"We've become a race of peeping Toms. What people ought to do is get outside their own house and look in for a change" --Rear Window
Like many other great female writers from the south, Eudora Welty placed her short story “A Worn Path” in the region of her birth, the surroundings of which she is clearly expert at exploiting to invoke realistic and memorable imagery for her setting. The ease with which Welty sprinkles the details of her story’s landscape is obvious, and one need not read the author’s biography to know that the journey of her main character is one with which both women are incredibly familiar. Only a woman who has walked such a path could so expertly take her readers along for the remarkable and symbol-laden trek through the Mississippi woods. “A Worn Path” is a mosaic of symbols. Every aspect—the path, Phoenix Jackson’s character, the obstacles along her way, the destination, and the reason for her trip—has meaning much deeper than its surface value. All possible discussions accepted, it is Phoenix Jackson herself, as well as the road which she travels, that is the most remarkable of all images in Eudora Welty’s “A Worn Path.”
The mere introduction of Welty’s central character, “there was an old Negro woman with her head tied in a red rag, coming along a path through the pinewoods. Her name was Phoenix Jackson” (Welty 644), evokes so many ideas that will continue to breathe further inferred meanings into the rest of the story. Although the surname Jackson is undoubtedly a very common title for countless other African American women of Welty’s familiarity, it was more likely chosen by the author to represent her native city (Jackson, Mississippi), while simultaneously insinuating that it is from Jackson that Phoenix will feel as if she has walked.
In a discussion of character titles in the story, one would be totally remiss in not noting the main character’s Christian name, Phoenix. Instantly, one marvels at such an unusual first name for anyone, let alone a black female of Eudora Welty’s time setting for the story. A consideration of the ancient archetype of the Phoenix is entirely appropriate for comparison. Like the Phoenix of mythical essence, Welty’s Phoenix Jackson has a very lengthy lifespan already. In fact, Phoenix Jackson is old, a detail of which either she or her creator fervently remind readers of throughout the story. Welty describes her as “an old Negro woman,” “very old and small,” and “Old Phoenix” (644) within the first four paragraphs alone. In mythology, the Phoenix is a symbol for constant rebirth and regeneration. These are themes that occur multiple times in “A Worn Path,” each time Jackson stops to rest before reclaiming her journey with newfound determination that is born from every respite. According to the commonly accepted description of the Phoenix, one envisions a vibrantly shaded bird with a plumage of various hues and equally colorful feathers. Welty’s description of Phoenix Jackson’s physical characteristics is a color study in itself:
“Her skin had a pattern all its own of numberless branching wrinkles and as though a whole little tree stood in the middle of her forehead, but a golden color ran underneath, and the two knobs of her cheeks were illuminated by a yellow burning under the dark. Under the red rag her hair came down on her neck in the frailest of ringlet, still back, and with an odor like copper” (644).
One can infer that Phoenix Jackson has seen much in her life, learned much from the world. She is obviously worn with age, clearly visualized in the description of her wrinkled countenance in the colorful writing of Welty.
Like Jackson, the path is equally worn, but for two separate and very distinct reasons. It has been tread back and forth, worn by Phoenix in her multiple journeys across. More profoundly, the path symbolizes so many similar steps walked in the lives of all the other citizens of the world who, like Phoenix Jackson, have been barraged with bad luck and misfortune. However, these countless others, like their representation in Welty’s heroine, have never allowed themselves to accept defeat.
The images of illness, death, and doom accompany nearly every moment of Jackson’s journey, but Phoenix, like the men and women of her character’s ilk, never allows her will to succumb to such frustrations. Phoenix walks “slowly in the dark pine shadows… with the balanced heaviness and lightness of a pendulum in a Grandfather clock” (644)—the images of Death lying in wait, biding its time. The sound of Jackson’s tapping umbrella makes “a grave and persistent noise in the still air” (644). Jackson is wearing “a dark striped dress” and encounters woods that “were deep and still” (644). Along her way, Jackson sees that “down in the hollow was the mourning dove—it was not too late for him” (644), but it seems that it is neither too late for Phoenix. Later on her trip, she encounters yet another bird, another symbol of death, “a buzzard” (645), and “then there was something tall, black, and skinny there, moving before her” (645).
The next encounter mentioned is not of the ornithological variety, though it is yet another image of death. Although Jackson believes that she has come upon a ghost, she soon determines that the solitary black figure is merely a scarecrow. Perhaps to laugh in the face of a cruel and conniving fate as it continually tempts her to give up, Phoenix chooses instead to dance with death before, re-energized in the sheer absurd perversity of the latest encounter, she moves forward. In fact, the closest the woman comes to truly grave danger is in her run in with “a black dog with a lolling tongue [that] came up out of the weeds by the ditch” (646) into which Phoenix falls, only to be knocked into a momentary state of total sensory loss in which she hallucinates.
It is here that “a dream visited her, and she reached her hand up, but nothing reached down and gave her a pull” (646), and Welty treats readers to the story’s second example of Jackson a sort of peaceful reverie that ends with her returning to a reality much more harsh than the tranquility of her fugue-like state. In her previous alteration of consciousness:
“[Phoenix] sat down to rest. She spread her skirts on the bark around her and folded her hands over her knees. Up above her was a tree in a pearly cloud of mistletoe. She did not dare to close her eyes, and when a little boy brought her a little plate with a slice of marble cake on it she spoke to him. ‘That would be acceptable.’ she said. But when she went to take it there was just her own hand in the air” (645).
It seems that in her hallucinatory state, people are caring and compassionate. They are not abrupt, nor sarcastic, nor condescending like the sundry real-life human characters she is soon to encounter.
Neither the white hunter nor the nursing staff at the hospital is particularly sympathetic to the plight of Phoenix Jackson. Neither are any of these characters truly polite. In fact, they verge on being quite rude, but in both cases, she manages to surreptitiously maneuver a nickel from the situation, a symbolic payment for which she feels some guilt, but for which she is obviously due. The nickel is further a symbol of her tough, untarnished spirit, the root of her faith in this arduous journey along “A Worn Path.”
It is quite doubtfully coincidental that the antagonistic characters Phoenix meets along her way are white; however, they are portrayed not from a platform rooted in the politics of Welty, but from the point-of-view of Phoenix Jackson, a woman who has obviously lived countless sorrows and hardships at the hands of a predominantly white population. There is the insinuation that Jackson has some degree of familiarity with being captured and being held when, along the path, her feet become tangled in a bush of thorns, and she muses that it “‘seem like there is chains about my feet, time I get this far,’” (645). Jackson even looks back along the way from which she has come, as if somewhat confused by her present circumstances and memories of something she has experienced before as “her fingers were busy and intent, but her skirts were full and long, so that before she could pull them free in one place they were caught in another,” and Phoenix remonstrates: “‘Thorns, you doing your appointed work. Never want to let folks pass—no sir’” (645). The imprisonment of her dress by the thorns, and its temporary prevention of her continuance, is a reminder of something with which she finds places a degree of comparative significance.
There are equal behavioral similarities between the hindrances that pontificate her journey and the forms of skepticism and hatred with which she has been dealing in her adult life. The most intense of these is brilliantly executed in her encounter with the sarcasm, blatantly condescending verbal assaults, and megalomaniacal sociopathic attitude of the white hunter who repeatedly calls attention to her age and belittles the reason for her trip. Finally, there is the ultimate slap in the face, shown in her arrival at the journey’s destination, the hospital, where she is treated to an obvious attitude of segregated beliefs by a staff that holds onto a sort of separate, but equal habituation. Undoubtedly, the behaviors and demeanors Jackson stumbles over in the characters sketches of Welty’s expert pen are far more common than not.
It seems that every moment of her jaunt has been beset with circumstances that could prevent her from persevering, people that might tempt others to simply give up. Fortunately, it is clear that no natural or human deterrent can ever totally break a person’s spirit if he or she refuses to allow their will to be broken. Welty’s story proves that when a person like Phoenix Jackson has love in her heart and goals to pursue, nothing can stop her ambition, even as the journey takes her along “A Worn Path.”
Works Cited
Welty, Eudora. “A Worn Path.” Literature for Composition, 8th ed. Ed. Sylvan Barnet, William Burto, and William E. Cain. New York: Longman, 2007. 644-649.
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