Dean Bethea, Western Oregon University
Unsurprisingly, Eudora Welty's short story "A Worn Path" has inspired many interpretations. Most critics, including Elaine Orr, James Walter, Peter Schmidt, and James Robert Saunders, assert the work as an optimistic depiction of its protagonist, Phoenix Jackson. [1] However, no previous study has discerned what I believe to be the work's primary purpose: to attack the debased Bible Belt Christianity that does not eradicate but instead accommodates racism through sins of both commission and omission. Even the many poststructuralist readings of "A Worn Path" have exhibited a shared, essentially formalist strategy: a tendency to divorce the "text" from the vitally important historical conditions and social relationships so carefully limned therein. But an understanding of the history from which the story's action emerges is required if we are to grasp Welty's larger concerns. Through the profound implications of its setting during the Christmas season in and around Natchez, Mississippi, in the twentieth century's early decades, and through its delineation of the protagonist's selflessness and courage, "A Worn Path" calls for the implementation of a theology that would make Phoenix's dangerous - and possibly fatal - journey unnecessary. In my view, Welty's primary intent is not to console, inspire, or edify her readers; nor does she want them merely to take heart from Phoenix's example. Rather, the story is a call to action against the "Christian" world that oppresses the protagonist. Phoenix's arduous, life-threatening trek is not solely reflective of the human spirit's capacity to triumph over circumstantial difficulties but revelatory of a society in which very different, patently unjust standards exist.
"A Worn Path" illuminates crucial distinctions between apocalyptic and ethical eschatology in Christian theology. Apocalyptic eschatology refers to the conventional belief that a last judgment will be meted out by a deus ex machina, and allows, indeed encourages, disinterest in and disdain for the events and realities of the mundane world. In contrast, ethical eschatology argues for an apocalypse in that quotidian realm, for an "end time" in the here and now achieved by humans who seek to transmogrify the mores of a corrupt social realm. This interpretation of apocalypse forms the basis of Liberation Theology, a phenomenon whose origins can be traced back to the Civil Rights Movement in the United States: "in the 1950s [Martin Luther King, Jr.] was the pioneer, the forerunner, of all the other liberation theologies that began only in the 1960s and 1970s." [2] If a Christian framework is to be imposed on "A Worn Path" at all, this radical eschatology seems the best choice, since it stems from the same racist experiences as those Phoenix endures. Attempting to read the story through the lens of a quietist eschatology recalls James H. Cone's cogent assertion that American theology has "failed miserably in relating its work to the oppressed in society by refusing to confront this nation with the evils of racism... Most of the time American theology has simply remained silent, ignoring the condition of the victims of this racist society." [3] I wish to argue that Welty has sought at the fictional level what Cone demands at the theological: through the acute historical consciousness and moral vision that infuses "A Worn Path," she confronts her nation with the lasting effects of its troubled history.
Readers of the story must decipher a subtle prose puzzle, one whose carefully chosen components - including tone, plot structure, setting, the juxtaposition of characters, the racist misinterpretations of Phoenix - only cohere when they are closely examined in light of the story's sociohistorical bases, revealing the rage churning beneath its deceptively placid surface. First, Welty filters her assault through her objective tone, a task she accomplishes perhaps too skillfully, as her concealed authorial presence may have fostered the consensual view of "A Worn Path" as a story concerned primarily with spiritual triumph. Second, the work's cunning structure invokes and apparently valorizes racist stereotypes while withholding crucial information until a final, revelatory reversal. Third, deep and furious irony is expressed through the title itself and its physical and seasonal settings. While the latter has been interpreted as an optimistic framework for the plot, this setting shows instead that the spiritual rebirth which the Christmas holiday symbolizes has not occurred in the heart of the so-called Bible Belt. Welty is also quite specific about where in the Bible Belt Phoenix is journeying to: Natchez - one of the South's most grandiose architectural gems and a bleak monument to the slave economy that built it. The setting's precise geography is thus complemented by its historical associations. The story's picaresque plot also augments Welty's fourth tactic, the juxtaposition of the other characters' material wealth and self-concern with Phoenix's poverty and selflessness, a contrast intensified by their interactions with, and misunderstanding of, her.
Taken together, these four components recall Christ's directive as stated in the Gospel of Matthew that "if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well. And if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile. Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you." [4] Welty's careful description of her protagonist's clothing reveals that Phoenix has no coat, and despite the freezing weather, none of the several people she meets offer her one. It seems probable that Welty, a product of the Bible Belt herself, had this precise verse in mind when she wrote the story. Christ demands that humans give more than what is asked of them and indicts the passive acceptance of another's suffering as an active form of evil, as a sin of omission. Yet no one in the story offers to "walk" even a mere yard with Phoenix, neither on the specific and perilous trip at hand nor on the larger "journey" that is her life. All of the work's white characters, because they do nothing in any real sense to improve Phoenix's plight, are revealed through their apathy as active sinners by the standards of their espoused religion's namesake. Welty invites us to castigate them not merely for their racist actions, but also for their callous inaction. She also implies that if they will not help Phoenix even now, during Christianity's most sacred season, they certainly will not do so during "ordinary times" either. Finally, after examining these four primary issues, we can turn to the story's open-ended conclusion, which should strike us as ominous and foreboding that the road's end for Phoenix will be the complete loss of her faculties or simply death - a fate that the work implies is near at hand.
The exclusion of such important factors from interpretations of "A Worn Path" diminishes its powerful range of meanings and recalls Walter Benjamin's assertion that "nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history." [5] By pursuing what Benjamin calls the "fullness of the past" through the restoration of the story's historical and social contexts, we discern not a benign and bland Christian allegory, but instead an impassioned and comprehensive indictment of the American South and, by extension, of the larger republic to which it belongs. [6] Phoenix does not live "primarily" as "a text... beyond the boundaries drawn by her social superiors." [7] Nor does she exist merely "within the world created by her own interior monologue," but rather as an individual trapped within the very real boundaries of a historically defined, deeply racist society. [8] These boundaries create monumental barriers to her expressive love, barriers that would have been confronted only by an illiterate, impoverished, isolated, and elderly African-American woman in the Deep South.
"A Worn Path" inveigles readers by invoking and apparently endorsing a host of "Aunt Jemima" or "Mammy" stereotypes regarding Phoenix's appearance and behavior. This entrapment begins with the story's first two paragraphs: "Far out in the country there was an old Negro woman with her head tied in a red rag... She wore a dark striped dress reaching down to her shoe tops, and an equally long apron of bleached sugar sacks, with a full pocket." [9] Her makeshift cane and clothing accord perfectly with racist clichés of the time, as do her untied shoes, which many mid-century readers would have seen as corroborative of their specious belief in African-Americans' "innate" laziness and lack of self-regard. More importantly, Welty indicates that her readers must be acutely aware not only of those details she mentions but also of those that she does not. We must notice that Phoenix has no coat, for this fact greatly magnifies the callousness of the white people she encounters, none of whom could have failed to remark her inadequate clothing, and none of whom bother to remedy it.
The invocation of racist stereotypes in describing Phoenix's appearance is immediately augmented by her behavior, as she begins conversing with both her surroundings and herself. In the next several paragraphs she continues to "talk loudly to herself" as well as to trees and to a thorn bush in which she becomes tangled, to a boy who brings her a slice of cake in a moment of hallucination, and then to a "ghost" that she finally realizes is only a scarecrow, around whom she subsequently dances a jig of relief (143). Phoenix's appearance is "comical," her behavior "childish" and "superstitious." Welty augments this apparent valorization of racist clichés by withholding the true reason for Phoenix's journey until the story's concluding paragraphs. Readers are tempted to agree with the white hunter Phoenix encounters who claims "I know you old colored people! Wouldn't miss going to town to see Santa Claus!" (145).
James Walter argues that "the red rag [Phoenix] wears on her head, then, is, in one perspective, her tiara, signifying her sovereignty over the creatures in her domain." [10] Similarly, Elaine Orr sees this passage as exemplifying a dominant concern with inscribing "contradictions" in the story: "For example, Welty describes her protagonist as 'neat and tidy' and yet Phoenix walks all the way to town with her shoes untied... but no careful reader will believe Phoenix could not tie her own shoes." [11] "Careful readers" ought to realize that Phoenix has untied laces not because she is lazy or unconcerned about her appearance but rather because her advanced age - the white hunter claims she "must be a hundred years old" - prevents her from tying them (146). That she is so wizened by time, yet so determined to complete her life-threatening quest, is a detail meant to deepen our admiration of and empathy for Phoenix. Walter's claim that the red rag she wears is a "tiara" signifying her dominance of a world that so clearly dominates her seems inaccurate, especially since such notions of sovereignty are quickly dismissed when she is knocked into a ditch by a dog and jeered at by the white hunter who discovers her there. The rag signifies the cause-and-effect relationship between Phoenix's indigence and her slave heritage: such scraps of fabric were the most common regalia of slave women in the South, the closest thing to a hat that they were often allowed, or could afford. Finally, her apron made of sugar sacks not only comments movingly on her privation but also alludes to the terrible legacy of the Jim Crow laws, which in many Southern towns prohibited most black men from wearing white shirts during the week and required all black women to wear aprons in public as humiliating signs of their continued oppression.
Neil Isaacs focuses on the symbolic dimensions of the Christmas setting, which for him inspires hope and provides a transcendental, timeless framework within which the text's specific details should be subsumed. [12] Yet the rebirth implied in Phoenix's name not only pertains to her repeated journeys in search of medicine, but also reveals the complete absence here of the spiritual rebirth that the Christmas holiday represents: the arrival of a new god, one whose love extends to all people regardless of skin color and whose main dictum to humanity is to love their neighbors as themselves. Phoenix's plight, and the indifference she faces, indicate that this spiritual rebirth has not occurred in her world. Welty's description as Phoenix first arrives in Natchez is deceptively innocuous: "Bells were ringing. Phoenix walked on. In the paved city it was Christmas time. There were red and green electric lights strung and crisscrossed everywhere and turned on in the daytime... A lady came along in the crowd, carrying an armful of red-, green-, and silver-wrapped presents" (146-47). The spirit of Christmas, however, is nowhere to be found as Natchez exhibits all of the season's trappings but none of its true meanings. While the city can afford not only to pay for decorative lights but also to burn them in the daytime, Phoenix is forced to live in a primitive house so cold that her grandson awaits her return wrapped up in "a little patch quilt" (148). Moreover, the contrast between Phoenix's makeshift clothing and the woman who approaches her bearing an armful of gifts only deepens the scene's irony.
Having Phoenix arrive in Natchez sets a host of negative historical associations reverberating throughout the story. Mississippi's first capital, Natchez was once the apotheosis of the King Cotton, slave-built South, a territorial hub where by 1850 two-thirds of the nation's millionaires lived and where at least forty mansions had been erected by 1860. [13] Moreover, the town marked the southern terminus of the Natchez Trace, the Mississippi River route that provided cheap and quick transportation for cotton - and for the newly arrived slaves who would be shipped to regional plantations, making the Trace forever a "Trail of Tears" for all African-Americans. After 1812, the rapid expansion of the Cotton Empire in the Southwest made Natchez and Algiers, Louisiana, the busiest slave markets in the nation. Natchez records for an "unknown part of the year 1833" show that thirty-two non-resident slave traders made the then staggering sum of $238,879, a figure that does not include the earnings of resident slavers, who conducted a much greater portion of the sales. Natchez's thriving economy is further evidenced by the presence of the regional offices of Franklin, Armfield and Company, the nation's major slave-trading firm. Moreover, slave prices in the city quadrupled over the course of sixty years primarily because of the "increasing significance of chattel ownership as a symbol in the frenzied quest for status among the middle and upper class whites." [14]
Finally, unlike similarly magnificent cities in the eastern Deep South such as Savannah and Charleston, which had been long established before the cotton gin's invention in 1793 and the ensuing explosive rise of King Cotton, Mississippi as a whole and Natchez in particular owed their very existence - and certainly their wealth - to Whitney's technological innovation. Beginning with Mississippi, Alabama, and western Tennessee, and finally extending into northern Louisiana, Arkansas, and parts of Texas, the slave-based cotton industry itself impelled the westward expansion of the American South, as the demand for more and more suitable land drove new settlement. When Phoenix enters the streets of Natchez, we should be struck not only by the obvious contrast between her material poverty and the wealth that surrounds her, but as well by the deeper irony that she is walking through the midst of a material opulence she once labored to build, against her will. Her story is a living testament to the dismal origins of the city's spurious grandeur; her understanding of, connection to, and exclusion from the "splendors" of Natchez is immediate and personal, rendering the racist condescension the city's white residents subject her to even more intolerable and maddening.
If Phoenix is a symbolic figure, then she has arrived in a kind of "Anti-Bethlehem," a spiritual necropolis whose white denizens cling to the wreckage of an ideology that is the antithesis of the egalitarian and unifying philosophy attributed to Christ in the Gospels. In this city festooned with and illuminated by seasonal decorations, Phoenix is the only true "Christmas light," so to speak, but that small flame does nothing to mitigate the emotional darkness enveloping Natchez, as her experiences there will prove. Natchez, built largely through what Benjamin has labeled the "anonymous toil" of people like Phoenix, perfectly exemplifies his characterization of "cultural treasures" as composites of both barbarism and civilization. [15] Using the city as a setting deepens the necessity of examining the historical wreckage that "A Worn Path" subtly delineates and indicts.
The interactions between Phoenix and the story's other characters augment its setting's multiple ironies. The first person Phoenix encounters is a white hunter, who pulls her out of a ditch into which a dog has just knocked her. Isaacs asserts this man as "a Santa Claus figure himself (he carries a big sack over his shoulder, he is always laughing, he brings Phoenix a gift of a nickel)." [16] Similarly, Saunders asserts that "there is enough of an understanding between the hunter and the woman for him to be genuinely concerned; he had helped her off her back and shared a word or two." [17] Isaacs and Saunders fail to mention, however, that "Santa" finds the frail Phoenix in the ditch, that his initial laughter occurs when he sees her lying helpless, that this outburst is not followed by an apology, that his subsequent laughter is derisive of her, and that he refers to her by the racist term "Granny," which he would never use for an elderly woman if she were white. Moreover, Isaacs's "Santa" does not intend to give Phoenix a nickel but drops it just before claiming that he would give her a dime if he had any money. He then points his gun at her only to see if she will react in terror, which she does not. Finally, the hunter abandons Phoenix miles from town, without offering her a coat or helping her reach her destination.
Other important contrasts are created in this scene as well: the hunter, in addition to the money he claims not to have, carries a string of dead quail on his belt, an abundance of food that Phoenix is not likely to experience. His claim that he understands "colored people" only typifies the repellant thinking of those who equate racist stereotypes with knowledge. The hunter's reaction upon learning of her destination further reveals his complete misunderstanding of her: "Why that's too far! That's as far as I walk when I come out myself, and I get something for my trouble" (145). This encounter ends with his attempt to terrify Phoenix by threatening her with his gun. Phoenix believes he is aiming the rifle at her because she has been caught "stealing" his dropped nickel, although he does not realize that he has lost the coin. She has seen "plenty" of other African-Americans getting shot, at closer range and for less than the crime she believes she might have committed: stealing five cents (145). Her resigned tone evidences the absolute lack of both justice and safety for blacks in her world, as if being shot now would be the next "logical" consequence in a world founded on injustice.
The story's ironies continue in the apparently benign encounter between Phoenix and the white lady in Natchez. This scene initiates a series of important reversals of the racist stereotypes invoked earlier: Phoenix asks someone to tie her shoes as soon as she arrives in town. Far from being slovenly, she is quite concerned with her appearance, and has not tied her laces only because her aged fingers lack the dexterity to do so. The white woman must set her armload of presents down beside Phoenix's untied and worn shoes, after asking "What do you want, Grandma?," using, as did the hunter, the patronizing terminology sanctioned by a racist world (147). That Phoenix asks a favor of the "lady" - a title then reserved for white women - alludes again to Christ's commandment in Matthew, yet the woman, despite being confronted with an elderly, coatless woman on a day earlier described as "frozen," only grudgingly fulfills the request and then abandons her (142).
The next passage contains the story's crowning misinterpretation of Phoenix by the white people she meets. Having finally reached a doctor's office, she simply asserts "Here I be." The office attendant immediately assesses Phoenix, whom she calls "Grandma," as "a charity case" because she is elderly, black, and poorly dressed. Perhaps flustered by this snideness, Phoenix seems to forget temporarily why she has come, but the attendant's response is not concern but consternation: "'Are you deaf?' cried the attendant." Her shouts cause a nurse to come in, who reveals "that's just old Aunt Phoenix... She doesn't come for herself - she has a little grandson. She makes these trips as regular as clockwork. She lives away back off the Old Natchez Trace" (147).
At this juncture Welty's carefully laid trap is sprung as she annihilates the racist stereotypes she seemed to endorse. In Phoenix's poignant recollection of the reason for her pilgrimage, we learn that we have not really "known" her at all and that she is the only truly humane character in the work: "I'm an old woman without an education. It was my memory fail me. My little grandson, he is just the same and I forgot it in the coming... Every little while his throat begin to close up again, and he not able to swallow. He not get his breath. He not able to help himself. So the time come around and I go on another trip for the soothing medicine..." (148). Phoenix is uneducated, of course, because she was denied schooling due to her race. In the world depicted in the story, she and her grandson are the "only two left in the world" who care about each other. By the explicitly Christian standards invoked in the story, they are its "only two" truly humane characters. No one else exhibits more than a slightly vexed interest in them, a reality underscored by the nurse's two responses to Phoenix's speech: "'All right. The doctor said as long as you came to get it, you could have it... But it's an obstinate case...' The nurse was trying to hush her now. She brought her a bottle of medicine. 'Charity,' she said, making a check mark in a book" (148). The grudgingly donated medicine does not constitute charity in the sense demanded by Christ, an irony that is only deepened by the seasonal setting. Moreover, Phoenix's forgetfulness, coupled with her earlier hallucinations, augurs ominous developments. Rather than being a confident assertion, her claim that "I not going to forget him again, no, the whole enduring time" functions as a kind of desperate incantation, as a magic spell she wields against the increasing desperation of her plight and the inexorable advance of time. But people of her age and condition, especially those with no access to proper care, will not get better (148). When Phoenix does lose her grasp of reality, no one else in her world - as this scene makes abundantly clear - will step in to help her grandson.
And Phoenix's utter isolation in this deeply racist world is borne out by the story's most ironic passage: "'It's Christmas time, Grandma,' said the attendant. 'Could I give you a few pennies out of my purse?'" (148). This statement culminates Welty's incremental attack on the Bible Belt's self-serving definition of Christian duty: moral sanctity purchased for a few pennies, not through any real, substantive concern for other humans. Appropriately, even the typically unflappable protagonist approaches curtness in her response: "'Five pennies is a nickel,' Phoenix said stiffly" (149). Besides constituting a final reference to Christ's directive in Matthew, this passage is the crowning denouncement of the miserable inhumanity exemplified throughout the story. It is imperative to note that every white character - the hunter who terrifies her, the white lady, the snide attendant, and the dismissive nurse - is revealed as someone who views Phoenix through the dehumanizing perspective of racism.
Phoenix then combines her charitably acquired nickel with the one from the hunter, and instead of spending it on something for herself, she states her intention to buy her grandson a little paper windmill. We must remember that, despite her long journey to Natchez and the return trip she now faces, Phoenix has not eaten at all; her earlier hallucination of a boy offering her a piece of cake is just that, a dream of sustenance in an uncharitable world. This passage recalls the white woman and her armful of brightly wrapped presents, in stark contrast to Phoenix's grandson's reality, for whom a simple paper windmill promises to be an unexpected gift. Such an obvious allusion to the journey of the magi in the Gospels only intensifies Welty's ironic rendering of the South's racist Christianity. The story's final sentence also augments this anger, as Phoenix leaves the office: "Then her slow step began on the stairs, going down" (149). The participial phrase symbolizes a bleak future for her and her grandson - and for the society that perpetuates inhumanity. That symbolic foreshadowing is augmented by the conclusion's lack of closure, which impels readers to wonder if Phoenix, unfed, coatless, having already suffered a hallucination and a memory blackout, will be able to make the trip safely.
At this juncture the story's title demands further consideration: at one level "A Worn Path" stakes a claim for the deep humanity, fortitude, and courage of black women, the most oppressed of all the oppressed in the American South. At another level, the title is an indictment of the social world that causes Phoenix's suffering, a call to Welty's readers to exit the "worn path" of human relations constructed by a racist society, one in which an elderly woman must imperil her life to gain begrudged medical treatment for her grandson. Through this story, Welty attempts to make her readers relinquish the established road of social interaction, to break new ground in their treatment of each other, to effect at one level the kind of rebirth signified by the story's Christmas setting.
As the final work in A Curtain of Green and Other Stories, "A Worn Path" functions as a sort of last testament on the Southern world presented in that collection. The story is as radical an assault on racism for its time as Faulkner's story "The Bear." Both authors came, of course, from white Mississippi families and both deftly delineate the dimensions and lasting effects of the South's racist heritage, with Faulkner asserting the "mongrel" Sam Fathers as the true role model for Ike McCaslin, and Welty according the same status to Phoenix Jackson for all of her readers.
Notes
[1]
See Orr, "Unsettling Every Definition of Otherness: Another Reading of Eudora Welty's 'A Worn Path,'" South Atlantic Review 57 (1992);
Walter, "Love's Habit of Vision in Welty's Phoenix Jackson," Journal of the Short Story in English 7 (1986): 78; Schmidt,
The Heart of the Story: Eudora Welty's Short Fiction (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991); and Saunders, "'A Worn Path': The
Eternal Quest of Welty's Phoenix Jackson," Southern Literary Journal 25 (1992): 71.
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[2]
Alfred T. Hennelly, Liberation Theologies: The Global Pursuit of Justice (Mystic, CT: Twenty-Third Publications, 1995) 122.
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[3]
James H. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1970) 46.
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[4]
Teh New Oxford Annotated Bible: New Revised Standard Version (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991) Matt. 5:40-42
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[5]
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1968) 254.
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[6]
Benjamin 254.
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[7]
Orr 66.
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[8]
Schmidt 39.
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[9]
Eudora Welty, "A Worn Path," in The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980) 142.
Subsequent references are to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text.
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[10]
Walter 82.
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[11]
Orr 63.
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[12]
Neil Isaacs, "Life for PHoenix," Sewanne Review 71 (1963): 40.
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[13]
Clayton D. James, Antebellum Natchez (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968) 144.
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[14]
James 197 - 98
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[15]
Benjamin 256.
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[16]
Isaacs 40.
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[17]
Saunders 71.
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