Where It All Goes Down
The Narrator's Yard and House, (Possibly) 1960s Rural Georgia
Hey there—come on in and stay awhile. Most of the story in "Everyday Use" takes place in the narrator's yard so she wastes no time helping us get familiar with the place. Right from the get go, she tells us:
A yard like this is more comfortable than most people know. It is not just a yard. It is like an extended living room. When the hard clay is swept clean as a floor and the fine sand around the edges lined with tiny, irregular grooves, anyone can come and sit and look up into the elm tree and wait for the breezes that never come inside the house. (1)
Our clever narrator isn't just plopping down a description of the story's setting for us good literature students to spot. No, she's drawing us in and inviting us to get comfortable before she starts bringing on all the uncomfortable stuff (i.e. racism, traumatic memories, ugly quilt fights) that the story deals with. That way, we'll be less likely to close the book and start checking our email. Pretty clever indeed.
At the same time, the narrator doesn't completely romanticize the place. Later in the story, she points out that her house has "no real windows, just some holes cut in the sides, like the portholes in a ship, but not round and not square, with rawhide holding the shutters up on the outside" (14). This description gives us a pretty good understanding of the economic hardships the narrator and her daughters have had to face.
As for the bigger picture, it's tough to say for sure exactly where in the world this story is set. Our only real clues are that the house itself is located in a pasture and the narrator mentions that she raised money to send Dee to school in Augusta. So, if we were wagering a bet, we'd probably guess that the story more likely takes place in rural Georgia than in Paris, France. Figuring out the time period is a little easier thanks to the narrator's Johnny Carson reference (Johnny becomes a household name in the 1960s).
1960s in the American South, you say? Whoa, what a time for shifts in race relations, from Civil Rights to the Black Power and Black Pride Movements. We talk a lot about these contexts in the narrator's and Dee's segments of the "Characters" section, so be sure to check them out.