“A Worn Path”

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“A Worn Path”

THE LITERARY WORK

A short story set in the South sometime between 1890 and 1920; written in the 1930s and published in 1941.

SYNOPSIS

An elderly African American woman travels the hazardous worn path from her rural home to the city to retrieve medicine for her invalid grandchild.

Events in History at the Time the Short Story Takes Place

The Short Story in Focus

Events in History at the Time the Short Story Was Written

For More Information

Born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1909, Eudora Welty is deeply immersed in the culture and history of the South. Though raised in an upper-middle-class white family, she traveled extensively throughout the South during the Depression, working for the Works Progress Administration, and learned firsthand the plight of its impoverished black residents. In “A Worn Path” Welty provides a glimpse of the hard life of a poor Southern black woman who must confront both white society and the rapid urban growth and technological advancement of America around the turn of the twentieth century.

Events in History at the Time the Short Story Takes Place

Rural South

At the turn of the twentieth century, Jackson, Mississippi, was an area rife with divisions. As in other areas of the Deep South, segregation, racism, and poverty continued to dominate African American life, the way they had since the end of the Civil War. Large numbers of blacks moved north to take industrial jobs created by rapid urban growth and technological advancements. Many more, however, remained in the South and continued to farm the land as sharecroppers. Too financially strapped to buy land outright, most African American sharecroppers leased plots from white plantation owners (former slaveowners), for which they paid rent in cash or in a portion of the crops raised, often 50 percent. The landlord dictated what and how much to grow. The soil was generally poor, so farmers could scarcely produce enough to pay their rent, let alone turn a profit. Most owed money to white landlords by the end of each season for items purchased on credit at the landlord’s store. It was not until about 1910, when people like the African American scientist George Washington Carver taught farmers how to improve soil conditions and plant more suitable crops, that the lives of sharecroppers began to show some improvement.

Southern black women worked primarily as field hands or in domestic service. Like the sharecroppers, their lives had improved little and in some ways had even worsened since slavery. Many were denied a basic education, and factory jobs or nondomestic positions were all but impossible to secure. The practice of segregation kept blacks in the South out of “white” job sites. And African American women suffered prejudice twofold, since they were both female and black, which limited even further the types of jobs they could hold.

Living conditions for blacks in the rural South were quite impoverished around the turn of the twentieth century. Most Southern towns remained remote outposts, with no indoor plumbing or electricity. The prohibitive cost of new technologies kept modern amenities, such as the automobile, out of the reach of most Southern blacks.

Segregation

In 1896, with the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, the “separate but equal” doctrine became law. The decision officially sanctioned segregation. Southern restaurants, schools, meeting halls, theaters, and public transportation were all segregated by race. African Americans were expected to drink from separate drinking fountains, ride at the back of trains in separate rail cars, eat in separate sections of restaurants or in specifically “black” restaurants, shop in “black” stores, and attend “black-only” schools. Proponents of the separate-but-equal doctrine claimed it allowed for equality, but most services were anything but equal. For example, black amenities, such as drinking fountains, were generally lower to the ground, tarnished and placed in remote locations—far away from the “white” drinking fountains. More importantly, housing, wages, education, and economic opportunities remained vastly inferior to those enjoyed by Southern whites.

A violent era

Rampant violence against African Americans persisted in the South through 1915 and beyond. The Ku Klux Klan and other racist hate groups targeted black Americans in a hate campaign that included lynchings and brutalization. From 1890 to 1896 there was an average of 114 recorded lynchings per year in the United States; an average of 50 per year occurred through 1915. Though emancipated and granted full rights as citizens after the Civil War, African Americans were prevented from exercising those rights by racist Southerners as well as by the law. In 1903 blacks were kept from voting in Alabama when the Supreme Court upheld a clause in the state constitution that restricted voters to “people having an education, employment, property, a war record, good character, and the understanding of the duties of citizenship” (Angel, p. 37). Having been denied most of these opportunities since being brought to America as slaves, most African Americans could not meet these requirements and thus were denied suffrage. The federal government did little to punish or prevent crimes against Southern African Americans. Reluctant to intervene further in Southern affairs after the Reconstruction era, U.S. government authorities let local jurisdictions prosecute lynchings (resulting in very few convictions) and instead urged blacks to rely on their own community for help and support.

Emphasis on education

Black leaders, such as Booker T. Washington and Ida Bell Wells-Barnett, struggled to improve the lot of Southern blacks. Wells-Barnett, a writer for the Memphis, Tennessee, black newspaper Free Speech and Headlight, was among the first to publicize lynchings in the 1890s. Her efforts led to the formation of antilynching organizations and raised public awareness of the ongoing injustice. Washington influenced the Southern black community through his promotion of education and vocational training, founding the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama to make possible the achievement of these objectives. Along with the efforts of other pioneering black leaders, Washington’s emphasis on education produced positive results. By 1901 the number of African American teachers had risen to 30,000 and the population of black children attending school to 1.5 million. In “A Worn Path” the character Phoenix Jackson is too old to benefit from the educational reforms instituted after the Civil War—something she refers to in the text, hinting that her lack of education has severely limited her opportunities in life.

Progressive age?

The first decades of the 1900s were a time of great change and expansion. Cities grew in every direction: skyscrapers were erected, forever altering the American landscape; automobiles replaced horses and carriages in the streets; factories drew immigrants and workers of various ethnic groups into the cities, crowding the streets and polluting the skies and waterways. The expansion of railroads brought mass transit to more parts of the nation, while the inventions of electricity and the assembly line created mass production, standardization of products, and great demand for a low-wage industrial labor force. Thus in some respects the nation flourished—yet great inequalities accompanied such progress, inequalities that most strongly impacted minorities. Low-wage, labor-intensive work was generally performed by blacks, immigrants, women, and children—and while the factory owners (primarily white men) prospered, a growing class of laborers struggled to earn a decent living. In 1910 wages for black men, amounted to one-third those of white men, while women and children of any race were paid even less. The average woman or child textile worker earned $6 per week and was required to work twelve hours per day, six days a week. Such glaring inequalities and harsh working conditions helped the trade union movement gain strength during this era. Aided by President Theodore Roosevelt—the first president to support the concept of organized labor—the government formed Commerce and Labor Departments to regulate business practices, improve working conditions, and control the growth of corporate monopolies.

From 1900 to 1920 reform movements abounded in the United States. Labor laws were passed, educational reforms were implemented (high school and college enrollment among Southern blacks doubled from 1900 to 1920), and women won the right to vote (in 1920 under the Nineteenth Amendment). Social welfare programs emerged as well to aid the urban and rural poor. For the first time in the nation’s history, philanthropists and taxes subsidized necessities for the poor such as medical care. But grave inequalities remained—especially in the South. In 1916 the first Federal Bureau of Education study on black education revealed extreme discrepancies between black and white Southern schools. Only 58 percent of black children attended school at all, and high schools for African Americans were nearly nonexistent. The argument among whites for keeping blacks uneducated was that education “spoiled field hands” (Tindall, p. 268). Such an attitude eventually gave way to positive efforts to improve black education in light of this study. Among other measures, roads were built to increase access to rural schools where illiteracy and nonattendance rates were the highest. The plot of “A Worn Path” reveals how difficult progress is when physical, economic, and intellectual access are limited.

Women restricted

At the turn of the century women were restricted in nearly every aspect of their lives. They could not vote, could not enter most professions or attend most colleges, and were physically restricted by their clothing. Heavy long dresses and rib-crushing corsets literally bound women and restrained their movement in the outside world. Fainting was common among women during this era, as corsets cut blood and oxygen flow in the body, and activities such as riding a bicycle were all but impossible. Shoes consisted of lace-up boots, which often required a hook to secure. For many—especially elderly or overweight women—lacing of such shoes proved to be a tremendous chore and was sometimes neglected, as shown by this passage from “A Worn Path”:

She wore a dark striped dress reaching down to her shoe tops, and an equally long apron of bleached sugar sacks, with a full pocket: all neat and tidy, but every time she took a step she might have fallen over her shoelaces, which dragged from her unlaced shoes.
(Welty, “A Worn Path,” p. 200)

Harlem Renaissance

By the second decade of 1900, African Americans were having a strong impact on society. In the Harlem section of New York City a cultural revolution was underway (1915-1940) in which African American arts flourished. By 1917 Harlem—in uptown Manhattan—had become home to rising black writers, actors, musicians, dancers, club owners, and other future cultural icons. African and Southern traditions were promoted through theater, literature, music, and dance. Black writers such as Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes related stories of a people and heritage heretofore largely unknown to many white Americans in the North, and these stories had a profound effect on both the black and white communities. The Harlem Renaissance, as this creative outpouring of black artists and thinkers of the time was called, furthered social change by challenging stereotypes and exposing African American strengths and contributions. Black nightclubs featuring jazz, ragtime, and blues thrived, while stories portraying the Southern black experience of poverty and oppression—and of the storytelling and music-making that served as a balm to these circumstances—made their way into print and onto the stage. The promotion of Southern black culture during this era paved the way for writers such as Welty to be published. Though not black, Welty wrote about Southern culture and race relations—subjects that prior to the Harlem Renaissance had been nonexistent in mainstream literature.

Southern storytelling tradition

Welty’s realist writing style evolved out of the Southern story-telling tradition. As she explained, “the Southerner is a talker by nature” (Welty, One Writer’s Beginnings, p. 17). Southerners, by and large an oral society, considered storytelling an important aspect of life. This held true for both its white and its black communities. With literacy rates low and the dispersion of people in remote rural areas, stories were a way to communicate as well as preserve culture and history when one could not easily access outside information. Mark Twain was among the first to capture the sights and sounds of the South—so distinct from any other region of America—on paper. Later writers, such as William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, extended the custom of traditional storytelling and ushered in what has been called a Southern renaissance in literature. Eudora Welty was part of this elite group of writers who helped define and contribute to Southern and American literature! In a time when the literary world considered European writers the only true literary masters or innovators of genre, Southern writers added proof that Americans could not only create original works but could produce masterpieces.

The Short Story in Focus

The plot

“A Worn Path” begins with a black woman, Phoenix Jackson, embarking on a familiar journey down the much-trodden path toward town. It is winter. She is walking through the countryside, and the path is frozen and menacing for an old woman such as herself. Her stride, says the story, is like the “pendulum in a grandfather clock” as she makes her way uphill through the woods, past the thorny bushes and “foxes, owls, beetles, jack rabbits, coons and wild animals” (“A Worn Path,” p. 200). The journey is much like her life: an uphill struggle filled with obstacles, distractions, and little help.

A thorny bush is the first to attack her. It takes hold of her skirt and threatens to tear it if she pulls away too hard. Clearly unwilling to risk damaging her dress—possibly her only one—Phoenix carefully wrests herself free, all the while understanding that the thorns are only doing their job. Next she negotiates her rickety frame across a creek and stops briefly to rest on the other side. She imagines that a little boy stops to bring her some cake but when she reaches out to take it, awakens from her daydream.

She proceeds under a barbed wire fence and through an old wood, all the while carrying on a dialogue with herself about the perilous journey and sights she sees and recalls from previous trips down the familiar trail. She passes a scarecrow that she mistakes for a ghost, then comes upon a well that has been there since before she was born. She continues on and meets a black dog who startles her. She attempts to tap him with her cane but in doing so falls into a ditch.

It is impossible for Phoenix to get out of the ditch herself and so she lays there contemplating her fate. After a time a white man comes upon her and picks her up out of the ditch. He asks her why she is going to town and urges her not to go because it is so far away. He is completely ignorant as to the urgency and importance of her mission and trivializes it, saying: “I know you old colored people! Wouldn’t miss going to see Santa Claus!” (“A Worn Path,” p. 203). In reality, Phoenix is on her way to retrieve vital medicine for her invalid grandchild, of whom she is the sole caretaker. But she does not bother to explain herself. She has just seen a nickel fall from the man’s pocket and focuses her attention and energy on retrieving it.

At the same time the big black dog reappears and barks ferociously at the white man. Phoenix, admiring the dog’s spirit, comments: “Look … He ain’t scared of nobody” (“A Worn Path,” p. 203). While the man goes after the dog, Phoenix bends down, picks up the nickel and slides it into her apron. She is conscious of God watching her “stealing” and chastises herself a little for doing so. But it is clear that she desperately needs the money and that the man will not even miss it.

When the man comes back from shooting at the dog, he points the barrel of his rifle directly at Phoenix for no apparent reason. She does not even flinch. He asks her why she is not afraid of guns and she replies: “I seen plenty go off closer by, in my day, and for less than what I done” (“A Worn Path,” p. 204). The man seems satisfied with her response and tells her that he’d give her money if he had any—which the reader and Phoenix know is a lie. Then he tells her she should go home and leaves. Phoenix continues on her way toward town.

Phoenix arrives in town and encounters all the people, cars, and shining electric lights of the city. It is a stark contrast to her simple, desolate rural home. She encounters a white woman rushing down the sidewalk, arms full of colorfully wrapped packages. Needing her shoe tied and unable to do it herself, Phoenix stops the woman and asks her to tie it. In a random, unexplained gesture of kindness, the woman obliges, lacing and tying both shoes before continuing on her way.

Phoenix finally reaches her destination. It is a tall building and she climbs several flights of stairs. She enters a doctor’s office and encounters a flippant receptionist who eyes her and says immediately: “A charity case, I suppose” (“A Worn Path,” p. 205). Whether she refuses to respond to the condescending remark or whether she is overcome by exhaustion or both, Phoenix makes no reply for several minutes. A nurse comes into the room who recognizes her and, knowing how far she has traveled and why, asks her to sit down while she fills her grandson’s prescription. The nurse asks how the boy is doing, if his throat is any better. Phoenix sits for a long time and stares blankly. Finally she says that her memory temporarily left her and she forgot why she was there. “I never did go to school,” she says in her own defense. “I was too old at the Surrender (of the South, after which she would have been free to attend school)” (“A Worn Path,” p. 205). She tells the nurse the boy is just the same, still very ill from swallowing lye two to three years ago. Phoenix has come for the “soothing medicine” that allows him to breathe and swallow, as she always does. The nurse brings out the prescription, hands it to Phoenix, and marks “charity” in her ledger. The nurse then offers Phoenix a nickel because it is Christmas. Phoenix takes the other nickel from her pocket, places the new coin beside it, and stares at her palm. An idea flashes to mind. She taps her cane on the floor and announces she is going to buy her grandson a little paper windmill and march it back to where he is waiting, alone. With that goal set, she turns and walks out the door, back down the long flight of stairs.

The African American family

Welty’s short story illustrates, in part, the strength of the extended family in African American society. Conditions in America in the era of slavery had often forced black families to adapt to extremely difficult situations in order to endure. In fact, the majority of slaves lived in mostly stable two-parent households, but the threat of family breakup was constant. Forced into separation in the 1700s and 1800s, black families were torn apart by slavetraders and owners during the pre-Civil War era. Husbands were sometimes taken from their wives and sold to other plantation owners, and children were treated like commodities, regarded not as belonging to their mother or father but rather to the white slaveowner.

The breakup of families only strengthened kinship ties in the black community. Extended kin formed a network, helping slaves adapt to a family breakup. If children were sold to a nearby plantation, blood relatives in the new place—aunts, cousins, or grandparents—took on the role of parents. And if there were no blood relatives, strangers stepped in to care for the children.

Such unconventional families persisted after emancipation, though the two-parent household seems to have been most common then too (Mintz and Kellogg, p. 78). When necessary, black women in the late 1800s and early 1900s worked as a male would, performing farm labor, for example, to support their families. Some couldn’t find their husbands after the war, or perhaps their husbands had remarried. Living without spouses, such women often formed community “clusters” in which they would pool resources with other matriarchal families. These clusters became extended families, giving women and their children a greater sense of security, providing emotional and economic support. This type of cooperative measure helped the fragmented black families to maintain a degree of stability and mutual sustenance against the tremendous odds the history of slavery had dealt them.

The number of female-headed households grew. At the turn of the century, when blacks moved en masse to the North, many Southern women were left behind while men took industrial jobs unavailable to black women. By 1940, 17.9 percent of all black families were headed by women in contrast to 10.1 percent of white families. Kinship networks meanwhile remained important, serving to protect children, grandchildren, or other blacks whose families were disrupted by developments like migration to the North.

As many writers assert, “there is no ‘the black family’; there are, however, black families” (Low, p. 381). The history of slavery, segregation, prejudice, and economic deprivation has, in other words, produced a variety of family models in the black community. “A Worn Path” illustrates the strength of those families in whatever form they take. Phoenix Jackson, though seemingly 100 years old, is the sole caretaker of her grandson and does whatever is needed to provide for him. Through her example, the story conveys a definition of a family based not on gender and white social conventions but rather on love, responsibility, and support.

Sources

Eudora Welty based “A Worn Path” on a personal observation of an old woman crossing a distant field in rural Mississippi. “I couldn’t see her up close,” Welty says, “but you could tell it was an old woman going somewhere, and I thought, she is bent on an errand. And I know it isn’t for herself. It was just the look of her figure” (Welty in Prenshaw, p. 300). Welty created the story from her imagination but based it on this and other observations. She worked for the federal government’s Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the 1930s as a publicity agent and traveled throughout the South. She visited nearly every county in Mississippi, encountering a broad spectrum of people and lifestyles. This experience opened Welty’s eyes, she says, to “diversity” and “the great poverty of the state” (Welty in Prenshaw, p. 155). Though she always credits her fertile imagination as the source of her fiction, she is quick to acknowledge “nothing could have been written in the way of a story without such a background, without the knowledge and experience I got from these things [her work for the WPA]” (Welty in Prenshaw, p. 156).

Events in History at the Time the Short Story Was Written

Depression years

In 1929 the stock market crashed and launched the U.S. into the Great Depression. Twelve million people became unemployed and millions found themselves homeless and without food. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected President three years after the crash and immediately implemented “New Deal” policies designed to aid the destitute and get the country back on its feet again. Many government agencies were created to put Americans back to work and distribute aid. Among these agencies was the Works Progress Administration, which employed Welty. The WPA hired thousands to perform maintenance on public buildings and also set up programs to aid struggling writers, artists, actors, and musicians. The idea behind the WPA and other New Deal agencies was not to provide charity, but rather to provide opportunity for people to help themselves. Thousands of artists benefited from working for the WPA. Their work, in turn, often addressed the plight of the poorer members of society, which inspired others to aid the disadvantaged. Welty personally interviewed and photographed hundreds of impoverished Southerners in Mississippi for the WPA’s guide to Mississippi. While her efforts helped publicize their plight, she also benefited personally by being employed during an era of widespread unemployment.

World War II

The year 1941 marked the start of Roosevelt’s third term as President and America’s entry into World War II. In December of that year the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor was attacked by Japanese bombers, thus bringing an immediate declaration of war against the Axis powers, an alliance of the fascist governments of Japan, Germany, and Italy. The rationing of food and many other commodities became necessary since America was allocating all her resources to aiding the war effort. The cost of living skyrocketed as daily necessities became scarce. Butter jumped from 34.4 cents per pound to 43.5 cents; coffee increased 5 cents per pound, and ham prices increased by 35 percent. On the other hand, the war served to lift the nation out of the Depression by putting the unemployed to work in war-related industries. But for struggling families, such as the one featured in the short story, such drastic price increases would put many commodities and daily necessities out of reach.

One positive effect of the war was that it forced open the doors of the defense industry for minorities. Millions of African Americans found ready work in defense plants across the nation. Though especially slow to accept African Americans, the defense industry and armed services—desperate for personnel—eventually changed hiring practices out of necessity. Among others it was First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt who pushed for the hiring of black men and of women of all races. In her newspaper column, “My Day,” she described how “Negro girls are fitted to take training in as many different fields as the white girls, but in New York City and the State [of New York], the greatest number of employment opportunities for Negro girls are in domestic service” (Roosevelt, p. 209). She also called attention to the frustration experienced by patriotic African Americans who could not serve their country because they could not enlist. Due in part to her championing the cause, by 1942 one million African Americans were enlisted in all branches of the armed services. The war in this sense furthered the causes of women’s rights and civil rights in comparison to their status during the time period in which Welty’s story is set.

Reviews

Welty found immediate success when she began writing fiction in 1936. The collection that included “A Worn Path,” entitled A Curtain of Green, was published in 1941. Her writings—particularly “A Worn Path”—were praised by New York Times Book Review editor Robert Van Gelder, who hired her as a literary critic. Among other awards during her career, Welty received four O. Henry awards, the Brandeis Medal of Achievement, the Howells Medal for Fiction, the American Book Award for Fiction, and the Pulitzer Prize in 1972 for her novella, The Optimist’s Daughter. “A Worn Path” won immediate critical acclaim and has become a standard text in high schools and universities across the nation.