Meaning Of Heritage In Everyday Use By Alice Walker

"Everyday Use" by Alice Walker does an excellent job showing how one's family can determine how one acts and feels about themselves. Walker uses first person point of view to describe how one person can change so many lives. In the story Mama has two daughters, Maggie and Dee. Maggie still lives at home with her mother while Dee has moved out and gone to college. From the very first sentence, "I will wait for her in the yard that Maggie and I made so clean and wavy yesterday afternoon"(92) the reader can tell that Mama is proud of how she lives and how she brought up her daughters.
Mama is very nervous about Dee coming to visit and has done things to try and make her house look good before Dee gets there. She states "I will wait for her in the yard that Maggie and I made so clean and wavy yesterday afternoon."(92) Mama wants everything to be perfect when she arrives, it is as if Mama needs her approval of the house and everything she has done before she can go
on with her life. Mama is the judge of the story and we can only really see what she is like through her thoughts and words about everyone else. She describes Maggie as "chin on chest, eyes on ground, feet in shuffle, ever since the fire that burned the other house to the ground."(94)
Maggie is the character that the reader feels sympathetic for. Once her sister arrives, Mama states that she will "stand hopelessly in corners, homely and ashamed of the burn scars down her arms and legs, eying her sister with a mixture of envy and awe."(92) Maggie looks up to Dee, it's as if Dee is a celebrity. Maggie is the complete opposite of Dee though; everything that Maggie has gotten in life she has had to work for. She learned how to quilt from her grandmother and she helped her mother cook and clean the old house. Maggie also does not speak very often; you can see this when Dee's companion tries to have a conversation with her but all that Maggie says is "Uhnnnh".
Once Dee arrives the reader gets a good look at what she is truly like.
We discover that she spends way too much time on the appearance of things instead of the meaning of them. She has changed her name to Wangero because she said that she "couldn't bear it any longer, being named after the people who oppress me."(96) Dee does not understand the true meaning of heritage, she thinks that heritage is something that can and should be put on display only if it is in fashion at the time. Dee speaks about the bench that her father had made and the butter dish that her grandmother had as if the were just objects that could be bought at any old store. "I never knew how lovely these benches are. You can feel the rump prints, she said, running her hands underneath her and along the bench. Then she gave a sigh and her hand closed over Grandma Dee's butter dish."(97) Everything that holds memories for Mama and Maggie of people that have gone she treats as though they shouldn't be used, they should be
displayed.
Towards the end of the story Dee goes into the trunk at the end of her mother's bed and pulls out two quilts that had been hand made by her grandmother and her mother. Dee states that she will "Hang them."(98) She makes it sound as though you can not do anything else with a quilt. It's at this point that Mama tells Dee that she can not have the quilts because Maggie is going to take them when she gets married. Dee throws a fit saying that Maggie will ruin them by using them everyday. What Dee doesn't understand is that the quilts were not made to be hung up for everyone to look at; they were made to be used. When Maggie says, "She can have them, Mama. I can 'member Grandma Dee without the quilts,"(98) she proves that it is not the objects that show a persons heritage, it is how they do things and the way that they act.
It is only through ones family that a person can truly see how another is. Walker uses family and heritage to show that if someone only does what is fashionable and popular they will soon forget their heritage and eventually how their family affects them. Maggie shows that she can remember her family without the material object, just on memory alone. While Dee needs to have something that everyone made to show how she "understands" her heritage and her family's ways, Mama tries to explain that that's not what is important. As Dee leaves she tells Maggie to do something with her life but what she doesn't realize is that Maggie already has done something. She has learned about their past and lives to learn more about it.