“A Worn Path,” by Eudora Welty, follows an ancient black woman on her journey through the cold countryside. Phoenix Jackson makes her painstaking way through dark woods, up steep hills, across streams, through fields, and down a lonely road on her mission to town to get medicine for her ailing grandson. She is met with many obstacles along the way, including thorny bushes that catch and snag her, a loose dog who runs her down, a hunter who admonishes her to return home, and, mostly, her own imagination. When she at last reaches her destination, she receives the medicine for which she came, and without hesitation she turns and begins her long journey back home.
On the surface, this is a story of love and devotion, but as we look more carefully at the details of what Phoenix encounters along her journey, we may come to wonder whether this is a story of mortality, or more specifically, illusions of immortality.
We can begin with the most obvious connection, Phoenix’s namesake. The character of Phoenix Jackson closely resembles the mythic bird in many ways: she wears a red scarf and has gold skin, which are the traditional colors of a phoenix; her hair is the odor of copper, which smells burnt and acrid; her tapping cane sounds like “a solitary…bird”; and her face is described throughout the story as glowing, illuminated, radiating, and shining, all conjuring images of the fiery bird. She also describes her grandson as a baby bird, and tells the hunter she cannot turn back because she is “bound” to go to town, since “the time [has] come around,” as if she is fulfilling her destiny to complete this cycle.
Phoenix’s love of her grandson is the driving force behind her routine journeys into town, but there are clues to suggest that her powerful love has tainted her grasp of reality, and that the mission bringing her to town is stemming from self-delusions. Phoenix is described as “solitary” as she walks, and even given her insistence that her grandson is still living, we can divine from her reactions to other occurrences that he may have died years ago, leaving her, indeed, solitary. For instance, when she rests by the side of the creek, Phoenix imagines that she sees a little boy offering her a piece of cake, but when she reaches for it, the apparition disappears. Just after this, she sees a scarecrow in a field and immediately takes it for a ghost, perhaps another indication that she is almost aware of the futility of her errand. Later, when the nurse asks her about the health of her grandson, Phoenix is confused and struck into a rigid silence for long moments until she regains her foggy and uncertain memory. There are also smaller clues throughout, including the appearance of a mourning dove (at which she comments that it’s “not too late for him”), and a buzzard (where she remarks, “Who you watching?”).
All of this implies that Phoenix is trapped in her cycle of walking this path, and within this cycle she is also somewhere between the recognition of mortality and the delusion of immortality. Until the end comes for her, too, she is compelled to continue this journey again and again out of her powerful love and her equally powerful denial.
I found that I had to read this story several times in order to fully gain any real insights on it. Because of the richness of the details and descriptions, it was too much to take in the first time, but I grew more attached to and appreciative of the story each time I read it. With the revelation at the end of the motive for Phoenix to make this journey, I was able to go back and better understand all the foreshadowing that takes place during the bulk of the story. I am amazed at the style and depth of this work of art, and I can only dream that someday I will write anything that may compare.
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