Instilled Heritage Essay -- essays research papers fc

Instilled Heritage Alice Walker usually puts herself into characters that she writes about in her stories. However, you don’t understand this unless you know about her. Staring with this let us find out about who she is and where she came from. When recounting the life of Alice Walker, you find out that she was born to sharecroppers in Eatonton, Georgia in 1944 and was the baby of eight children. She lost one of her eyes when her brother shot her with a BB gun by accident. She was valedictorian of her class in high school and with that and receiving a scholarship; she went to Spelman, a college for black women, in Atlanta. She then transferred to Sarah Lawrence College in New York and during her time there went Africa as an exchange student. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Sarah Lawrence in 1965. She was active in the Civil Rights Movement of the 60’s and as of the 90’s she is still an involved activist. She started her own publishing company in 1984, Wild Tree Press. She is an acclaimed writer and has even received a Pulitzer Prize for the movie, The Color Purple. What is it about her that makes her works so meaningful and persuasive? What provoked her to write what she has? One of her works, a short story called Everyday Use, is a story that she herself can be pictured in. During the opening of this story you find a woman with her two daughters. She and one of her daughters, Maggie, have just cleaned and beautified the yard of their new house. It is very comforting sitting under the Elm tree that is present and blocks the wind from going through the house. It is a place that you feel enveloped in comfort and love. Maggie and Dee, the other daughter are very different, and it is very apparent that mother, is not your ‘everyday’ woman. She, the mother, is â€Å"a larger woman that can kill and clean a hog as mercilessly as a man’ (American Lit, p. 2470). She has no problems doing what needs to be done in order to feed and protect her family. However, the daughters are quite opposite; you have the one, Maggie that has been badly burned and is much scarred, and then Dee, the African Princess want to be. Maggie is very envious of her sis ter and is waiting for the day that she leaves, to further her education. Mother only made it to second grade and back then there wasn’t much to say or do about it, so she settled with what she had. Through the church ... ... lives were lived, that we survived on scraps and patches, the leftovers from the ancestors; we take what no one wanted and make it into something that is loveable and cherished. The heritage that you are looking for is probably looking you in the face. Look around you, discover what you know is there. Remember what brought you where you are and how you got there. Your family is your heritage, no matter the consequences or heartbreaks that happen along the way. There is a reason for everything and it is only then that you can really say that instead of just showing off what you have received or found, put it to Everyday Use. It is everyday that we learn something new. When learning these things, use what you already know to lead the way for your followers to find what they are looking for, heritage is never far from anyone, as a matter of fact, it is instilled in everyone. Works Cited 1. Helga Hoel. "Alice Walker's Everyday Use." Essay on Alice Walker. 17 January 2005. 08 March 2005 . 2. Klinkowitz, Pritchard, Wallace. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2003.