It was December—a bright frozen day in the early morning. Far out in the country there was an old Negro woman with her head tied in a red rag, coming along a path through the pinewoods. Her name was Phoenix Jackson. She was very old and small and she walked slowly in the dark pine shadows, moving a little from side to side in her steps, with the balanced heaviness and lightness of a pendulum in a grandfather clock.

The story begins with Phoenix’s journey already underway. She is walking slowly, and her frailty and vulnerability are immediately emphasized. She is old and small, and the dark shadows of the pine trees tower menacingly over her. However, the comparison with the pendulum of a grandfather clock also stresses Phoenix’s regularity and reliability. Phoenix is the only character in the story who is named. Both her names are cities in the southern United States, reinforcing the setting, and her first name emphasizes her resilience, since it associates her with the mythical bird that is reborn from the flames.

She shut her eyes, reached out her hand, and touched a sleeve. She found a coat and inside that an emptiness, cold as ice.

“You scarecrow,” she said. Her face lighted. “I ought to be shut up for good,” she said with laughter. “My senses is gone. I too old. I the oldest people I ever know. Dance, old scarecrow,” she said, “while I dancing with you.”

At first, Phoenix thinks the dark figure in the cornfield is a man, then a ghost. She reaches out to touch it and feels emptiness and coldness, which are consistent with the idea that the figure is a ghost, assuming that one could touch a ghost at all. However, she quickly realizes that she is touching the sleeve of an old coat which is hanging on a scarecrow. She laughs as she admonishes herself, and is so relieved that she dances with the scarecrow. This sense of relief, however, emphasizes just how frightening the long journey is for a frail old woman, particularly when, as she observes, her senses are not as sharp as they were. This is particularly true of her eyesight. Phoenix often seems to be almost blind, tapping her cane in front of her like a white stick rather than leaning on it. She only identifies the scarecrow by touching it, even though a scarecrow is not an unlikely thing to encounter in the middle of a cornfield.

“I bound to go to town, mister,” said Phoenix. “The time come around.”

He gave another laugh, filling the whole landscape. “I know you old colored people! Wouldn’t miss going to town to see Santa Claus!”

But something held Old Phoenix very still. The deep lines in her face went into a fierce and different radiation. Without warning, she had seen with her own eyes a flashing nickel fall out of the man’s pocket onto the ground.

The hunter who has helped Phoenix out of the ditch seems relatively good-natured but is racist and condescending in his manner toward her. She is on an errand of mercy for a sick child, and although the reader does not yet know this, it is quite clear that the motive behind her journey is something more serious than a childish desire to see Santa Claus. The hunter seems to regard Black people as being similar to children when he links this motive with her race. This attitude increases the reader’s sympathy for Phoenix and makes it appear more forgivable that she decides to take the nickel which has fallen out of his pocket. The fierce concentration in her face when she sees the money makes it clear how important such a small sum is to her.

“A charity case, I suppose,” said an attendant who sat at the desk before her.

But Phoenix only looked above her head. There was sweat on her face, the wrinkles in her skin shone like a bright net.

“Speak up, Grandma,” the woman said. “What’s your name? We must have your history, you know. Have you been here before? What seems to be the trouble with you?”

Old Phoenix only gave a twitch to her face as if a fly were bothering her.

“Are you deaf?” cried the attendant.

The two characters who provide Phoenix with the money to buy a Christmas gift for her grandson are also the two least attractive personalities in the story. The attendant brusquely refers to the old woman as a charity case, then barks questions at her without any regard for her age or dignity. It is not clear why Phoenix does not answer. She tells the nurse later that her memory failed her when she was questioned about her grandson. However, the reference to a troublesome fly here suggests that she has decided to ignore the attendant because she is behaving so rudely.

“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.”

Phoenix’s description of her grandson is heart-rending in its pathos and stands in stark contrast to the cold, officious treatment she has received at the hands of the attendant and the nurse. Her comment that they are “the only two left in the world” emphasizes the isolation of their situation and their dependence on one another. The little boy’s resilience in the face of suffering reflects that of his grandmother, and her love for him appears in her description of his helplessness and his sweet nature. While she was formal and dignified in her apologies to the nurse, at the end of this passage she seems genuinely distressed that someone so central to her life could have slipped her mind even for a moment.