Phoenix Has No Coat: Historicity, Eschatology, and Sins of Omission in Eudora Welty's "A Worn Path"

Unsurprisingly, Eudora Welty's short story "A Worn Path" has inspired many interpretations. Most critics, including Elaine Orr, James Walter, Peter Schmidt, and James Robert Saunders, assert the work as an optimistic depiction of its protagonist, Phoenix Jackson.(1) However, no previous study has discerned what I believe to be the work's primary purpose: to attack the debased Bible Belt Christianity that does not eradicate but instead accommodates racism through sins of both commission and omission. Even the many poststructuralist readings of "A Worn Path" have exhibited a shared, essentially formalist strategy: a tendency to divorce the "text" from the vitally important historical conditions and social relationships so carefully limned therein. But an understanding of the history from which the story's action emerges is required if we are to grasp Welty's larger concerns. Through the profound implications of its setting during the Christmas season in and around Natchez, Mississippi, in the twentieth century's early decades, and through its delineation of the protagonist's selflessness and courage, "A Worn Path" calls for the implementation of a theology that would make Phoenix's dangerous--and possibly fatal--journey unnecessary. In my view, Welty's primary intent is not to console, inspire, or edify her readers; nor does she want them merely to take heart from Phoenix's example. Rather, the story is a call to action against the "Christian" world that oppresses the protagonist. Phoenix's arduous, life-threatening trek is not solely reflective of the human spirit's capacity to triumph over circumstantial difficulties but revelatory of a society in which very different, patently unjust standards exist. "A Worn Path" illuminates crucial distinctions between apocalyptic and ethical eschatology in Christian theology. Apocalyptic eschatology refers to the conventional belief that a last judgment will be meted out by a deus ex machina, and allows, indeed encourages, disinterest in and disdain for the events and realities of the mundane world. In contrast, ethical eschatology argues for an apocalypse in that quotidian realm, for an "end time" in the here and now achieved by humans who seek to transmogrify the mores of a corrupt social realm. This interpretation of apocalypse forms the basis of Liberation Theology, a phenomenon whose origins can be traced back to the Civil Rights Movement in the United States: "in the 1950s [Martin Luther King, Jr.] was the pioneer, the forerunner, of all the other liberation theologies that began only in the 1960s and 1970s."(2) If a Christian framework is to be imposed on "A Worn Path" at all, this radical eschatology seems the best choice, since it stems from the same racist experiences as those Phoenix endures. Attempting to read the story through the lens of a quietist eschatology recalls James H. Cone's cogent assertion that American theology has "failed miserably in relating its work to the oppressed in society by refusing to confront this nation with the evils of racism.... Most of the time American theology has simply remained silent, ignoring the condition of the victims of this racist society."(3) wish to argue that Welty has sought at the fictional level what Cone demands at the theological: through the acute historical consciousness and moral vision that infuses "A Worn Path," she confronts her nation with the lasting effects of its troubled history. Readers of the story must decipher a subtle prose puzzle, one whose carefully chosen components--including tone, plot structure, setting, the juxtaposition of characters, the racist misinterpretations of Phoenix--only cohere when they are closely examined in light of the story's sociohistorical bases, revealing the rage churning beneath its deceptively placid surface. First, Welty filters her assault through her objective tone, a task she accomplishes perhaps too skillfully, as her concealed authorial presence may have fostered the consensual view of "A Worn Path" as a story concerned primarily with spiritual triumph. …