Alice Walker

The African American writer, Alice Walker, expresses her thoughts of how black women struggle to look toward the future and back at the past in the short story collection In Love and Trouble. Walker discusses the connections blacks’ history, their present moment in time, and their future lives have among one another in, “Everyday Use”, “Strong Horse Tea”, and “To Hell with Dying”. Walker’s theme throughout these works is how the individual values black women put on their ancestors’ traditions and heritage effects their decisions in the present. The dramatic transformation of the treatment of African Americans in the 1900s triggers the importance of the women’s choices and the further development of their history.
Walker shows how the difference in values of ancestry effects the decisions of the black women in “Everyday Use”. The educated daughter of the Johnson family, Dee, returns home newly named Wangero and claims she now possesses value for Africa...