y values their old handmade goods, such as the hand-carved benches made for the table when the family could not afford to buy chairs. To Dee, artifacts such as the benches or the quilts are strictly aesthetic objects. It never occurs to her that they, too, are symbols of oppression--her family made these things because they could not afford to buy them. Her admiration for them now seems to reflect a cultural trend toward valuing handmade objects, rather than any sincere interest in her "heritage." After all, when she was offered a quilt before she went away to college, she rejected it as "old-fashioned, out of style." Dee is not the only one confused about the heritage of the black woman in the rural South. Although the mother and Maggie are skeptical of Dee, they recognize the limitations of their own lives. The mother has only a second-grade education and admits that she cannot imagine looking a strange white man in the eye. Maggie "knows she is not bright" and walks with a sidelong shuffle. Although their dispositions lead them to make the best of their lives, they admire Dee's fierce pride even as they feel the force of her scorn. It is the mother's point of view which permits the reader's understanding of both Dee and Maggie. Both young women might seem stereotypical--one a smart but ruthless college girl, the other a sweet but ineffectual homebody. The mother's attention to details saves Dee and Maggie, as characters, from banality. For example, Maggie's shyness is explained in terms of the terrible fire she survived: "Sometimes I can still hear the flames and feel Maggie's arms sticking to me, her hair smoking and her dress falling off her in little black papery flakes. Her eyes seemed stretched open, blazed open by the flames reflected in them." Ever since, "she has been like this, chin on chest, eyes on ground, feet in shuffle." In Dee's case, the reader learnsthat, as she was growing up, the high demands she ...
