A Worn Path

Phoenix, as her name implies, rises from the ashes of her life to hunt down medicine for her only grandson who had swalllowed lye a few years before and still suffers from the burn. On her way to the dispensary, we learn that she is old, very old, perhaps a hundred. She is a living link to the past: she remembers the Surrender. She has one foot in the culture of the past, and one foot in the historical present. She seems to inhabit an animist belief system or world, and transforms even simple gestures like crossing a log bridge into mythical events imbued with spiritual significance. In that regard, she is very child-like, and in fact she does appear like a child to the nurse at the dispensary despite her extreme old age. Having grown up as a slave stunted her matrurity, and in fact she is diminutive in stature, as well. Her fears arise in response to the natural contingencies of making her journey on foot through the woods, alone: wild animals, her battle with a thornbush, the presence of a vulture, the dead, ghosts, a scarecrow, and a big black dog that makes her fall into a ditch; yet she is not afraid of stealing money under God's watchful eye, or having a gun pointed at her (the vestige of institutionalized racism), or of contradicting a white man and making such a long journey, or of asking someone to lace up her shoes once she reaches the town, or of begging for money to buy her child a toy. She seems to accept her role as her grandson's caretaker as her fate and expects the medication for him as her right. But for all her fears, she seems at home in nature, which she transfigures through her imagination to the point even of hallucinating being served a slice of cake by a little boy. The link between imagination and memory is very real for Phoenix, and this fact too may lend significance to her name, perhaps more real that the link between memory and intellect, for she even forgets for a moment why she made the journey. Her presense in the dispensary seems entirely anomolous and out of place, except for the fact that she must leave and return whence she came. And we don't know what awaits her once she reaches home.