It was December—a bright frozen day in the early morning. Far out in the country there was an old Negro woman with her head tied red rag, coming along a path through the pinewoods. Her name was Phoenix Jackson. She was very old and small and she walked slowly in the dark pine shadows, moving a little from side to side in her steps, with the balanced heaviness and lightness of a pendulum in a grand-father clock. She carried a thin, small cane made from an umbrella, and with this she kept tapping the frozen earth in front of her. This made a grave and persistent noise in the still air, that seemed meditative like the chirping of a solitary little bird.
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. She looked straight ahead. Her eyes were blue with age. Her skin had a pattern all its own of numberless branching wrinkles and as though a whole little tree stood in the middle of her forehead, but a golden color ran underneath, and the two knobs of her cheeks were illumined by a yellow burning under the dark. Under the red rag her hair came down on her neck in the frailest of ringlets, still black, and with an odor like copper.
I was lucky enough to be introduced to this Eudora Welty story whilst enjoying an excellent Get Into Reading ( GIR) day hosted by the University of Bolton. The story held everyone and looking at it again today, the brilliance of the tale remains undiminished. It reads as both an allegorical and ‘local’ narrative, and Welty’s representation of the solitary Phoenix, is intimate and tender. Our eyes and ears alight cinematically on the figure as she comes into view and hearing, treading through a landscape respected for its natural familiarity and challenges. For dialogue is everywhere in the story. Phoenix is listening to her own voice within as well as hearing all the voices without.
The story seems to have a physical affect upon the reader too as we move with Phoenix along the ‘worn path’ towards a destination undisclosed until the final stages of the narrative. So the story has its own ‘pulse’..it is alive with the wonder of Phoenix’s ongoing ‘dialogue’ with a journey she has carried out before, but which for me seems final on this occasion as there appears a ‘lastness’ which is palpably present here.
Perhaps the idea of a journey at Christmas time may seem a little forced, but the story transcends any cliche. We identify strongly with this feisty, focussed woman and her trials matter to us; we care. The story celebrates determination and life!
I admire the ambiguity of the tale as well. Why does her hair smell like ‘copper’ and how near to Phoenix would we have to be to know this? Colour proliferates in the story. It is acknowledged everywhere which is why the overall impression seemed one of wonder and communion. The journey is a metaphor perhaps but primarily it is a neccessay gift for the sick grandson, living or dead. Phoenix is respecting something within and without herslelf which is literally bigger than anything else. And that is love. the journey is a demonstration of unconditional altruistic love and as the woman nears her goal( the city with the hospital) every obstcale is overcome and swept aside.
Even the ‘blue’ eyes seem positive in the story. For whilst they are most likely blue with the untreated damage of cataracts, Welty’s representation of her heroine seems more transcendent. Everything can be reconciled or redeemed, because Phoenix is a ‘beyond’ character. Even the white hunter who tries to intimidate Phoenix evaporates as a threat. She has seen more than he can ever threaten her with.
Pathos can become transmuted alchemically into something larger. Perhaps what I am trying to get at is the way that the story moved beyond pity or charm ( or mourning?) and manages to find something else, more enduring and irresistible. When her stick taps out her progress ‘like a solitary bird’ we are aware of her improvisation and ability to survive and negotiate her winding path through the trauma of American history. For everything is something else too, and this metamorphosis and slippage between being one thing and another anticipates the visionary techniques of Toni Morrison in her Pulitzer prize winning novel Beloved. When the ‘as though a whole little tree stood in the middle of her forehead’..suffering and age are not fixed and irredeemable. Fpr the gaze which alights on Phoenix is filled with loving possibility..or perhaps it is love that creates such possibilities, such wonderful ‘as if’ reframes and similes.
And it doesn’t matter if the images are elusive to our understanding for they communicate the wonder of another human being who is in turn suffused by wonder at nature and her own relationship with nature and her own kin.
A gift of a story! Remarkable and the You tube interview with Eudora Welty and warm and inspiring too.