Alice Walker - Everyday Use

Alice Walker is a black woman who allows her personality and her personal characteristics to flow through her writing. Her most famous writing to me would have to be “The Color Purple.” Most people this day and time mainly remember it as a movie.
This short story focuses on a mother, who is the narrator, and her two daughters, Maggie and Dee. It is immediately evident that the two daughters are quite different. Maggie is more reserved and homely and she has burns on her body from a house fire from some years past that seems to me could have been set by Dee. Their mother is a stoutly, thick woman who has the physical ability to work as hard as any man but only has a second grade education. Dee wants a better life that what she was given as a child, while Maggie seems satisfied.
As the girls have grown up, Dee is coming back home with her fellow named Asalamalakim. She came home to show off the place and the things she calls history to Asalamalakim. She wants thing from the house to take home with her to display and not use. She mainly wants a quilt that was made by her grandmother to hang on a wall. Her mother isn’t very happy with this. Dee and her mother argue over this as well as the other relics. Mother explains how her sister Maggie was to get these things because she would appreciate them in a way Dee never could. This angers Dee and she can’t seem to understand why her mother thinks she will not appreciate it appropriately. Dee feels she is the only would who could actually appreciate these things appropriately when however she appears to be the one ashamed of her history. She wants these things to show as something in the past, but it is also a part of her family’s current lives.
This was an alright story for me. It was somewhat boring and I searched for a climax that I never found. I was glad to see Maggie show a little personality at the end.