Mama and Maggie live in a three-room house with no windows. The house is in a pasture, where Mama maintains livestock. Their yard is “like an extended living room,” meaning that, for them, there is little delineation between indoor and outdoor space. Mama narrates that she “can work outside all day,” wash with ice, and cook pork over the open fire after killing and cleaning the hog herself. Mama asserts her independence and resourcefulness without bragging about it. There is no man in the three-room house, and the reader knows that Mama doesn’t need one, due to her “man-working hands.” Walker establishes Mama and Maggie’s rural lifestyle as one characterized by a resourcefulness that urban Black people like Dee overlook. Worse, Dee views rural life as both backward and quaint. Mama and Maggie are oblivious, she thinks, to the changes in the world. The common objects that Mama and Maggie put to daily use—quilts and churns—are, for Dee, antiques for display.

Walker uses the difference with which the women look at objects to signify the division between rural Black life and urban Black life. The difference is also illustrated when Dee’s partner, Hakim-a-barber, tries to give Maggie the “soul shake,” but both Maggie and Mama are clueless about what he’s trying to do. What had become a convention in the urban Black world didn’t make sense in the rural one. As a result, Mama figures that he doesn’t know how to shake hands properly. Maggie’s lack of hipness is read by Mama as Hakim-a-barber’s lack of proper manners.

Black people who moved to the cities, like Dee, became disconnected from their agrarian roots and developed a different relationship to space. While Maggie and Mama see the area outside of their house as being as much theirs as the house itself, Dee is focused on interiors: the churn is for her alcove table, and the patchwork quilts, she insists, should be hung. These are choices that she is able to make regarding how to organize her domestic space. She mistakenly equates her ability to make these choices with Mama and Maggie’s “choice” to remain on the farm. Dee is oblivious to the ways in which poverty and racism have made another way of life unthinkable.

Dee’s urbanity has also instilled in her a more conventional approach to domesticity and urbanity. While Mama is characterized by her masculine strength and her inability to exhibit a more palatable mode of Black feminine identity—that is, to be “a hundred pounds lighter” with lighter skin—Dee arrives at the farm in the company of a man and still wears a dress. Mama, on the other hand, wears overalls during the day. Though Dee thinks that she is more sophisticated, she reiterates the gender conventions that were instituted by the oppressor that she frequently mentions. It is Mama, unable to be the way Dee wants her to be, who is the less conventional figure in the context of their time.