Everyday Use

Much like the quilts, the Johnson’s home is a symbol of both the family’s past and each individual family member’s relationship to it. The house Mrs. Johnson and Maggie currently live in is itself a near replica of an earlier house that was destroyed in a fire: “It is three rooms, just like the one that burned, except the roof is tin; they don’t make shingle roofs any more. there are no real windows, just some holes cut in the hides” (Paragraph 14). Both before and after the fire, then, the Johnsons’ home has been a testament to the family’s relative poverty. In this sense, it isn’t surprising that Dee would resent the house she grew up in, even to the point of seeming to rejoice in its destruction: “Why don’t you do a dance around the ashes? I’d wanted to ask her. She had hated the house that much” (Paragraph 10). For Dee, who always “wanted nice things” and has sought to distance herself from her humble origins (Paragraph 12), the burning of the family home likely represented the possibility of freedom from her past.

Mrs. Johnson and Maggie clearly don’t share this attitude towards their family history, but the decision to model their new home on the old one is nevertheless striking; Maggie sustained severe burns in the same fire that destroyed the old house, and she must find life in such a similar structure difficult. However, the trauma associated with the fire actually makes the house an even more apt symbol for a family history marred by slavery, segregation, and racism (notably, slavery often destroyed the very idea of home by separating families from one another). In this sense, Maggie and her mother’s willingness to live alongside painful memories reflects their broader attitude towards their history as black women—an attitude that involves acknowledging both the good and the bad.  

Walker uses the motif of vision to explore the ways the story’s characters understand and relate to their shared history of oppression and powerlessness. In particular, the frequent descriptions of Dee staring intently indicate her refusal to submit to a racist society; she makes eye contact with the white men her mother looks away from deferentially, and is generally “determined to stare down any disaster” (Paragraph 12).

Perhaps ironically, however, Dee’s willingness to “stare down” the world’s challenges does not make her any more observant. Throughout the story, Dee uses her eyes not so much to take in what is happening around her but to reaffirm her own relatively privileged understanding of the world; she snaps photos of her mother and sister that seem designed to underscore their “backward” existence, and during the discussion surrounding her own name, she and Hakim-a-barber “sen[d] eye signals over [the narrator’s] head” (Paragraph 36), presumably in recognition of Mrs. Johnson’s supposed ignorance. The end result is that Dee is unable to see her mother and sister except through the lens of her own “enlightened” ideas, and thus fundamentally misunderstands both of them and the life they lead. By contrast, Maggie—who not only lacks her sister’s education but is described as having poor vision—seems much better equipped to understand herself and her sister; her smile when Dee tells her she “ought to try to make something of [her]self” suggests that she recognizes the limitations of Dee’s worldview in a way Dee herself cannot (Paragraph 81).