A Worn Path

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Introduction

Phoenix Jackson is a black old woman, and the protagonist of this story of a worn path. The story is about Jackson’s journey to the town of Natchez through the wilderness of Mississippi to find medicine for her grandson child. Phoenix faces the journey to town out of love for her grandchild, and the story” A worn Path” is a story of unending love and affection that brings the tale towards a goal. She has travelled in this worn path several times, and this journey has many hardships and challenges. The obstacles and the story are symbols of how the African society undergoes and overcomes the trials.

She encounters a dog that leads her falling to into a ditch. She is unable to come out, and she falls asleep. She dreams severally during her journey for instance she sees a boy holding a cake offering it to her, and when she is in the ditch she dreams again. Her dream is a symbolic of the whites and the blacks trying to get along. While she tries to reach for the cake, she stretches her hand symbolically impling that the racial harmony dream is not yet achieved, and the blacks are trying to reach for it. Later a white hunter passes by and pulls her out, but before getting her out of the ditch he spurns her and tells her to go home since Africans love going to town to see Santa Claus.

She is very old and talks to herself as well as with anything she encounters on her way, and she is short of memory since on arriving in towns she forgets her purpose of her journey. When she arrives in the hospital, the nurse calls her Auntie Phoenix and tells the attendant that Phoenix has a grandson, and she comes to pick medicine for him. The grandchild had accidentally swallowed lye some few years back and had died of suffocation. It seems she has hallucinations since, she believes the grandchild is still alive, and she tells the nurse that the lye had caused injuries to the child’s throat and that it will swell and block. The nurse understands her condition, and in the process she also gets treated for her hallucinations.

Work Cited

Welty, Eudora.  A Worn Path. Mississippi: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1998. 170. Print.