[In the following excerpt, Weston examines evidence of the Gothic tradition in "A Worn Path."]

It is not nature that is the spirit of healing in "A Worn Path," but human love and endurance, in spite of a world that might seem Gothic to those less grounded in reality than is Phoenix Jackson. Although it is justly celebrated for its humorous and inspirational depiction of Phoenix's love and of her clever adaptability in the natural world, even "A Worn Path" contains images of a gothic space and situation. The old woman with the exotic name walks through a winter wasteland from the Natchez Trace, up the hill through "dark pine shadows" and then down under live oaks, where "it was as dark as a cave," to the town of Natchez. Not only gothic entrapment but also the historical reality of slavery in the South is suggested by Phoenix's own image for her weariness—"Seem like there is chains about my feet, time I get this far"—and by the thorny bush and barbed-wire fence that entangle her along the way. The "ghost" in this story is only a scarecrow; but she is menaced as well by a real black dog and by "big dead trees like black men with one arm," and a row of weathered houses appears in gothic array like "old women under a spell sitting there." It even seemed necessary for Welty to explain the story's motivation, in "Is Phoenix Jackson's Grandson Really Dead?" to readers who believed the grandson, too, was a ghost, so fully "mysterious" is this most-magic work. The fact that Phoenix is associated with magic and with conjuring is a part of the realistic depiction of black culture, in which "women have long possessed 'magical' powers" [Marjorie Pryse, "Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and the 'Ancient Power' of Black Women," in Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition, 1985]. Thus the story illustrates the felicity of gothic images to deal with the many mysterious but very real facets of life as it is lived.

It is that combination of the real and the imaginary that characterizes the life of Phoenix Jackson. Besides the obvious qualities of faith and love that impel such a journey in the first place, her equanimity is due to several other aspects of her complex personality. If, for example, Phoenix seems remarkably without bitterness for an elderly, poor black woman in a forbidding, cold, white world, it is at least partly because the lives imaginatively. For one thing, she lives by her wits; thus, in the white man's South she uses good humor and frank admission of need to gain assistance from a hunter, a shopper, and a nurse. In addition, she respects the world and its powers and mysteries: "Thorns," she says, "you doing your appointed work. Never want to let folks pass, no sir." She also works her own magic, conjuring in the direction of perceived motion in the thicket: "Out of my way, all you foxes, owls, beetles, jack rabbits, coons and wild animals! . . . Keep out from under these feet, little bob-whites. . . . Keep the big wild hogs out of my path. Don't let none of those come running my direction. I got a long way" (Welty's ellipses).