roland L. A Communion of the Spirits: African-American Quilters, Preservers, and Their Stories. Rutledge Hill P, 1996.

Gates, Henry Louis. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford UP, 1989. Print.


Walker, Alice. Everyday Use. Ed. and introd. Barbara T. Christian. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1994. Print. Women Writers: Texts and Contexts.


Walker, Alice. In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973. Print.


Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose. Orlando: Harcourt, 2004. Print.

White, Evelyn C. Alice Walker: A Life. W. W. Norton, 2004.



 



 

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Last updated August 21, 2019