A Worn Path (1941). Content and Description

On a cold December day, old Phoenix Jackson—a black woman who lives out in the Mississippi countryside with her injured young grandson—makes the long, arduous trek into town, walking through woods, through fields, and across a stream and encountering (and speaking to) many creatures (including plants, birds, other animals, and even a scarecrow) along the way. When she meets a friendly if somewhat patronizing young white man who is out hunting with his dog (and who helps her up when he finds her fallen), she spies the chance to grab a nickel he has dropped; tucking it safely into her pocket, she moves on.

When she eventually arrives in town, she heads for a doctor’s office, where a nurse not only gives her medicine for her grandson but also gives her another nickel—a nickel Phoenix plans to use to help purchase a little paper windmill for the boy.

Although most readers have been charmed and moved by Welty’s depiction of elderly Phoenix Jackson, with her spirit of persistence and stoic endurance, other readers have found the character an example of the ways African Americans are often stereotyped in fiction in general and in Welty’s fiction in particular. Rather than being treated as a complex human being (these later readers argue), Phoenix is depicted as a quaint, eccentric, good-natured, nonthreatening old woman (a kind of “mammy” or “Aunt Jemima” figure) whom the white characters can treat with a sort of condescending charity that sometimes verges (as in the case of the hunter) on hints of intimidation.

Reading Welty’s story, it is certainly easy to forget the darker aspects of relations between the races in Mississippi in the 1940s, but perhaps part of the purpose of the tale is to demonstrate the true fellow feeling that can ideally exist when people see each other as parts of an extended family rather than as members of distinct racial or economic subgroups. A number of the whites in the story respond to Phoenix as they might to their own grandparents, and the fact that the story is set at Christmastime is surely no accident: In some respects the tale is a celebration of the kind of generosity and love (especially by Phoenix toward her grandson) that we associate with that season of the year.

On the other hand, it is also possible to read the tale as a subtle indictment of the patronizing racism of some of the whites—as understated satire of their failure, both in attitudes and in actions, to live up to the true spirit of both Christmas and Christianity.

Whatever their attitudes toward the whites in the tale, most readers have found the story and its central figure warm and appealing; in her good humor, perseverance, and selfless devotion to another, Phoenix seems to embody some of the best aspects of the human spirit. She, more than anyone else in the story, embodies the true spirit of charity and kindness, and although it would have been easy to make her entirely a figure of sentimental pity, Welty complicates our response by showing that Phoenix can be tough, sly, hard-nosed, and even skeptical (as in her complex response to the hunter or her later dealings with the nurse).

Because of her first name (which suggests the legendary bird that rises, reborn, from the ashes of destruction—and that, for that reason, has often been associated with Christ), because of her quaint habit of speaking to flora and fauna, and because of her absent-mindedness as well as her single-minded imperturbability, Phoenix attains an almost mythic dimension. She is a small old woman, but somehow she is also larger than life.

Her journey is the latest in a long line of quest narratives that run from the beginning of recorded time; the “worn path” of the title is not only the literal path Phoenix walks but also, metaphorically, her own life and the lives of all people throughout the ages who have walked long and worked hard in the struggle to survive and (more important) to sustain the next generation. However much Welty’s story may imply a critique of the specific social relations of her day, her tale is also a deeply affecting affirmation of the resilience of the human spirit. Phoenix Jackson is an archetype of the loving “grand mother,” who struggles, as she nears the end of her own life, to nurture the life of a child she loves.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. Flannery O’Connor’s story “Everything That Rises Must Converge” also deals with relations between whites and blacks in the South and with a white woman’s gift of money to a poorer black. How do the stories resemble and/or differ from each other in tone, characterization, setting, and purpose? How are religious connotations used in both stories?

2. Compare and contrast Welty’s depiction of an elderly person on a journey with the similar depiction offered in Edwin Arlington Robinson’s poem “Mr. Flood’s Party.” What are the purposes of the two journeys? How are Phoenix and Mr. Flood similar and/or different? How is comedy used in both texts? Which of the two characters is more isolated, and how do the different levels of isolation contribute to the tones of the two works?

3. Which factor—race, class, gender, or age—is most important in this story? How do they intersect and interact? What difference (if any) would it make if the central character were an old white woman, or an old black man, or a poor young white girl? How (if at all) does Welty prevent the story from becoming sentimental? How does she make the story relevant to readers outside rural Mississippi?

4. Welty herself wrote an essay about this story (“Is Phoenix Jackson’s Grandson Really Dead?”). First, without having read the essay, give your own response to the question its title asks; be sure to provide evidence to support your argument. Then, after having read the essay, compare Welty’s answer and reasons for your own, and, in general, discuss the usefulness and effectiveness of Welty’s own comments about her story.