SOURCE: Cowart, David. “Heritage and Deracination in Walker's Everyday Use.” Studies in Short Fiction 33, no. 2 (spring 1996): 171-84.

In the following essay, Cowart explains how Alice Walker uses her main characters in “Everyday Use” to outline her own vision of the African American community in the past and present, as well as their struggle for identity and liberation.

“Everyday Use,” a story included in Alice Walker's 1973 collection In Love ‘and Trouble, addresses itself to the dilemma of African Americans who, in striving to escape prejudice and poverty, risk a terrible deracination, a sundering from all that has sustained and defined them. The story concerns a young woman who, in the course of a visit to the rural home she thinks she has outgrown, attempts unsuccessfully to divert some fine old quilts, earmarked for the dowry of a sister, into her own hands. This character has changed her given name...