Alice Walker's Everyday Use
...Maggie would “probably be backward enough to put them to everyday use.” With Maggie, we see a disfigured and undereducated younger sister, overshadowed by Dee, who accepts the quilts for her future marital use, rather than yield to her more imposing sister. In the story’s beginning, the mother says, “Maggie will be nervous until after her sister goes.” However, at the story’s ending, Maggie is able to see Dee off, with a “real smile, not scared.” Their mother, hard working and uneducated, who always favored the more popular Dee, surprises us by not yielding to her demand for the quilts. She describes herself as “a large, big-boned woman with rough, man-working hands.” To send Dee, rather than Maggie, to school, she “raised the money, the church and me.” However, in the end, she “did something I never had done before: hugged Maggie to me, then dragged her on into the room, snatched the quilts out of Miss Wangero’s (Dee) hands, and dumped them into Maggie’s lap. Asalamalakim, who first appears as a resolute activist, retreats from this position by proclaiming his disdain of the farmers who stood up to the white men who poisoned their cattle. When he arrives, he is...