Dee is dressed in a beautiful, colorful, floor-length dress in African style. Mama recounts the traumatizing fire, which burnt down their home, and forced them to build a new one, exactly like it, where they now live.Īt last Dee and her partner, Hakim-a-Barber, arrive at the house. As she remembers Dee as a child, Mama contrasts her with Maggie-a diffident, kind, homely young woman with a scar on her face from the house fire. Mama thinks about how Dee’s attitude towards them changed as she became educated thanks to money from Mama and the Church, turning her from hateful to hurtfully condescending.

Mama then dismisses her fantasy as unrealistic, because she believes she is not the kind of person who would appear on such a show.Īs she waits for Dee, Mama looks around the yard and at Maggie, triggering memories of Dee’s troubled childhood in their house-her anger towards her family and their poverty, her hunger for higher quality clothes and an education, her charisma, assertiveness, and her beauty.

Maggie changes her clothes as Mama fantasizes about reconciling with her daughter on a television show hosted by someone like Johnny Carson. The story begins as Mama and Maggie, Dee’s sister and Mama’s younger daughter, prepare for the visit.

In “Everyday Use,” Mama, the story’s first person narrator, describes her relationship to her daughter Dee as Dee, an educated young African-American woman, returns to visit her childhood house in the Deep South.

Alice walker 1955 pdf