Worn Path

A Worn Path

Throughout time, people have traveled a peirlless journey through life, overcoming hardships along the way while enduring the unthinkable for the people they love. Strength, love and determination allow a person to persevere when the obstacles of life seem insurmountable. “A Worn Path”, written by Eudora Welty, is a story about an ageless woman named Phoenix Jackson, who has endured a lifetime of hardships. The journey she takes down a worn path is not only about her devotion and unconditional love for her grandson; it is also about the passage of the hard, self-sacrificing, proud and painful life she has endured.

Phoenix's bravery and boldness are illustrated time after time as she faces numerous challenges throughout her journey; the cold temperature, steep hills, thorny bushes, crawling under a barbed-wire fence, falling in a ditch, a hunter’s gun pointed at her face, and her failing physical health. But yet nothing frightens Phoenix, not even a scarecrow she first thought to be a ghost. Always getting herself out of a predicament, she continues with her quest by having her grandson as a reason to keep going. Often, love is the only reason people continue to live and to endure the unthinkable.

On a very cold winter day, an elderly Black woman named Phoenix Johnson begins a long journey into town to get medicine for her sick grandson. The path itself is reflected as a symbol of her travel through life. The story tells of her prevailing willpower as she encounters realistic and imaginary challenges of her journey and how love and faith prevail over considerable obstacles.

The path is a metaphor for life and life is full of obstacles and risks that Phoenix needed to overcome in this story.

Phoenix begins her journey into town early on a “bright frozen day” in December from the rural country where she lives. Having traveled this path her entire life, Phoenix knows the path very well. Being an old woman whose mind and body...