listen to Black women
A Response to Alice Walker's Everyday Use, and Toni Cade Bambara's The Lesson
Hello love,
I have not published here in what feels like a long while. Please take below an offering from me that feels particularly timely. This is an essay I wrote for my English class. We were asked to respond to Toni Cade Bambara’s short story “The Lesson” and Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use”. The following is a slightly edited version of the essay I submitted.
Thank you for your gentleness as I return to the page.
Love yall, Mean it.
-B
The voices of Black women carry the weight of centuries: a collective memory burdened by oppression yet buoyed by the labor of survival and the audacity of joy. In our silence, there is strategy; in our speech, revolution. …
Yet our voices are often dismissed by systems that commodify us, rewarding performance over substance and spectacle over soul. Navigating this labyrinth of oppression, Black women and girls are faced with a complex choice between conformity and individuality. But this is no simple dichotomy. Conformity, while offering the mirage of safety, often demands erasure, perpetuating cycles of dehumanization. Individuality, when disconnected from authentic role models, risks becoming hollow—detached from the communal roots and cultural heritage that sustain it. What remains clear is this: Black women’s mentorship, grounded in lived experience and unflinching wisdom, is the only path to liberation that does not demand our erasure.
At the heart of this truth lies the Black woman’s literary tradition—a cultural and intellectual necessity that has shaped the contours of resistance and self-actualization for nearly two centuries. From Maria Stewart’s 1831 call to “sue for our rights and privileges” to the works of today, this tradition has always articulated a collective consciousness while reflecting deeply personal experiences. Scholars like Katie Geneva Cannon and Patricia Hill Collins affirm that Black women’s literature serves as a symbolic conveyor, transferring the values and wisdom of the community across generations. It is a reservoir of overlooked and undervalued insight, where the ordinary becomes extraordinary, and survival itself is an act of creation. This lineage of storytelling, rooted in lived experience and literary craft, captures a perspective uniquely poised to critique and reimagine the world.
Two short stories by Black women writers exemplify the transformative dynamic between mentorship and individual expression: Alice Walker’s” Everyday Use" and Toni Cade Bambara’s “The Lesson”. Both Walker and Bambara, giants in the canon of Black women’s literature, provide essential models for how Black women define themselves and navigate cultural identities. Their work reflects the power of the Black woman’s literary tradition, which remains a guiding force for self-discovery and communal connection.
This tension plays out vividly in Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use”. Here, Momma anchors her family in the history and labor of Black women—women whose names were whispered through oppression and whose hands stitched survival into every quilted piece of fabric. Dee, with her renamed identity and academic affectations, rejects this anchoring “I couldn’t bear it any longer, being named after the people who oppress me” (Walker 444). Her claim that “Wangero” better aligns with her identity erases the lineage that Momma embedded in her given name. Momma’s response—“You know as well as me you was named after your aunt Dicie”—reveals the hollowness of Dee’s rejection. Dee’s desire for the family quilts, not as tools of daily life but as artifacts, reveals a painful truth: in seeking to reclaim her identity, she has become untethered from it. The quilts are not mere symbols; they are memory embodied, meant to be lived with, not displayed.
It is Maggie, timid and scarred, who inherits them—not because she is perfect, or smart, but because she understands. She knows that the quilts are the everyday use of survival, the weaving of one’s self into community. Momma’s choice is not a rejection of Dee’s education but a refusal to privilege performance over authenticity. As Momma declares, “She can always make some more,” it becomes clear that heritage, like the quilts, must be lived, not merely performed or displayed. In this, Walker reminds us that identity, when divorced from its roots, becomes a hollow mimicry of liberation.
In Toni Cade Bambara’s “The Lesson”, mentorship takes on a more confrontational form. Miss Moore, with her “nappy hair, proper speech, and no makeup,” becomes a mirror that Sylvia and her friends resist (Bambara 432). She forces them to see a world that insists on their inferiority, exposing them to wealth so vast it feels like a personal affront. The children’s discomfort is palpable, their ridicule of Miss Moore a shield against the dissonance she creates in their minds. And yet, Miss Moore persists—not to impose answers but to plant seeds of self-awareness that will grow long after she is gone. Sylvia, initially dismissive, ends the story in contemplative silence: “I’m going to… think this day through”, signaling that Miss Moore’s lessons have taken root, even if their full impact is not yet visible (Bambara 438). This moment, a crack in Sylvia’s armor, signifies the power of mentorship to disrupt even the most entrenched defenses.
But what do these stories mean for us today? The tension between Dee’s performance and Maggie’s practicality is mirrored in the modern commodification of Black identity. Corporate diversity initiatives celebrate surface-level representations of Blackness while sidelining the lived realities of systemic racism. Social media rewards performative activism, blue bracelets, digital outrage, and aestheticized liberation. Social media offers likes and shares in place of substantive change. It is the same spirit that mammified Kamala Harris, amplifying her as the emblem of progress, only to usher in Trump’s presidency and a subsequent wave of hollow gestures, echoing the pussy hat debacle of 2016. Once again, the "assignment" is failed. It’s always “listen to Black women” on paper, on campaign trails, in viral hashtags– but rarely in our homes, our ballot boxes, our hearts, or our school curricula.
In this landscape, our languages, stories, and traditions are the quilts of our heritage. And these sacred tools, meant for everyday use are at risk of becoming artifacts: curated for display but disconnected from their utility. These symbols of survival and resistance, stitched together by generations of Black women, risk being flattened into mere aesthetic, their revolutionary potential untethered from the very people who created them.
Miss Moore’s approach, meanwhile, finds its echoes in churches, and in the laps of grandmothers, and in grassroots movements like GirlTrek or Black Girls CODE, where Black women mentor the next generation to interrogate the systems that shape their lives. But even these spaces are not immune to the pressures of capitalism, which demands marketable outcomes over the messy, unquantifiable process of transformation. Sylvia’s final words, “And somethin weird is goin on, I can feel it in my chest” remind us that the work of mentorship is not to provide clarity but to unsettle, to inspire questions that linger, demanding answers only the mentee can discover (Bambara 435).
The mentorship of Black women is not a soft offering; it is a radical, disruptive act.
It insists that our stories, labor, and lives matter. Not as symbols but as truths that must be lived. Walker’s quilts and Bambara’s lessons are not relics but roadmaps. They demand that we remember: our names are not arbitrary, our lives are not props, and our liberation is not performative.
And yet, there is danger in remembering too simply. What neither Dee nor Sylvia fully grasps, but what Maggie and Momma seem to understand, is that identity cannot be claimed without reckoning with its cost. The quilts carry the pain of the hands that made them. The lesson is in the silences Miss Moore leaves unspoken. Both demand that we face the question: How do we carry memory without becoming trapped by it?
In this, mentorship becomes both burden and gift. It requires that we teach not only survival but how to transcend it—how to live in the fullness of a world that does not yet exist. For Black women and girls, the act of mentorship is an act of creation. It stitches the past to the future, weaving a fabric strong enough to hold us all.
This dialectical relationship feels inherent to womanism. More on this topic can be found in Katies Cannon - Katie G Cannon and Black Feminist Thought by Patricia Hills Collins. This, and all works I will ever write, assumes that the Black women’s literary cannon represents one of the highest forms of self definition and self actualization for Black women.1
There are three distinctive things you’ve written here that stood out to me:
1. “Corporate diversity initiatives celebrate surface-level representations of Blackness while sidelining the lived realities of systemic racism.”
2. “It’s always “listen to Black women” on paper, on campaign trails, in viral hashtags– but rarely in our homes, our ballot boxes, our hearts, or our school curricula.”
3. “How do we carry memory without becoming trapped by it?”
They stand out because they address a silent grief that it seems only black women can hear & understand. I can see clearly the rage that pounds against brick wall by brick wall never making a dent while everyone else just sits and watches—content with our suffering. Only ever assuming that this is the way it is “supposed to be.” Unconscious and completely sinister. Black power is an idea to them and not an actualization of our divine ingenuity.
I felt deeply infuriated and annoyed by how much, how often and how clearly I have communicated my needs, my desires, how it would contribute to my family/community—only to feel slighted by the people who would have benefited by my well being (my being a black woman). Even though my children are young & I’m doing my best to keep them from over exposure to the harmful ideals of social media, performed activism, internalized racism, etc. I see the behaviors trickling through from environmental influence.
So I ask the same question after repeating the things my mother and her mother did even though I thought I would “do better.” How can we honor what was without becoming it now? Thank you so much for sharing this potent work. Well done!
Thank you for sharing these authors' stories and helping me understand and empathize with the beautiful community of Black women writers who also mentor the next generations.