Reading Dee in Alice Walker's Story
Alice Walker wrote "Everyday Use" in 1973, and the story has been assigned in literature classes ever since. The central tension revolves around how Dee views her family's heritage versus what Mama and Maggie actually do with it. Most student papers treat Dee as the villain of the piece, which is a reasonable reading but misses some of the messier details Walker built into the text. The story works on two levels. On the surface it is a family conflict over material objects. Beneath that it is about who gets to claim cultural identity and who pays the price for it. Dee wears her new African name, Wangero, and dresses in a vibrant traditional outfit that she bought somewhere. Her mother's voice carries the weight of practical life — she remembers when this same daughter wanted to flee the only home she had ever known.
Everyday Use Dee Character Analysis
Dee is not a simple antagonist. She is a product of the era — the Black Power movement, the shift toward reclaiming African heritage, the tension between assimilation and rootedness. Walker herself lived through much of this. Writing the story in the early seventies, she was responding to a real cultural moment. The characters reflect people she knew rather than types she invented. When I read this story, I think about the churning in college towns around 1970 where students came back home wearing new political skin and treating their families like exhibits. That is what happens here. Dee looks at the quilts and sees artifacts. Her mother and sister see something they will actually sleep under.
What the Text Shows About Dee
Walker gives us specific details about Dee that matter. Dee attended school away from home. She learned to read properly. She brought a man named Hakim-barber with her, someone who spoke in a way Mama could not understand. When Dee asks for the quilts, she says she wants to hang them. Maggie says she can make more. Dee does not consider that Maggie might want the quilts for herself. Dee's dialogue throughout the story is sharp and performative. She corrects people. She frames her own narrative before anyone else gets a turn. That is the most consistent trait Walker gives her.
Mama's Perspective
The narrator, Mama, is the one telling the story. She is self-conscious about her appearance and her lack of education, but she knows her family. She knows Maggie better than she knows Dee at this moment. When Dee asks for the quilts, Mama has to make a choice, and she makes it. That choice reveals something important about the story's actual concern: it is not about heritage as display. It is about heritage as practice. The quilts are made from pieces of clothes that belonged to ancestors. They represent generations of work, memory, and domestic skill. Dee wants them as decoration. Maggie would use them every night. Walker forces the reader to decide which version of heritage is more authentic, and she makes the answer feel uncomfortable because both positions have value. Students often miss that Walker does not fully endorse Mama's rejection of Dee. The ending of the story is complicated. Mama finally asserts herself, but she also admits that she is not the kind of woman who can sustain that kind of declaration for long. The narration stays close to Mama's voice, and that means some of Dee's arguments are filtered through someone who does not entirely understand them.
I have seen readers treat Dee as a caricature — the snob, the traitor, the fake. That reading exists because the story is short. In a longer work, Walker would probably give Dee more interiority. Here she is mostly seen from the outside, through Mama's eyes. That matters for how we should evaluate the text.
Historical Context Matters
The short story appeared during a period when many Black Americans were renaming themselves and reconnecting with African traditions. Dee embodies that impulse. Walker does not mock it outright. The conflict in the story is real because it happened in actual families. Siblings who changed, parents who stayed, relatives who wondered who among them was living authentically. The story is not about whether Dee is good or bad. It is about what heritage means when it is something you can hold versus something you carry inside you. Dee brings a camera and takes pictures. She frames her family as subjects. That image recurs throughout the text — the idea of looking versus being looked at.
How to Approach the Text
Read the story slowly. Pay attention to the quilts scene. Notice how Mama describes Maggie's hands and Dee's hands differently. Notice what Walker says about burning and about survival. These details accumulate into a picture that is more nuanced than most first readings capture. The story is about twenty pages in most collections. It does not require deep background to engage with it, but understanding the historical moment helps. The Civil Rights movement was ending. The Black Power movement was gaining momentum. Families were splitting over these questions. Walker captured that split in miniature. Walker was a teacher. She wrote fiction and poetry and nonfiction. Her later novel "The Color Purple" won the National Book Award. But "Everyday Use" stands on its own. It is a compact story that keeps revealing new details on subsequent readings.
