This short story describes a poor black woman and her two daughters. The oldest daughter, Dee, is visiting from college and arrives with a young man to see her mother and younger sister. The mother is the narrator of the story and in the beginning describes her oldest daughter and reflects on their relationship. She gives examples of how they live and illustrates their appearances, to include her younger daughter. Her descriptions of how they live and the comparisons of what they look like are interesting because the reader can hear the animosity in her voice. In one way she is pleased that her prissy daughter Dee, is attending college and getting an education, but on the other hand, she seems sad for her other daughter, Maggie, who still lives at home with her. The mother's youngest daughter is someone that is not as smart, but very considerate and innocently understanding, although her older sister did not respect her feelings wholeheartedly.
The first confrontation is when the oldest daughter introduces her male companion and tells her family that she changed her name to an Islamic name, Wangero. Although the name was hard to pronounce, her mother and sister accepted the name and respected her wishes to be called by the name. After having a family dinner, Wangero, rushes off to her mother's bedroom with Hakim-a-barber, her male companion, and seeks out quilts she had obviously planned to retrieve during her visit. With no respect to her sister, who was cleaning in the kitchen, she without hesitation asked her mother for the quilts. What is important about these quilts is that her younger sister helped make them with the their grandmother. The quilts had become sentimental to her younger sister, Maggie, and Wangero did not give any consideration to that fact.
After all was said and done, the mother made a decision that the quilts belonged to her younger daughter, and Wangero stor
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