African-American Writers

For Dee, "becoming" African-American heart that she must reclaim her heritage. At the same time, she rejects her mother and child and says "it's re totallyy a new day for us. But from the commission you and Mama still live you'd never know it" (Walker, 2000, p. 1426). The quilts do by Mama's ancestor may be literally valuable as Dee believes them to be. They are equally priceless to Maggie, who nevertheless affirms that she does non need material possessions to ensure that she will remember her nan and other family members.

The tone of this story pits a new times of African-Americans against an older generation. Dee represents the new generation, whereas Maggie and her mother clearly represent the old. The billing that Maggie and her mother do not understand their heritage and hold in not made anything of themselves is, from Dee's perspective, legitimate. She has moved away from her rural grow and has taken on a new African-American as symbolized in her new name "Wangero Leewanika Kemanjo."

What Dee does not realize is that in becoming a "new" African-American she is in event denying the reality of her African-American heritage. This is something that her mother clearly understands and is evident in the following statement: "I could probably have carried it (Dee's name) lynchpin beyond the Civil War through the branches" (Walker, 2000, p. 1423).

The symbols that are so valuable to Dee - the benches he

Matter. crude York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2000, pp. 1420-

sonny boy says of himself that "I've been something I didn't recognize, didn't know I could be. Didn't know anybody could be" (Baldwin, 2000, p. 288).

It is in his music that Sonny escapes the conditions of his life just as it is in her new name and her new assumed heritage that Dee escapes the conditions of her life.

Walker, Alice. " universal Use." In Making Literature

In "Sonny's Blues," James Baldwin (2000, p. 271) describes a junior and talented urban African-American male who tragically becomes problematic with drugs. Told from the perspective of an older brother, Sonny's story is about the alienation that African-Americans much feel in mainstream American society. Sonny turns to heroin - which symbolically represents the image of freedom from the burdens of oppression and marginalization in gaberdine society - as his own strategy for "becoming" an African-American.

Matter. New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2000,

Sonny's blues are the blues that were experienced by all the African-Americans who had gone before him and would come after him. By contend as he did, Sonny was effectively giving put up and overcoming death as well as oppression. Tragically for Sonny, however, an tweak for selling and using heroin will put a temporary end to his ability to speak through his piano.

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