[In the following excerpt, Appel argues that " 'A Worn Path ' is an effort at telescoping the history of the Negro woman. " He examines the role of folk tradition and religious faith in the story.]

"Pageant of Birds," "Ida M'Toy," and the stories, "The Burning," "Livvie," and "A Worn Path," suggest that Miss Welty has a special sympathy and respect for the Southern Negro woman and that, like writers as various as Faulkner and James Baldwin, she seems to feel that the Negro's endurance in the South has had much to do with the strength of the Negro woman. "A Worn Path" is an effort at telescoping the history of the Negro woman. The setting is the "worn path" of the ancient Natchez Trace, and the story presents the greatest myths in the context of a folk tradition.

Its action concerns an old Negro woman, Phoenix Jackson, who, on a cold December day, makes an arduous trip from deep within the backcountry to the town of Natchez to get medicine for her sick grandson. She has been making the trip regularly since he swallowed lye two or three years before. Phoenix is not merely any old woman, as the story proves. It is no accident that she is named "Phoenix," for Miss Welty presents her as a symbol of the immortality of the Negro's spirit of endurance. Her cane, tapping the frozen eath, "made a grave and persistent noise . . . that seemed meditative like the chirping of a solitary little bird" [italics mine]. At the end of the story she refers to her grandson as "a little bird." Her endurance is etched in her wrinkled face, which seems to glow with an inner splendor: the "golden coloring" of her skin and the "yellow burning" which illuminates the two knobs of her cheeks remind us that her namesake was the legendary, selfperpetuating embodiment of the Egyptian sun god. When her weak eyes mistake a scarecrow for a ghost, she asks, "Who be you the ghost of? For I have heard of nary death close by." "I the oldest people I ever know," she tells the scarecrow. She never went to school because "I was too old at the Surrender." When she drinks from a spring flowing through a hollow log, she says, "Nobody know who made this well, for it was here when I was born." She is ageless. In fact, she defies death. When she sees a buzzard, she asks him, "Who you watching?" Like the clay bed of the Natchez Trace, Phoenix seems to disappear back into time. One might almost imagine her as an aged Florabel, the Negro slave who rose out of the ashes in "The Burning," a Phoenix emerging from the Civil War cinders.

Like "Keela" and "Powerhorse," "A Worn Path" provides an excellent example of how an eminently "modern" story teller makes use of folk materials. Miss Welty avoids confusing the folk with the folksy—of parodying her material. She seems to have discovered that the important relationship of formal art to folk art rests in the archetypes of primitive ritual, in the great world myths, rather than in reproductions of the "picturesque" surface texture of folk life. In "A Worn Path," these great myths are embedded within the folk context. Phoenix's journey is thus rendered as a minor-scale Odyssey. In the frozen, forbidding backcountry of the Natchez Trace, Phoenix is faced with at least twelve obstacles which require a heroic exertion on her part to surmount. Phoenix knows no fear: "Out of my way," she cautions all the animals that lurk in the thickets, "keep the wild hogs out of my path. Don't let none of those come running my direction. I got a long way." The rhythm of her speech communicates her determination; the tone of "I got a long way" is biblical. She struggles up a steep hill ("seem like there is chains about my feet"). In the valley she gets caught up in a "thorny bush." With eyes closed ("now comes the trial"), she bravely mounts a log that crosses a creek. The strain of this effort causes an hallucination. Then she encounters and survives a barbed-wire fence. Phoenix sees a buzzard and recalls the obstacles she had to bypass on previous journeys: "Glad this ain't the season for bulls . . . and the good Lord made his snakes to curl up and sleep in the winter." She makes her way through the pathless maze of a dead cornfield, the stalks rising "taller than her head." She follows the track across a dark swamp ("sleep on Alligators, and blow your bubbles"). A stray dog knocks her over and into a ditch, "like a little puff of milkweed." She is dazed and helpless; a white hunter finds her. He helps Phoenix up and urges her to "go on home, Granny!" She explains, portentously, "'I bound to go to town .. . the time come around.' He gave another laugh, filling [and, in Miss Welty's view, desecrating] the whole landscape. 'I know you old colored people! Wouldn't miss going to town to see Santa Claus!'" But Phoenix ignores this patronization and asserts her dignity. When a nickel falls out of the man's pocket onto the ground, she shrewdly tricks him into turning his attention to the dogs and then, with painstaking effort, manages to get the nickel into her apron pocket. Unaware of his "loss" the man returns from chasing the dogs. He teases Phoenix by pointing his rifle at her, giving her another opportunity to show her courage. "I'd give you a dime if I had any money on me," he says. The irony complete, they go their separate ways. Phoenix arrives in Natchez—it is Christmas time—and asks a passerby to lace up her shoe: "Do all right for the country," she says, "but wouldn't look right to go in a big building." When she finally arrives at the hospital, she encounters her final obstacles: a temporary loss of memory and the hospital nurses. Miss Welty has not wasted a detail; theme and action are woven together intricately.

Phoenix's safe arrival expresses one level of her triumph: her courage. Her encounters with the hunter and the hospital nurses present another kind of triumph, for they establish Phoenix's moral superiority, ironically so, since the whites treat her as an inferior: when she presents herself at the hospital desk—"Here I be!"—the nurse answers, "A charity case, I suppose." Phoenix then loses her memory. The first nurse is impatient, and, although the second nurse is initially polite, she is cruelly blunt when Phoenix fails to regain her memory immediately: "You mustn't take up our time this way. . . . Tell us quickly about your grandson and get it over with. He isn't dead is he?" When Phoenix speaks, the nurse interrupts her:

"All right. The doctor said as long as you came to get it, you could have it," said the nurse. "But it's an obstinate case."

"My little grandson, he sit up there in the house all wrapped up, waiting by himself" Phoenix went on. "We is the only two left in the world. He suffer and it don't seem to put him back at all. He got a sweet look. He going to last. He wear a little patch quilt and peep out holding his mouth open like a little bird. I remembers so plain now. I not going to forget him again, no, the whole enduring time, I could tell him from all the others in creation" [italics mine].

"All right." The nurse was trying to hush her now. She brought her a bottle of medicine. "Charity," she said, making a check mark in the book.

The hospital staff's lack of compassion highlights Phoenix's moral superiority. She is also "an obstinate case"; the nurses become aware of a mysterious barrier when they are unable to patronize Phoenix. The nurse gives Phoenix a nickel for Christmas but, like the hunter, is unsuccessful in patronizing Phoenix because, simply enough, she has a good use for the money: "I going to the store and buy my child a little windmill they sells, made out of paper. He going to find it hard to believe there such a thing in the world." Phoenix retains great dignity before the nurses because of her simplicity and devotion and, though illiterate, by her imagination and shrewdness. The joy that the little windmill will bring her grandson is the antithesis of the false Christmas spirit found in the town—from its electric light decor to the "charity" of its nurses. Phoenix is superior to the hunter and the nurses because of their complete inability to comprehend the profound source of her dignity and courage. That source is Phoenix's faith.

There is a deeply religious feeling manifest in "A Worn Path." Several times we are reminded that the story occurs at Christmas. Phoenix says, "God watching me the whole time." She marches across the treacherous log "like a festival figure in some parade"; when she presents herself at the hospital, "there was a fixed and ceremonial stiffness over her body"; and near the end of the story, she says, "I'll march myself straight back where he waiting, holding [the windmill] straight up in this hand"—the little toy assuming the attitude and importance of some religious banner, effigy, or offering. Her act of love is virtually ceremonial: the story opens with Phoenix coming along a path, walking "slowly in the dark pine shadows," and ends as "her slow step began on the stairs, going down." The landscape is strangely muted. Phoenix's cane makes a grave noise in the still air; "the sun made the pine needles almost too bright to look at"; "the cones dropped as light as feathers." Phoenix goes through silver grass, and through "the little strings of trees silver in their dead leaves, past cabins silver from weather, with the doors and windows boarded shut, all like old women under a spell sitting there. 'I walking in their sleep, ' she said, nodding her head vigorously" [italics mine]. Like a figure in a religious pageant, she sees herself as representative, as a personification: "I walking in their sleep." Phoenix's journey is presented as a kind of Christmas pageant or pilgrimage. When she sits down to rest, she sees up above her "a tree in a pearly cloud of mistletoe." But the setting and atmosphere of the backcountry are more than just seasonal; with their suspended, otherworldly quality they perhaps suggest the first Christmas season. When Phoenix begins her return journey, carrying the medicine and windmill, she is a kind of Magi, bringing gifts to a little grandson who, waiting alone, all wrapped up in a quilt, recalls the Christ child in the manger: "He got a sweet look . . . I could tell him from all the others in creation." Although the Christmas imagery need not be insisted upon, it is compatible with the story's extra-Christian mythic elements and reinforces our sense of "A Worn Path" as a celebration of life out of death. "I bound to go. . . . The time come around," Phoenix tells the hunter, referring not only to her trip for the medicine, but to her own mortality; "My senses is gone. I too old"; "Sun so high. . . . The time getting all gone here." With her death approaching, all of Phoenix's remaining energies go toward perpetuating the life of her grandson; "He going to last."

There is a sudden shift in tone from the poetic to the prosaic when Phoenix moves from the legendary, dreamlike backcountry world into the world of the town. As she enters the town, the rich nature imagery gives way to a blunt, drab, journalistic style. The shift in tone complements the setting and Phoenix's reaction to it: she "would have been lost if she had not distrusted her eyesight and depended on her feet to know where to take her." The red and green electric lights are strung and crisscrossed everywhere. The garish is revealed with quick, deft strokes: all the lights are turned on in the daytime, and the lady passerby who ties Phoenix's laces gives off perfume "like the red roses in hot summer." The town and its inhabitants are presented in contrast to Phoenix and the Natchez Trace. The Christmas color scheme on the lady's "armful of red-, green- and silver-wrapped presents" and in the tangles of electric lights is only a corruption of the red-green-and-silver tones that "decorate" the backcountry—just as the insensitive hunter and nurses are only shadows next to Phoenix and her deep, instinctual humanity, her serene acceptance of the death on which all future life is based.

"A Worn Path" passes far beyond its regionalism because of its remarkable fusion of various elements of myth and legend, which invest the story with a religious meaning that can be universally felt. The "worn path" Phoenix travels is the same one that man has always had to contend with—the well-traveled road of human suffering and isolation. But Phoenix, like the Hebrews and the early Christians, meets and endures her many tribulations, and through her courage and single-minded devotion, her buoyancy, serenity, and strength, she experiences something akin to God: "We is the only two left in the world," she says of her grandson; "he suffers and it don't seem to put him back at all. He got a sweet look. He going to last." Phoenix is as indomitable as the Natchez Trace, one of the last regions to preserve its identity. The Negroes are part of their tragic history and living folk tradition just as the Trace stretches into the past. They both represent values that have been obscured in the confusion of modern life. In "Some Notes on River Country," Miss Welty writes: "Whatever is significant and whatever is tragic in a place live as long as the place does. . . . Though they are unseen .. . the new life will be built upon those things, regardless of commerce and the way of rivers and roads and other vagrancies."

Created in the spirit of the "place," ageless Phoenix seems to span the years that extend from the death of the white heron ("A Still Moment") to the emergence of the modern town ("Petrified Man"). She transcends her region's geographical boundaries, for her celebration of life and her endurance—and that of the Negroes in the other stories and sketches—are presented by Eudora Welty as human qualities that man, whether Southerner or Northerner, Negro or white, must possess if, as Phoenix says of her grandson, "He going to last."