SOURCE: '"Unsettling Every Definition of Otherness': Another Reading of Eudora Welty's 'A Worn Path'," in South Atlantic Review, Vol. 57, No. 2, May, 1992, pp. 57-72.

[In the following essay, Orr perceives Welty's implicit examination of the writing process itself in the text of "A Worn Path," and argues that the reader is challenged "both to unlearn and to relearn, that is, to enter the process of creation. " She further notes that "the story plays upon our 'knowledge ' of 'others ' to resist the 'wornness' of old scripts."]

Eudora Welty's "A Worn Path," first published in 1941, is one of her most widely read stories. But to date, it has not received a critical reading that questions the interpretation of Phoenix Jackson offered by the white attendant at the end of the story. Phoenix is "a charity case." Given the story's "thick" rendering of Phoenix and the textual evidence that the attendant is an unreliable interpreter, this absence of different readings is puzzling. We should not fail to notice that Welty's verbose and inventive protagonist is herself immediately silenced when she is so summed up by her "superior." Why?

Through careful attention to the narrative itself—an attention that leads us to deconstruct the authoritative and delimiting perspectives offered by the white characters and to reconstruct an excessive subjectivity emerging among Phoenix, the narrator's voice, and the path—this essay seeks to break the critical silence surrounding this often-read story. My argument is that the text figures the writing process, that much more than a character sketch, "A Worn Path" is a complex analogy of fabulation—of invention, discovery, and subjective expansion. Far from resting on stereotypes, the story plays upon our "knowledge" of "others" to resist the "wornness" of old scripts. Phoenix's traits—her blackness, femaleness, age, and apparent poverty—are riddles told by the author to challenge the reader both to unlearn and to relearn, that is, to enter the process of creation.

A scene from the middle of the story suggests the complex "re-figuring" of Phoenix and her path that the text requires:

Then she gave a little cry and clapped her hands and said, "Git on away from here, dog! Look! Look at that dog!" She laughed as if in admiration. "He ain't scared of nobody. He a big black dog." She whispered, "Sic him!"

"Watch me get rid of that cur," said the man. "Sic him, Pete! Sic him!"

Phoenix heard the dogs fighting, and heard the man running and throwing sticks. She even heard a gunshot. But she was slowly bending forward by that time, further and further forward, the lids stretched down over her eyes, as if she were doing this in her sleep. Her chin was lowered almost to her knees. The yellow palm of her hand came out from the fold of her apron. Her fingers slid down and along the ground under the piece of money with the grace and care they would have in lifting an egg from under a sitting hen. Then she slowly straightened up, she stood erect, and the nickel was in her apron pocket. A bird flew by. Her lips moved "God watching me the whole time. I come to stealing."

In this passage, Phoenix Jackson creates a fictive diversion by improvising upon her knowledge of the white male character she confronts—of his penchant for bravado and of his fictions about her. While he appears the authority (certainly the interrogator), she employs his definitions and rewrites them as riddles, thus deconstructing his privilege and (if we are good enough readers) reconstructing her own subjectivity.

Having (somewhat miraculously, since she is earlier described as nearly blind) spotted a nickel which has fallen "out of the man's pocket onto the ground," she invents a competition between the dogs (his dog and the "big black" stray that surprises her, causing her to fall into a ditch). With the slim thread of her story, Phoenix draws the man off in chase and retrieves his money for herself. This brief but effective fiction within the fiction reveals Phoenix's identity as a self-conscious fabulist (something different from what the hunter thinks she is: a self-forgetful old woman) with a penchant for re-creation (making up stories) rather than resolution.

James Walter has suggested [in Journal of the Short Stories in English, Vol. 7, 1986] that the story's simplicity is misleading and argues that Welty "tests" the reader by requiring "a revaluation of interpretive assumptions and mental habits." I agree, and yet it seems to me that Walter and others have underread the story's complex, even contradictory signs, in particular, the interrelated tracings of race, class, and gender that Welty crisscrosses in Phoenix's journey. Though most of the narrative renders her trek, critics often depend upon the story's penultimate and stereotypical moment—Phoenix's securing of the "soothing medicine"—to provide unity or closure to this "dark" character and typically "feminine" tale.

A representative reading is offered by Ruth M. Vande Kieft [in Eudora Welty, 1962], who writes that "there are no significant barriers to the expressive love of old Phoenix." Comparing her to Dilsey in The Sound and the Fury, Vande Kieft suggests that Phoenix is "a completely and beautifully harmonious person," whose journey is undertaken with a "clear object—her grandson." Similarly, John Hardy has proposed [in Images of the Negro in American Literature, 1966] that Phoenix does "nothing for herself, for her own advantage," and John R. Cooley has interpreted "A Worn Path" [in Ball State University Forum, Vol. 14, 1973] as a primitive idyll that fails its black character in "sensitivity or depth." Vande Kieft's reading appears to overlook the complexities of the story while Hardy and Cooley, in analyzing race and not gender, seek a unified understanding of the story's meaning. Though these critics differ on the question of the story's success (some praise Welty for its harmony and pathos; others criticize its romantic tendency), they appear to agree with Granville Hicks's summary of its plot: in the "simple . . . story, 'A Worn Path,' there is nothing at all except the details of an old Negro woman's journey to the city to get medicine for her grandson."

Other critics have hinted at a more complex reading. Nancy K. Butterworth, for example, [in Eudora Welty: Eye of the Storyteller, 1989] suggests that Phoenix "is not a stereotypical or stock black character," yet her reading supports the "charitable" view of Phoenix that the white community in the text finds acceptable: Phoenix's "purpose" arises out of "unreserved love for her grandson." When she "obtains her goal," it is none other than the goal of self-sacrifice. Robert H. Brinkmeyer's view [in Southern Literary Journal, Vol. 20.2, 1988] is more instructive; he views Welty's writing as revealing "an openness to otherness" that is expansive and expanding rather than conclusive. His analysis of Welty's nonfiction prose can be applied to this story, which does not conclude. Contrary to most critics' assumptions, the reader does not, in fact, know where Phoenix is going at the "end" any more than the hunter (or the reader either, for that matter) knows why she is going to town in the "middle." Once we read our own hegemonic tendencies in the white characters' "reasoning" about Phoenix's trip, we realize that the text authorizes no "other" reason for her journey, no reason that makes her "other" and hence decipherable and defined.

We see an example of the text's refusal to authorize universal readings in Welty's elaborate description of Phoenix's scooping up of the coin while the hunter is off after the dogs; here we can read both the erasure of the hunter's signs (his "reason") and the writing of undecidable possibilities. Phoenix and the narrator emerge in this passage as unsettling subjects who steal not only money but stories. If this is a crucial moment in the text, as I am suggesting, we are faced with a subject (Phoenix and the writer's art) always in the making, a subject exceeding the boundaries of our expectations. By metaphorically connecting the hunter with the hen (Phoenix takes his money with "the grace and care [she] would have [used] in lifting an egg from under a sitting hen)," Welty playfully "crisscrosses" genders, subverts white male authority, and suggests her own writerly deftness (hence the need for readerly invention in response). As I have already suggested, Phoenix's theft challenges the framing designation—"charity case"—that many past readings have assumed as the authoritative comment in this story. She takes or makes up what she needs.

Phoenix's diversion of the hunter and her theft of his money illustrate the text's metaphorical challenge to all hegemonic definitions, all unitary readings. In the narrative doubling of a woman writer telling the story of a woman inventing a (devious) story, "A Worn Path" excessively re-presents the "defian[t] . . . act of woman writing" otherwise, creating "a space of contradictions," or "the consciousness of 'something else'" (de Lauretis). In this case, "A Worn Path" surpasses the phallic and supremacist definitions it includes and opens windows to contradiction and paradox.

Even in her own comments about the story, Welty is contradictory, for she implies both that the story is about the path (the process) and that it is about Phoenix's going out for another (the goal). I read the story as tracing Phoenix's marginalized selves in order to celebrate the woman writer's fabular (nonunitary) pleasure, which defies enclosure. Welty herself remarks upon the story in this way:

In the matter of function, old Phoenix's way might even do as a sort of parallel to your way of work if you are a writer of stories. The way to get there is the all-important, all-absorbing problem, and this problem is your reason for undertaking the story. . . . Like Phoenix, . . . you . . . us[e] inventions of your imagination, perhaps helped out by your dreams and bits of good luck.

From misleading the hunter to conjuring up marble cake, Phoenix "help[s herself] out by [her] dreams and bits of good luck." Rather than classify Phoenix "a charity case," a more appropriate response to the story, then, is to "us[e] inventions of [our own] imagination," following the contradictions, the "unclassified" play that the journey affords us in our reading.

Welty begins her narrative with contradictions, insisting from the beginning that we "fill in," invent with her, imagine possibility within paradox. For example, in the first paragraph, Phoenix is described as "old" and "very old"; she is "small" and carries a "small cane" that makes the sound "of a solitary little bird." Yet in naming her protagonist after the mythical phoenix (an ancient Egyptian, hence non-Christian, symbol of kingly cremation and rebirth) and having her appear in December (the time of the Winter Solstice, when according to folk tradition, the Witch Destroyer and Regeneratrix appears, a witch whose "nose is hooked like the beak of a bird"), Welty immediately complicates her own representation. These mythical contradictions are followed by homelier textual ones. For example, Welty describes her protagonist as "neat and tidy," and yet Phoenix walks all the way to town with her shoe untied. Her gait is compared to the balance of a pendulum in a grandfather clock, and she crosses a log with her eyes shut, but she is at critical moments quite "unbalanced." She is nearly blind, as evidenced when she is fooled by the scarecrow, yet she sees a nickel fall from the hunter's pocket (and knows that it is a nickel, not another coin). To herself, she thinks, "I the oldest people I ever know," yet the narrator describes her at one point as "stretching her fingers like a baby." She appears dominated by time, yet she often dreams, and as the windmill at the story's end suggests, is more like the wind, now gusting, now still, than she is inflexible or constant. She is both simple and wise, marginalized within the social fields she traverses and yet mysteriously beyond the boundaries drawn by her social superiors. She is poor, but her face is superior to jewels.

As textual contradiction, Phoenix herself "shake[s] up the . . . communities which do not acknowledge the excluded margins" [Dale M. Bauer, Feminist Dialogics, 1988]. Within the story, her encounters with the hunter and the larger white middle-class community illustrate both her marginality (as female, black, old, and poor) and the unsettling that occurs when her presence challenges that community's "readings" of her. If "it is not a writer's business to tease," it certainly is a writer's business to give us new knowledge of human possibilities, to invent metaphors that complicate "worn" knowledge. In this sense, the "worn path" that must be overcome in this story is not Phoenix's but ours, the worn path of old readings, tried and untrue assumptions.

Audre Lorde describes some of these assumptions when she writes, "Somewhere, on the edge of consciousness, there is .. . a mythical norm, which each one of us within our hearts knows ' .. . is not me.' In america [sic], this norm is usually defined as white, thin, male, young, heterosexual, christian [sic], and financially secure." Along the worn path, it is, of course, the hunter, not Phoenix, who appears as a fit hero for the American adventure. He, the narrator tells us, is "a white man .. . a hunter, a young man, with his dog on a chain" and a gun. As we have already seen, Phoenix is almost shrunken with age and apparently "poor"; her only weapon is a walking stick made from an old umbrella which she waves before her like a wand. In setting up this contrast, Welty's text certainly challenges assumptions about the hero. What readers have missed is the story's thoroughgoing deconstruction of familiar models, even the models we have employed to understand the heroine.

The hunter's authoritative voice is unequivocal, assumes privilege, and conveys a belief in the literal power of his words. When he tells Phoenix to "stay home" so that "nothing will happen to [her]" (indeed!), he seems to expect that his command will literally turn her around. Phoenix's speech, on the other hand, suggests a playful and deviant use of language. Creating riddles and playing with others' fictions about her, she is able to continue on her way despite the hunter. Like the character of the fool, who appears foolish only to the literal-minded, her language "serves to defamiliarize the conventions which have been accepted as 'natural,' as myth" (Bauer). And as John Hardy notes, "[T]he habit of mythologizing the lives of Negroes [sic], .. . is one of the best established and most effective methods that the while man [sic] has devised for denying them full status in his cultural community." Feminist writers have said as much about patriarchal mythologizing of women. Thus, Phoenix's play is seriously aimed, and at a fairly daunting set of canons. If there is purpose in this tale it is not to appease us through mere repetition of myth but to unsettle us through iconoclastic reversals and inventions. Phoenix, who appears simple, may not be; her path, which seems necessarily eclipsed by the hunter's may be of greater magnitude than he can imagine, and her purposes, which he and the nurse neatly categorize, may be far more mysterious and regenerative than are our associations with the traditional hero or heroine.

When the hunter learns that Phoenix is "bound to go to town," he immediately declares it unmanageable for her since the trek is equal to the distance he normally travels. "Why, that's too far," he argues, and then boasts while patting the bag of game he carries: "'When I come out myself, . . . I get something for my trouble'." Phoenix's understanding of his "sport" is signaled when the narrator shows us "a little closed claw. . . . one of the bob-whites, with its beak hooked bitterly to show it was dead." The hunter's "gaming" is not playful but conclusive and, as Butterworth notes, sadistic. The hunter assumes that Phoenix goes out with similar goals when, actually, she goes out not to bring things to a close, but to see what she can make of things, what she can make up. By analogy, Welty's writing does not conclusively frame the charitable heroine. Both writer and character initiate discourse as a form of play. Later, in town, for example, Phoenix approaches a well-to-do woman and asks for help tying her shoe, but no careful reader will believe Phoenix could not tie her own shoes. Rather, she wants to see what her talk will do, just as Welty does.

The hunter's condescension is reflected in past readings (and parodied in the shoe-tying episode) that preclude the possibility of Phoenix's self-conscious and self-interested play with language. Robert L. Phillips, Jr., for example, [in Eudora Welty: Critical Essays, 1979] denies the possibility that Phoenix is aware of the manifold dimensions of language when he writes, "In 'The Worn Path' the rich texture of allusion and symbol is there for the reader and the critic to enjoy." Phoenix, he argues, "is not aware that she is acting out patterns as ancient as the imagination. She knows only what she sees and feels to be important." But why can we not imagine that Phoenix is linguistically skilled? Earlier, facing a "field of dead corn," she whispers to herself, "Through the maze now'," thus playfully exchanging the words maze/maize. Indeed, she appears to illustrate the double consciousness and duplicitous use of language that W. E. B. DuBois postulated for African Americans, developed, he proposed, through their negoliation with white authority. Feminist theorists have similarly pointed to women writers' studied use of "double-talk," a subversive speech appearing to say one thing when really another meaning is intended. Phoenix's playful skill with language allows her to transform herself from "subject into object into subject," a fabular talent that "grounds [her] different relation .. . to consciousness, and to knowing" [Teresa de Lauretis, in Feminist Studies, Vol. 16.1, 1990]. Analogically, she is a figure for Welty's writing, for a subversive feminist knowledge that unravels worn assumptions and weaves new visions, for example, of woman's identity as evolving out of self-interested fabular play rather than self-forgetful abnegation.

Indeed, as Hardy and Butterworth have shown, Welty warns the reader against the obvious (or merely a literal reading) by parodying the all-too-predictable hero and his (self-definition of the quest. One must be young, strong, and male to set out on the hunt, and the guiding maxim is this: one goes out with an eye toward the goal—toward the kill, no less. The gun, which the young hunter soon exhibits, connects the intention of his language with his assured and literal result. Though we may quickly recognize Welty's play at the hunter's expense, previous readings have not recognized Phoenix's (and the narrator's) play at ours. For most readers desire closure and ends; and while some critics have scoffed at the hunter's definition of those ends, others have "swallowed" the "soothing medicine" of feminine self-sacrifice as an appropriate and noble "end" for Phoenix or, if they have rejected the medicine for themselves, have assumed that the writer accepts it.

Like the hunter, readers do not know Phoenix's "purpose" yet and have been reading this outing as more or less plotless, a "simple" story lacking sufficient motivation and purpose. We are trained as the hunter is toward greater expediency than Phoenix seems capable of. The hunter jumps to a second conclusion, since he finds a motivation that he can understand so necessary: "'I know you old colored people!'" he remarks, '"Wouldn't miss going to town to see Santa Claus'."

Actually, like Christmas Jenny in Mary Wilkins Freeman's story by that name, Phoenix is closer to being Santa Claus (in her mysterious capacities) than she is likely to be his devotee. She is a blend of biblical and mythical figures, all feminized through their association with Phoenix herself, while most of her antagonists are masculinized (the dead trees, the snake, the scarecrow, the dog). Clearly, she is the phoenix, who rises from her own ashes (thus one who is ageless and self-inventing), but also a female Aaron (where her cane/staff appears to be coming to life), a wiser Eve (when she hopes to avoid the snake "coming around that tree"), and the sibyl (in her frequent "dreams" and meditations, some of which are not revealed to us). The succession of mythic female characters suggests the story's less-worn path, its bringing of the traditionally marginal to center and simultaneous decentering of the reader through the character of Phoenix. She is a subject we cannot "pen" down according to any "other" definition or stereotype, even, as we will see, according to the type of "the good mother."

In his reinscription of Phoenix according to the limits of his imagination—as quaint, childlike, and needy—the hunter is the unimaginative reader who reads not to entertain something new but to confirm what he already knows. Phoenix appears aware of his limitations when she responds to his questions about her age and origin. "'You can't even see it from here'," she replies to the question about where she lives. And when she answers "'No telling'" to his question about her age, she plays both with her own deviance (she will not tell him) and with the possibility that she is ageless, that she is mysteriously outside of or beyond his measured time. Indeed, the narrative seems to suggest that Phoenix's context is not small at all; it only appears that way to the hunter, who is limited by his self-referential language. Her origins as well as her destination are "beyond" the hunter, perhaps literally, certainly figuratively and symbolically. Like Pilate in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, Phoenix is presented as one who cannot be understood by those who imagine that they already know her. The "golden color" that runs underneath her skin and her "eyes . . . blue with age" are signs of her mystery, pointed to by Welty but not at all "read" by those whom Phoenix encounters on her way.

When Phoenix creates the fictive diversion of the dogs, the hunter's "knowledge," not merely his physical prowess, is questioned. This (black female) character's detouring of the hunter breaks the frame of the (white) masculine myth and reveals it as a literary convention. Indeed, as Phoenix negotiates her way around the hunter and his commanding language/commanding gun/authoritative tradition, she lifts her skirts and walks out of his picture into another space, "a space of contradictions, in the here and now, that need[s] to be affirmed but not resolved" (de Lauretis). Tracing out the process of writing with the extended metaphor of Phoenix's journey, Welty affirms a knowledge of uncertainties, a revisionist practice of looking at the "other" in order to rename and expand the self, not to rename and de-limit those "others."

But Phoenix has not yet escaped all "framing." When she arrives in town and enters the doctor's office, we are finally given a "reason" for this trek. Phoenix is a grandmother whose sick grandson needs the "soothing medicine" for which she has come. As the nurse remarks: "Oh, that's just old Aunt Phoenix, . . . She doesn't come for herself—she has a little grandson. She makes these trips just as regular as clockwork. She lives away back off the Old Natchez Trace'" (italics mine). The nurse, of course, is another reader/interpreter like the hunter, but now Welty sharpens the critique of hegemonic definition (clearly inscribed in Phoenix's meeting with the hunter) by revealing the uncharitable authority of white women in relation to Phoenix. Hardy correctly calls the scene a "scathing indictment of the fool's pride of the white man [sic] in the superiority of his civilization."

Are we to believe that Phoenix does not come for herself? In The Eye of the Story, Welty's only definitive answer to the question of whether the boy is dead is this: "Phoenix is alive." Thus while Phoenix's encounter with the hunter initiates the story's critique of the well-worn path of racist and masculinist definitions, the encounter with the "professional" women in the office sharpens the review by dramatizing the racism and classism that inform the white women's "charitable" understanding of Phoenix. Like the racism and sexism of the hunter, the classism and racism of the white women are dead languages (the ashes) in Welty's text, played upon by Phoenix to call forth a new alphabet, a new text of emerging subjectivity, of coming to life through invention.

The white women's knowledge depends on and subsumes some "other," someone who "I am not." It deadens relationship through dependence on static categories. Like the hunter, these women read Phoenix stereotypically, never imagining that she might deviate from their prescription. Profiting from their alliance with the white male doctor, they have escaped certain material oppressions of patriarchy (they will, for example, be rewarded materially for their work outside the domestic sphere), yet they expect Phoenix to act humbly and always out of love. She is (their) servant. Or as Bell Hooks remarks [in Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, 1984] in her description of white feminists, "they are the 'hosts,' [we/black women/Phoenix are the] guests," in other words, the other, the foreigner.

The acceptable motivation of a black woman's maternal love—a part of the mythology of the "superhuman black woman"—might be a reason Phoenix comes to town but it is not her defining reason. Said differently, Phoenix does not come to be herself merely through bearing the medicine but through her fabulous thought. She is primarily the woman who journeys and thinks rather than the woman who bears. She lives (as a text does) through her constant telling and retelling. Welty's narrative represents these "feminine" contradictions, though most readers resist reading them, concluding (unitarily) that this good woman's story can finally be understood as really being about maternal charity.

But as soon as the nurse provides herself (us?) with an "acceptable" reason for Phoenix's journey, Welty erases it. Phoenix forgets why she came: 'The old woman sat down, bolt upright in the chair. . . . as if she were in armour." The static and constricting definition given to Phoenix is imagistically conveyed in her body; as a charity case, she loses all agency, all fluidity. She is no longer the graceful writer of her path. Perhaps her forgetfulness is simply old age (but can we ignore the name Phoenix even in the most literal of readings), or perhaps the boy is dead and she is momentarily ashamed for having troubled the nurse (again to read this way, we must forget the numerous mythical allusions in the text and ignore the playful and resonant language Phoenix has spoken throughout the story). More likely, the erasure is not forgetfulness at all but self-consciousness—Phoenix's self-conscious resistance to the erasure of her subjectivity and Welty's self-conscious refusal to author-ize her character (her own writing) as "other."

Like the hunter, the attendant "reads" Phoenix quickly: "'A charity case,'" she "supposes." Her immediate sizing up reveals stereotypical attitudes toward Phoenix's race and class. On the one hand, the attendant reads her blackness as meaning she requires charity (thus blackness and poverty are conflated). On the other hand, readers have "supposed" that the statement is the key to understanding the story: Phoenix's story is about charity, about her (grand) motherly love for a child. The white women's overdetermined "reading" of Phoenix reveals their actual complicity in the simple story that makes every woman Mary or Eve. But Phoenix's response again casts doubt on such simple readings. Here she employs silence rather than narrative invention to rebel against white and male "author-izations" of her journey as (m)other.

Phoenix refuses to answer in the way that the attendant requires. Even when the nurse, who "knows" Phoenix, enters the story, Phoenix does not comply with the script the nurse supplies. She is still silent, though finally she does "remember" her purpose. Still, the slippage between the nurse's prescriptive view and Phoenix's deviant silence provokes us into thought. Such fictional play reevaluates the traditional procedures of communication—here between a white woman and a black woman, where the black participant is expected simply to say "yes"—and releases us from established patterns. Phoenix provokes the nurse, who warns that she "mustn't take up our time this way," actually pleading that Phoenix stay with the frayed script of black/white (also self/other) relations with which both are familiar. But Welty erases that old "dialogue" and shows that it is indeed the ever-emerging path that matters, that Phoenix's fabulous journey beyond the familiar and outside the boundaries of our previous knowledge is her reason for coming. "The deep-grained habit of love" is Phoenix's habit of self-invention and Welty's writerly habit of empathy, of extending her knowledge not by defining the "other" but by redefining herself in relation to others, what Vande Kieft correctly refers to as Welty's "power to 'slip into' people whose lives and social and economic situations differed greatly from her own."

Clearly a thoughtful readerly pause will make more of Phoenix's pause than mere forgetfulness. Middle- and upper-class white women have often escaped the requirements of "pure" motherly love in part by hiring black women to mother their children and clean their houses. The pause in Welty's text exposes the white women's assumptions as their own fictional construction. Their identifying statements—statements identifying Phoenix, that is—are not Phoenix's, and in her pause, she (along with Eudora Welty) erases them. In the absence of identification (foreigners and "others" must be identified), readers may bridge the gap by holding on tenaciously to their need for Phoenix's charity (for her being a charity case) or they can imaginatively reconstruct the subjectivity of the fabulator that Phoenix has played with throughout her journey. Such a reconstruction offers a fruitful opportunity for speaking the contradictory subject that emerges when we read Welty and Phoenix Jackson as (metaphorical) writer(s). This move, initiated by Welty and expansively rewritten in our reading may allow us to do what Valerie Smith says we must: "develop a mode of selfevaluation, and sustain a dialogue with those [black and white feminists] involved in related enterprises." Welty expands her writing self through fabulating this African American woman. The writer and her subject are both related and distinct. As the '"Inappropriate/d Other,'" the metaphorical subject arising between Phoenix and Welty "moves about, with always at least two/four gestures: that of affirming 'I am like you' while pointing insistently to the difference; and that of reminding 'I am different' while unsettling every definition of otherness arrived at" (Trinh T. Minha-ha, qtd. in de Lauretis).

When Phoenix does finally answer the nurse, she actually overanswers in a self-effacing response that is another parody of readers' unimaginative expectations. Begging forgiveness, Phoenix offers this life history: "'I never did go to school, I was too old at the Surrender." Then she adds, "I'm an old woman without an education. It was my memory fail me'." Alluding to the Civil War, Phoenix fulfills the image the nurse has of her. She promises not to forget again (that she should be subservient and/or that she has come for the boy).

Welty's overwriting of this passage, coming just on the heels of the underwriting of the narrative pause, again disconcerts our reading. Having created a spirited and inspiriting character, she belittles her beyond recognition. But the writing here merely mimics the white women's language. We have actually left Phoenix's text (her crisscrossing, difficult, interesting path) and embarked upon the nurse's sterile path of self-denunciation, a path she marks for Phoenix-as-(m)other, not for herself.

We are given a final sign of Phoenix's refusal to stay in her place, however, when, after gaining the nurse's approval, she cunningly pockets another nickel before leaving. She reminds us of her encounter with the hunter and of her subversion of his authority. Though she plans to buy a windmill for the boy, there is no evidence that she plans to go "straight" home. Instead, the quixotic image clearly suggests the fabulous subject Welty has been tracing. Through Phoenix's play, which crosses the established field of power between whites and blacks, between those upstairs and those down (Welty's clear imaging of the race/class hierarchy), the character has re-created herself linguistically (the phoenix!). We may assume she is going home, but there is no evidence in the story. Instead, I suggest she will move as she has throughout, beyond us, always re-marking the space of contradiction, the open ending.

The story's parodic or "non-sensical" (because inconclusive) character interrogates our attempt to find an allencompassing truth in fiction and in particular our propensity to identify feminine truth as motherly love exclusive of self-interest or African American identity as auxiliary to white ideologies of wealth, conquest, and leisure. By refusing to stay in its place, to abide by any definition of otherness, the story offers no conclusions, only complications and deferrals. Not only the image of the hunter but that of the (black) mother is momentarily disestablished. What is left is the path/tracing and Phoenix/Welty upon it. Zigzagging in our reading of her, Phoenix recalls the goddess whose symbol is the zigzag, the image of water [Marija Alseikaite Gimbutas, The Language of the Goddess, 1988]. Her play with many selves—adventurer, fool, mother, inventor, comic—is like Welty's expansive writing which will not allow us to conclude but moves back and forth upon itself. When Phoenix refuses to stay in (her) place, defying the hunter who misreads her and would send her home (to the house) as well as the attendant and nurse who misname her a "charity case" (and thus would send her back to the type of "angel in the house" so familiar to women writers and feminist readers, white and African American alike), Phoenix/Welty generates a story that gets away from us (because we are inclined like those others to underread). If we follow Phoenix's path, however, (that is, Welty's writing), we are able to "see meaning in what previously has been empty space" [Showalter, qtd. in Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, 1979]. Appealing to a feminized past through the character of Phoenix, Welty generates her playful, evasive, stubborn, and fabulous writing selves. Certainly, she is not a "charity case." Crossing boundaries with Phoenix, she does not create a type but shows her process of invention and her determined erasing of those myths which keep all emerging subjects penned in or up.

At last, we can read Phoenix's mothering but now through the defamiliarization brought about by parody which, as Patricia Waugh says [in Metafiction, the Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction, 1984] allows new and more authentic forms of the subject to be released. Phoenix herself crosses self-interest with other interest. When she claims that she will remember the boy "the whole enduring time," she hints at something that past readings have not noticed: that she chooses him, as a fiction perhaps, but nevertheless as willfully desired.

Phoenix's desire to mother as she will rather than according to definition recalls the Goddess Creatrix, the source (of fictions as well as lives). As Marija Gimbutas reminds us, early Goddess Creatrix images were bird-woman hybrids. More than fertility goddesses, these beings were beings of thought, of intellect, as well as of body. Like Phoenix, readers who remember the complexity of this other past, will learn to make their (textual) ways like a mother, by hook or by crook, writing and erasing, always interested and self-conscious, and always tracing the complexities of (self-and other-) love.