Alice Walker's Everyday Use depicts a return visit home by a successful black woman named Dee. She visits her poor mother and sister Dee. "Mama" and Dee still exist in the humble hard working manner of Dee's childhood. Dee resented her poverty and African American heritage, distancing herself as much as she could from this environment. While Mama and Maggie still rely on the use of the everyday things of their environment and heritage; Dee has distanced herself from these things, transforming herself with education, clothes, and hairstyle. By showing the distinctions in the everyday use of things between Mama and Maggie and Dee, Walker shows how Maggie and Mama remain connected to and live their heritage, while Dee is disconnected and distant from hers.
Mama's dream that she arrives in style on the Johnny Carson show to reunite with her successful daughter Dee shows how she and Maggie seem inferior to Dee. Dee dresses in designer clothes and stylish sunglasses, wears her hair in stylish fashions, and considers herself sophisticated and modern. Mama's dream is significant to this, because she imagines herself a lighter, whiter woman in the dream, "I am the way my daughter would want me to be: a hundred pounds lighter, my skin like an uncooked barley pancake" (Walker 1). But Mama and Maggie are not "quick of tongue," nor would they ever have the confidence to "look a strange white man in the eye" (Walker 1). Dee's everyday use of things are expensive, designer goods that make her appear more successful (i.e. rich) and disconnected (i.e. white) from her heritage.
In contrast to Dee's everyday use of things, the things used everyday by Maggie and Mama firmly connect them to their heritage. We see Walker does an excellent job of characterization in the opening pages, by describing the kinds of everyday things used by Mama and her skill and pride in using them. From
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