On the day the story takes place, Dee arrives on a very infrequent visit. Mama is astonished because Dee is wearing African clothing and jewelry. She’s also taken an African name and the religion of her boyfriend which is Islam. In the 1960’s African Americans in response to widespread racism, they embraced and began affirming their true roots. She was trying to establish here new proud African identity but also authentic southern rural roots.
She comes across as showing high opinion and unfeeling, but Mamma sees even her admirable qualities as extreme and annoying. Her lack of knowledge concerning her family is symbolic of the black power movement's. She is embracing her roots where she come from, look down on her surroundings and believes herself to be above them. She is educated because she went to school in Augusta. When she return from school, she had a new identity and she change her name to Wagner.
She does not understand what the presence of a mother would really be like, but she feels her mother’s absence constantly. Though Lily fantasizes about a replacement mother in Rosaleen, she still yearns for the real thing. Lily eventually leaves Sylvan because T. Ray tells her that her mother left her as a child. Lily has kept her mother in such a high regard and the news from T. Ray is devastating to her, she will not believe it. Lily chooses to travels to Tiburon, South Carolina after reading the name of this city on the black Mary picture that belonged to her mother.
She held the quilts securely in her arm, stroking them” (748) Dee (Wangero) can feel the love of her Grandmother through these quilts. Mama has already promised them to Maggie now, knowing that Dee had no use for them before she went away to college. Now she would like to hang them up and show off her heritage. Walker uses the quilts to also show a little personality in Mama as she is angered by the fact that Dee thinks all Maggie would do with the quilts is use them every day and not realize the history and heritage behind them. Even though Maggie is portrayed as a frail, quiet, shy child, she reveals her thoughts when Dee is told no by Mama for the quilts.
Set in rural Georgia during the age of the Jim Crow south, Alice Walker used a time where African American people were searching for their African roots while seemingly neglecting those closer to home. When Dee came home from the city to visit her mother and sister, she appears to have a brand new love of her culture and heritage but in reality, she rejects the very root of her own family tree, while Mama is still content with her life as is, and a spark was finally lit in Maggie making her smile at
One job that she learned about racial differences was being a housekeeper, where she worked for a lady named Mrs. Burke. Mrs. Burke bluntly tells her that because she is black, she doesn’t get paid that much. Through holding local guild meetings at her house with her gal friends, Moody discovers how white people expressed their hatred toward black people. The triple exploitation of nationality, work, and gender characterizes Moody’s motivation to her individuality of becoming a civil rights activist. Similar to Coming of Age in Mississppi, Mirta Vidal’s article on Chicanas
in History, but the passing of one of her biggest inspirations, her grandmother Louvenia Watson, caused her great suffering. This tragedy led to the production of powerful poems and essays, which essentially became her most significant outlet and by 1968, Giovanni published the first volume of her book of poems, Black Feeling Black Talk. This volume includes the poem Nikki-Rosa, one that gives a first hand account of the life of a young African American girl growing up in the heat of racism and violence. Immediately, the title Nikki-Rosa indicates that the poem will discuss Giovanni’s childhood, seeing as how the poem is given the title of the nickname Giovanni was given in the early years of her adolescence. In addition, the first shift directly comments on an area known as “Woodlawn,” (line 3) a suburb of Cincinnati, Ohio where Giovanni briefly resided.
She writes in order to redirect the generations of misguided African Americans. Her story preaches to her readers that it is crucial to keep and preserve the culture and history of their ancestors. African American history should be as the quilt in the story; it represents the bond of African Americans, “sewn” together, as patches on a quilt. Each patch represents a different generation bonded through cultural tradition. In the story, the quilt illustrates a tale of the struggle of the family’s ancestors, and just as a piece of stitching comes loose Dee helps her family to learn a lesson that keeps the quilt (a family’s ancestral history) intact by sharing it so that others too may learn to become educated in their history and take pride in it.
The education of Alice Walker leads to enlightenment of her races injustice and through her activism Alice discovers her ancestry has been persecuted for being a human of a different color, oppressed by our ignorant fore fathers. The same holds true for Myop, her enlightenment to her races injustice and oppression with the discovery of the corpse, rotting noose still dangling, “Myop laid down her flowers. And summer was over” (Walker 22). The growth of Myop with that one simple display of activism of a young black girl stems from the similarities in character of the hand of the
When she came back to visit, she had changed her name to Wangero which she believed represented her heritage more so than “being named after the people who oppress me” (112). Dee’s personal struggle to overcome the oppression directly parallels the African American community’s struggle to overcome oppression. The evolution of the African American community in society can creatively be seen through Alice Walker’s development of the characters Mama, Maggie, and Dee. Walker also uses possessions to creatively represent the heritage of the family. Through the three characters, Walker symbolizes the struggles and success of the African American community.