Quiet Heritage

My grandmother suffered a stroke three months before her 100th birthday. While the clot moved through her body, she sat quietly on her sofa knitting an army-green winter cap for Russian orphans. She didn’t know she was in the middle of a medical crisis, but the moment reveals something essential about her: she stayed with her purpose until the end, doing something simple and loving. Every week for ten years she gave hats to an organization that worked with the orphans, yet she never bragged about it. She sent off the hats in batches of twenty to the Russian orphanage and got to work on twenty more. There was never a time when yarn wasn't attached to her knitting needles. Even in her last moments she served.

After her funeral, I asked if I could have the unfinished winter cap and her attached knitting needles. More than anything of hers, this was the most valuable to me. It held her last act of love, and I wanted to preserve it. My mother and her siblings agreed, and I placed the needles, yarn, and her picture inside a frame. I hung it above my desk next to pictures of Mother Teresa, the Buddha, and Martin Luther King Jr. When I look up at that wall, I think about King’s words: “Everyone can be great, because everyone can serve,” and I wonder if my grandmother would have wanted her needles displayed this way. Did she ever intend them to be displayed like this or in motion doing the work they had always done? What good were they doing on the wall?

This same tension, between exposition and quiet service, runs through Alice Walker’s Everyday Use, written just five years after King’s assassination. The story explores identity, education, and the ways our past shapes us, whether we recognize it or not.

Mama and Maggie live their heritage the way my grandmother lived hers. They cook, quilt, work, and care for each other. Their days are filled with doing, not displaying. Their heritage continues through their hands and habits, echoing King’s message that legacy is something we build moment by moment. It doesn’t begin or end; it’s something we keep knitting into the story of who we are.

Dee, on the other hand, returns home transformed, thinner, stylish, confident, educated. She arrives with a man, speaks with new authority, and carries herself like she has stepped into a higher version of herself. She has taken on an African name, Wangero Leewanika Kemanjo, believing it connects her to a more authentic identity. In many ways, she is the first in her family to break into new territory, the first to receive a higher education, the first to imagine a life beyond the small home she grew up in, the first to feel she “made it.”

It’s tempting to dislike Dee for the condescending way she reenters her childhood home, demanding things and talking down to her mother and sister. But I believe her intentions are pure. She is young, excited, and full of conviction about resisting the forces that have shaped her life. Pendulums swing far before settling in balance. If Walker had continued the story across decades, I imagine a more grounded Dee, a woman who eventually recognizes the value of the heritage Mama created would eventually emerge.

Dee’s struggle isn’t her education or her desire for African roots. It’s that she refuses to see the African American heritage she already belongs to. Mama tries to tell her who she was named after, but Dee brushes it off. She takes Polaroids without asking. She wants the churn, the bench, the quilts, not to use, but to display. To her, heritage is something you hang on the wall. She believes her family doesn’t understand the meaning of their own history.

The story comes to a head when Dee demands the quilts that Mama promised. Dee wants to preserve them, while Maggie, wants to use them and if they wear out, she knows how to make more. Mama had created a pattern with her daughters that etched into the fabric of their family heritage. She gave into Dee whenever she wanted anything, but when Mama decided to give the quilts to Maggie, she changed their heritage trajectory. It is Mama’s way of saying that what her family built in this country has value, and Maggie deserves to carry it forward. Dee’s personality was shaped partly by a mother who once placed her on a pedestal. This is Mama reclaiming balance.

Dee and Maggie mirror two paths into the future. Dee resembles the side of the Civil Rights Movement shaped by Malcolm X. He represented bold reinvention, Black pride, and the reclaiming of identity. Maggie embodies the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr's rootedness, focus on community, and teachings on a steady progress together. Both paths have value. Both arise from pain. Both seek dignity. When Mama places the quilts in Maggie’s arms, the story's position is clear; heritage is created in life's daily duties, not in the bold pronunciation of it.

Thinking about that helps me see my grandmother differently. Her framed knitting needles have hung on my wall for years, meant to honor her. But maybe I froze the very thing that made her life meaningful. She didn’t knit hats to create a legacy. She knit them so children she would never meet could be warm. That is heritage. That is service. That is the kind of greatness King believed in.

Maybe the best way to honor her isn’t through the frame at all. Maybe I should take it down, hold her knitting needles in my hands, finish the hat she started, and send it where she meant it to go. That feels closer to who she was, and closer to what it means to truly live our heritage, one small stitch, one small act of service, at a time.