Everyday Use

“Everyday Use” is a short story by Pulitzer Prize winning author Alice Walker. First published in Walker’s 1973 story collection In Love and Trouble, the story centers on a figure marginal to American literature at the time: a working-class black woman in the American South. The story’s interest in the way gender, race, and class intersect is characteristic of Walker’s work; in fact, it was Alice Walker who, later in her career, would coin the term “womanism” to describe a uniquely African-American form of feminism.

The protagonist and narrator of “Everyday Use” is a middle-aged woman named Mrs. Johnson. As the story opens, she is waiting outside her home for her semi-estranged daughter, Dee, to arrive for dinner. Dee was ambitious and assertive from a young age and is the only member of the family to have completed high school and college, thanks in large part to the financial sacrifices of her family and church. Mrs. Johnson, meanwhile, continues to live in a modest three-room home with her other daughter, Maggie, who is shy and painfully self-conscious about the scars she sustained when the family’s previous house burned down.

Maggie joins her mother in the yard shortly before Dee arrives, accompanied by her boyfriend (or possibly husband).