“A Worn Path” by Eudora Welty is a story of love and sacrifice, two of the 
primary reasons for Easter. In this quiet story old, black Phoenix Jackson walks to town to obtain medicine for her grandson. Phoenix “was very old and small and she walked slowly . . . Her eyes were blue with age. Her skin had a pattern all its own of numberless branching wrinkles as though a whole little tree stood in the middle of her forehead.” Phoenix endures fear, pain, and humiliation, but brushes them off and retains her dignity throughout her journey.
Phoenix walks through deep, still woods, climbs up a hill “through pines” and “down through oaks,” maneuvers through thorn bushes, crosses a creek on a log, crawls under barbed wire and walks through a dead forest, dead corn fields, and a swamp. She travels through cold and wind. Just as she starts on “the easy going,” a black dog startles her and she lands in a ditch, too weak to get up by herself. A young, white hunter helps her out and orders her to return home. When she insists on going to town, he insults her by saying “I know you old colored people! Wouldn’t miss going to town to see Santa Claus.” But, the motivation for Phoenix’s journey is not trivial, it’s a labor of love.
The title and the nurse’s comments inform the reader that Phoenix endures this journey on a regular basis to obtain “the soothing medicine.” When the nurse asks if the boy is still alive, Phoenix’s response radiates with love:
“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 could tell him from all the others in creation.”
Ms. Welty said the source of the story was a glimpse of an old solitary black woman walking through a winter landscape. She wondered what would cause the women to walk there and decided it could only be an errand for someone else, an errand for a loved one.
Easter imagery of death and re-birth is everywhere: the main character’s name, the journey occurs in December as one year is dying and another will start, Phoenix’s coma-like rigidity in the doctor’s office and then sudden re-awakening. Other instances of Easter symbolism occur in Phoenix’s struggle to mount the hill, it ”seems like there is chains about my feet . . . something always take a hold of me on this hill–pleads I should stay” as if it were Golgotha. Phoenix getting caught in the thorny bush is a reference to the crown of thorns and the scarecrow points to Christ on the cross. The stops along the way are reminiscent of the stations of the cross. Having walked the stations of the cross, I can tell you that the meaning of that journey is far better portrayed in this story than fighting your way through the throngs in Old Jerusalem.
In “A Worn Path,” Ms. Welty gives us a story of a journey, one that is undertaken in hardship as a sacrifice for love, just like Easter.
Tags: Easter, holiday, recommended reading, short story
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