Everyday Use
by Alice Walker
I will wait for her in the yard that Maggie and
I made so clean and wavy yesterday afternoon. A yard like this is more
comfortable than most people know. It is not just a yard. It is like an
extended living room. When the hard clay is swept clean as a floor and
the fine sand around the edges lined with tiny, irregular grooves, anyone
can come and sit and look up into the elm tree and wait for the breezes
that never come inside the house.
Maggie will be nervous until after her
sister goes: she will stand hopelessly in corners, homely and ashamed
of the burn scars down her arms and legs, eying her sister with a mixture
of envy and awe. She thinks her sister has held life always in the palm
of one hand, that "no" is a word the world never learned to
say to her.
You've no doubt seen those TV shows where
the child who has "made it" is confronted, as a surprise, by
her own mother and father, tottering in weakly from backstage. (A pleasant
surprise, of course: What would they do if parent and child came on the
show only to curse out and insult each other?) On TV mother and child
embrace and smile into each other's faces. Sometimes the mother and father
weep, the child wraps them in her arms and leans across the table to tell
how she would not have made it without their help. I have seen these programs.
Sometimes I dream a dream in which Dee
and I are suddenly brought together on a TV program of this sort. Out
of a dark and soft-seated limousine I am ushered into a bright room filled
with many people. There I meet a smiling, gray, sporty man like Johnny
Carson who shakes my hand and tells me what a fine girl I have. Then we
are on the stage and Dee is embracing me with tears in her eyes. She pins
on my dress a large orchid, even though she has told me once that she
thinks orchids are tacky flowers.
In real life I am a large, big-boned woman
with rough, man-working hands. In the winter I wear flannel nightgowns
to bed and overalls during the day. I can kill and clean a hog as mercilessly
as a man. My fat keeps me hot in zero weather. I can work outside all
day, breaking ice to get water for washing; I can eat pork liver cooked
over the open fire minutes after it comes steaming from the hog. One winter
I knocked a bull calf straight in the brain between the eyes with a sledge
hammer and had the meat hung up to chill before nightfall. But of course
all this does not show on television. I am the way my daughter would want
me to be: a hundred pounds lighter, my skin like an uncooked barley pancake.
My hair glistens in the hot bright lights. Johnny Carson has much to do
to keep up with my quick and witty tongue.
But that is a mistake. I know even before
I wake up. Who ever knew a Johnson with a quick tongue? Who can even imagine
me looking a strange white man in the eye? It seems to me I have talked
to them always with one foot raised in flight, with my head fumed in whichever
way is farthest from them. Dee, though. She would always look anyone in
the eye. Hesitation was no part of her nature.
"How do I look, Mama?" Maggie says, showing
just enough of her thin body enveloped in pink skirt and red blouse for
me to know she's there, almost hidden by the door.
"Come out into the yard," I say.
Have you ever seen a lame animal, perhaps a dog
run over by some careless person rich enough to own a car, sidle up to
someone who is ignorant enough to be kind to him? That is the way my Maggie
walks. She has been like this, chin on chest, eyes on ground, feet in
shuffle, ever since the fire that burned the other house to the ground.
Dee is lighter than Maggie, with nicer hair and
a fuller figure. She's a woman now, though sometimes I forget. How long
ago was it that the other house burned? Ten, twelve years? Sometimes I
can still hear the flames and feel Maggie's arms sticking to me, her hair
smoking and her dress falling off her in little black papery flakes. Her
eyes seemed stretched open, blazed open by the flames reflected in them.
And Dee. I see her standing off under the sweet gum tree she used to dig
gum out of; a look of concentration on her face as she watched the last
dingy gray board of the house fall in toward the red-hot brick chimney.
Why don't you do a dance around the ashes? I'd wanted to ask her. She
had hated the house that much.
I used to think she hated Maggie, too. But that
was before we raised money, the church and me, to send her to Augusta
to school. She used to read to us without pity; forcing words, lies, other
folks' habits, whole lives upon us two, sitting trapped and ignorant underneath
her voice. She washed us in a river of make-believe, burned us with a
lot of knowledge we didn't necessarily need to know. Pressed us to her
with the serf' oust way she read, to shove us away at just the moment,
like dimwits, we seemed about to understand.
Dee wanted nice things. A yellow organdy dress
to wear to her graduation from high school; black pumps to match a green
suit she'd made from an old suit somebody gave me. She was determined
to stare down any disaster in her efforts. Her eyelids would not flicker
for minutes at a time. Often I fought off the temptation to shake her.
At sixteen she had a style of her own: and knew what style was.
I never had an education myself. After second
grade the school was closed down. Don't ask my why: in 1927 colored asked
fewer questions than they do now. Sometimes Maggie reads to me. She stumbles
along good-naturedly but can't see well. She knows she is not bright.
Like good looks and money, quickness passes her by. She will marry John
Thomas (who has mossy teeth in an earnest face) and then I'll be free
to sit here and I guess just sing church songs to myself. Although I never
was a good singer. Never could carry a tune. I was always better at a
man's job. I used to love to milk till I was hooked in the side in '49.
Cows are soothing and slow and don't bother you, unless you try to milk
them the wrong way.
I have deliberately turned my back on the house.
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 sides, like the portholes in a ship, but not round
and not square, with rawhide holding the shutters up on the outside. This
house is in a pasture, too, like the other one. No doubt when Dee sees
it she will want to tear it down. She wrote me once that no matter where
we "choose" to live, she will manage to come see us. But she
will never bring her friends. Maggie and I thought about this and Maggie
asked me, "Mama, when did Dee ever have any friends?"
She had a few. Furtive boys in pink shirts hanging
about on washday after school. Nervous girls who never laughed. Impressed
with her they worshiped the well-turned phrase, the cute shape, the scalding
humor that erupted like bubbles in lye. She read to them.
When she was courting Jimmy T she didn't have
much time to pay to us, but turned all her faultfinding power on him.
He flew to marry a cheap city girl from a family of ignorant flashy people.
She hardly had time to recompose herself.
When she comes I will meet—but there they
are!
Maggie attempts to make a dash for the house,
in her shuffling way, but I stay her with my hand. "Come back here,"
I say. And she stops and tries to dig a well in the sand with her toe.
It is hard to see them clearly through the strong
sun. But even the first glimpse of leg out of the car tells me it is Dee.
Her feet were always neat-looking, as if God himself had shaped them with
a certain style. From the other side of the car comes a short, stocky
man. Hair is all over his head a foot long and hanging from his chin like
a kinky mule tail. I hear Maggie suck in her breath. "Uhnnnh, "
is what it sounds like. Like when you see the wriggling end of a snake
just in front of your foot on the road. "Uhnnnh."
Dee next. A dress down to the ground, in this
hot weather. A dress so loud it hurts my eyes. There are yellows and oranges
enough to throw back the light of the sun. I feel my whole face warming
from the heat waves it throws out. Earrings gold, too, and hanging down
to her shoulders. Bracelets dangling and making noises when she moves
her arm up to shake the folds of the dress out of her armpits. The dress
is loose and flows, and as she walks closer, I like it. I hear Maggie
go "Uhnnnh" again. It is her sister's hair. It stands straight
up like the wool on a sheep. It is black as night and around the edges
are two long pigtails that rope about like small lizards disappearing
behind her ears.
"Wasuzo-Teano!" she says, coming on in that
gliding way the dress makes her move. The short stocky fellow with the
hair to his navel is all grinning and he follows up with "Asalamalakim,
my mother and sister!" He moves to hug Maggie but she falls back,
right up against the back of my chair. I feel her trembling there and
when I look up I see the perspiration falling off her chin.
"Don't get up," says Dee. Since I am stout
it takes something of a push. You can see me trying to move a second or
two before I make it. She turns, showing white heels through her sandals,
and goes back to the car. Out she peeks next with a Polaroid. She stoops
down quickly and lines up picture after picture of me sitting there in
front of the house with Maggie cowering behind me. She never takes a shot
without making sure the house is included. When a cow comes nibbling around
the edge of the yard she snaps it and me and Maggie and the house. Then
she puts the Polaroid in the back seat of the car, and comes up and kisses
me on the forehead.
Meanwhile Asalamalakim is going through motions
with Maggie's hand. Maggie's hand is as limp as a fish, and probably as
cold, despite the sweat, and she keeps trying to pull it back. It looks
like Asalamalakim wants to shake hands but wants to do it fancy. Or maybe
he don't know how people shake hands. Anyhow, he soon gives up on Maggie.
"Well," I say. "Dee."
"No, Mama," she says. "Not 'Dee,' Wangero
Leewanika Kemanjo!"
"What happened to 'Dee'?" I wanted to know.
"She's dead," Wangero said. "I couldn't
bear it any longer, being named after the people who oppress me."
"You know as well as me you was named after
your aunt Dicie," I said. Dicie is my sister. She named Dee. We called
her "Big Dee" after Dee was born.
"But who was she named after?" asked Wangero.
"I guess after Grandma Dee," I said.
"And who was she named after?" asked Wangero.
"Her mother," I said, and saw Wangero was
getting tired. "That's about as far back as I can trace it,"
I said. Though, in fact, I probably could have carried it back beyond
the Civil War through the branches.
"Well," said Asalamalakim, "there you
are."
"Uhnnnh," I heard Maggie say.
"There I was not," I said, "before
'Dicie' cropped up in our family, so why should I try to trace it that
far back?"
He just stood there grinning, looking down
on me like somebody inspecting a Model A car. Every once in a while he
and Wangero sent eye signals over my head.
"How do you pronounce this name?"
I asked.
"You don't have to call me by it if
you don't want to," said Wangero.
"Why shouldn't 1?" I asked. "If
that's what you want us to call you, we'll call you."
"I know it might sound awkward at first,"
said Wangero.
"I'll get used to it," I said. "Ream
it out again."
Well, soon we got the name out of the way. Asalamalakim
had a name twice as long and three times as hard. After I tripped over
it two or three times he told me to just call him Hakim-a-barber. I wanted
to ask him was he a barber, but I didn't really think he was, so I didn't
ask.
"You must belong to those beef-cattle peoples
down the road," I said. They said "Asalamalakim" when they
met you, too, but they didn't shake hands. Always too busy: feeding the
cattle, fixing the fences, putting up salt-lick shelters, throwing down
hay. When the white folks poisoned some of the herd the men stayed up
all night with rifles in their hands. I walked a mile and a half just
to see the sight.
Hakim-a-barber said, "I accept some
of their doctrines, but farming and raising cattle is not my style."
(They didn't tell me, and I didn't ask, whether Wangero (Dee) had really
gone and married him.)
We sat down to eat and right away he said
he didn't eat collards and pork was unclean. Wangero, though, went on
through the chitlins and com bread, the greens and everything else. She
talked a blue streak over the sweet potatoes. Everything delighted her.
Even the fact that we still used the benches her daddy made for the table
when we couldn't effort to buy chairs.
"Oh, Mama!" she cried. Then turned
to Hakim-a-barber. "I never knew how lovely these benches are. You
can feel the rump prints," she said, running her hands underneath
her and along the bench. Then she gave a sigh and her hand closed over
Grandma Dee's butter dish. "That's it!" she said. "I knew
there was something I wanted to ask you if I could have." She jumped
up from the table and went over in the corner where the churn stood, the
milk in it clabber by now. She looked at the churn and looked at it.
"This churn top is what I need," she said.
"Didn't Uncle Buddy whittle it out of a tree you all used to have?"
"Yes," I said.
"Un huh," she said happily. "And I want
the dasher, too."
"Uncle Buddy whittle that, too?" asked the
barber.
Dee (Wangero) looked up at me.
"Aunt Dee's first husband whittled the dash,"
said Maggie so low you almost couldn't hear her. "His name was Henry,
but they called him Stash."
"Maggie's brain is like an elephant's,"
Wangero said, laughing. "I can use the chute top as a centerpiece
for the alcove table," she said, sliding a plate over the chute,
"and I'll think of something artistic to do with the dasher."
When she finished wrapping the dasher the
handle stuck out. I took it for a moment in my hands. You didn't even
have to look close to see where hands pushing the dasher up and down to
make butter had left a kind of sink in the wood. In fact, there were a
lot of small sinks; you could see where thumbs and fingers had sunk into
the wood. It was beautiful light yellow wood, from a tree that grew in
the yard where Big Dee and Stash had lived.
After dinner Dee (Wangero) went to the
trunk at the foot of my bed and started rifling through it. Maggie hung
back in the kitchen over the dishpan. Out came Wangero with two quilts.
They had been pieced by Grandma Dee and then Big Dee and me had hung them
on the quilt frames on the front porch and quilted them. One was in the
Lone Star pattern. The other was Walk Around the Mountain. In both of
them were scraps of dresses Grandma Dee had won fifty and more years ago.
Bits and pieces of Grandpa Jattell's Paisley shirts. And one teeny faded
blue piece, about the size of a penny matchbox, that was from Great Grandpa
Ezra's uniform that he wore in the Civil War.
"Mama," Wanegro said sweet as a bird.
"Can I have these old quilts?"
I heard something fall in the kitchen,
and a minute later the kitchen door slammed.
"Why don't you take one or two of the others?"
I asked. "These old things was just done by me and Big Dee from some
tops your grandma pieced before she died."
"No," said Wangero. "I don't want
those. They are stitched around the borders by machine."
"That'll make them last better," I
said.
"That's not the point," said
Wangero. "These are all pieces of dresses Grandma used to wear. She
did all this stitching by hand. Imag' ine!" She held the quilts securely
in her arms, stroking them.
"Some of the pieces, like those lavender
ones, come from old clothes her mother handed down to her," I said,
moving up to touch the quilts. Dee (Wangero) moved back just enough so
that I couldn't reach the quilts. They already belonged to her.
"Imagine!" she breathed again,
clutching them closely to her bosom.
"The truth is," I said, "I
promised to give them quilts to Maggie, for when she marries John Thomas."
She gasped like a bee had stung her.
"Maggie can't appreciate these quilts!"
she said. "She'd probably be backward enough to put them to everyday
use."
"I reckon she would," I said.
"God knows I been saving 'em for long enough with nobody using 'em.
I hope she will!" I didn't want to bring up how I had offered Dee
(Wangero) a quilt when she went away to college. Then she had told they
were old~fashioned, out of style.
"But they're priceless!" she
was saying now, furiously; for she has a temper. "Maggie would put
them on the bed and in five years they'd be in rags. Less than that!"
"She can always make some more,"
I said. "Maggie knows how to quilt."
Dee (Wangero) looked at me with hatred.
"You just will not understand. The point is these quilts, these quilts!"
"Well," I said, stumped. "What
would you do with them?"
"Hang them," she said. As if
that was the only thing you could do with quilts.
Maggie by now was standing in the door.
I could almost hear the sound her feet made as they scraped over each
other.
"She can have them, Mama," she
said, like somebody used to never winning anything, or having anything
reserved for her. "I can 'member Grandma Dee without the quilts."
I looked at her hard. She had filled her
bottom lip with checkerberry snuff and gave her face a kind of dopey,
hangdog look. It was Grandma Dee and Big Dee who taught her how to quilt
herself. She stood there with her scarred hands hidden in the folds of
her skirt. She looked at her sister with something like fear but she wasn't
mad at her. This was Maggie's portion. This was the way she knew God to
work.
When I looked at her like that something
hit me in the top of my head and ran down to the soles of my feet. Just
like when I'm in church and the spirit of God touches me and I get happy
and shout. I did something I never done before: hugged Maggie to me, then
dragged her on into the room, snatched the quilts out of Miss Wangero's
hands and dumped them into Maggie's lap. Maggie just sat there on my bed
with her mouth open.
"Take one or two of the others,"
I said to Dee.
But she turned without a word and went
out to Hakim~a~barber.
"You just don't understand,"
she said, as Maggie and I came out to the car.
"What don't I understand?" I
wanted to know.
"Your heritage," she said, and
then she turned to Maggie, kissed her, and said, "You ought to try
to make something of yourself, too, Maggie. It's really a new day for
us. But from the way you and Mama still live you'd never know it."
She put on some sunglasses that hid everything
above the tip of her nose and chin.
Maggie smiled; maybe at the sunglasses.
But a real smile, not scared. After we watched the car dust settle I asked
Maggie to bring me a dip of snuff. And then the two of us sat there just
enjoying, until it was time to go in the house and go to bed.
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