Irony In Alice Walker's Everyday Use

This story takes place in Mama’s yard anticipating of Dee’s arrival. “It is like an extended living room. When the hard clay is swept clean as a floor and the sand around the edges lined with tiny, irregular grooves anyone can come and sit and look up into the elm tree and wait for the breezes that never come inside the house” (Walker, 1973,1). Dee arrives in her rural childhood home proudly sporting "[Her hair] stands straight up like the wool on a sheep" afro coupled with a decked out fashionable African dress and jewelry. Not to mention, an irony occurred when Dee’s Muslim boyfriend greeted “Assalamualaikum” to Mama mistaken it as his name. Dee have a new persona Wangero to participate in a cultural trend of the 1970’s. Dee explain to her
In both of them were scraps of dresses Grandma Dee had worn fifty and more years ago. Bits and pieces of Grandpa Jarrell’s Paisley shirts. And one teeny faded blue piece, about the size of a penny matchbox, that was from Great Grandpa Ezra’s uniform that he wore in the Civil War” (Walker,1973, 55). Dee asks Mama for the quilts but Mama attempts to offer her some other quilts in the family collections. However, Dee refuse by saying, “I don’t want those. They are stitched around the borders by machine” (Walker,1973, 59) seeing that Mama recalls Dee turned her nose up at the quilts calling them “old-fashioned, out of style” (Walker,1973, 67). Dee rightly recognizes the quilts as part of a fragile heritage but she fails to appreciate the quilts the way the Mama and Maggie can of practical use. Therefore, Mama snatched the quilts out of Dee’s hands and dumped them into Maggie’s lap that was promised her. Maggie made a remark “I can ‘member Grandma Dee without the quilts” (Walker,1973, 74) for this reason she was taught how to quilt by Grandma Dee and Big Dee. In effect, Maggie acknowledges these quilts as the cross-generational bonding of the sisterhood over their creation(Cowart, 1996).