Parting the Curtain on Lye Poisoning in “A Worn Path”

Abstract

Parting the Curtain on Lye Poisoning in “A Worn Path” Melissa Deakins Stang Eudora Welty’s sensitivity to words and images in rural Mississippi during the late 1930s are often reflected in her writings and photographs (Barilleaux 21). “A Worn Path” is evident of this. Written, apparently, in 1940, and published in 1941, it is a short story about Phoenix Jackson, an elderly grandmother who undertakes a heroic journey into town to procure free “charity case” medicine for her grandson’s throat (177–78). The story is predicated on the unfortunate circumstance that the boy’s throat periodically becomes swollen because he accidentally swallowed lye. The doctor’s office that Phoenix returns to “like clockwork” confirms this: “Yes. Swallowed lye. When was it?-January-two-three years ago-” (178). How accurately does “A Worn Path” reflect conditions of the poor of Welty’s time and place, and from where does she draw inspiration for this tale? The child’s condition is something Welty obviously understood, as her story and its allusions to medicine clearly show. Traveling throughout her native state as a junior publicity agent for the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s, camera in hand, Welty observed the lives of rural people closely and took photographs depicting black life, including several that portray images of women like Phoenix Jackson. Unlike many writers and photographers of her time—for example, Margaret Bourke-White and Doris Ulmann—Welty was not on a Depression era crusade (Black 35), although she is clearly sympathetic to the people whose images she snaps. She explains, “And though I did not take these pictures to prove anything, I think they most assuredly do show something—which is to make a far better claim for them” (Eye 354). What Welty did do, however, was to imagine the heroic and difficult lives of those whom she observed. Stories like “The Key,” “The Whistle,” “Death of a Traveling Salesman,” “A Worn Path,” and many others testify to the imaginative interest she added to the static pictures of obscure lives she discovered as she traveled Mississippi for the first time. Her conversion from photographer to chronicler was abrupt. In an oft-quoted remark, Welty states that: Away off one day up in Tishomingo County, I knew this anyway: that my wish, indeed my continuing passion, would be not to point the [End Page 13] finger in judgment but to part a curtain, that invisible shadow that falls between people, the veil of indifference to each other’s presence, each other’s wonder, each other’s human plight. (Eye 355) What is Welty parting the curtain to show in “A Worn Path”? An elderly black woman negotiates the barriers, threats, and mazes that challenge but do not thwart her annual trip through the countryside to town. Phoenix faces down a ghostly scarecrow and a white hunter with his dog before she must face the condescending nurses in the city doctor’s office to which her memory draws her. This story means to reveal the complexity and difficulties in the life of a woman like Phoenix, as Welty signals when she writes, “The shadows hung from the oak trees to the road like curtains” (176). This is just the first of many curtains that Phoenix Jackson will part. What is often written about is the courage of Phoenix Jackson, her devotion to her grandson, and the obstacles she overcomes on her mythic journey, including the humiliating way she is treated at the clinic. Since Welty played down the realistic elements in the story (and refused to explain whether or not Phoenix Jackson’s quest was an old woman’s delusion regarding a grandson who is long dead), the issue of accidental lye poisoning has perhaps not received the critical attention it deserves, even though it comprises a compelling chapter in the medical history of America and one that was well-publicized when Welty wrote Phoenix’s story. When “A Worn Path” was published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1941, the plight of Phoenix Jackson’s grandson was alarmingly real, especially in the rural South. Esophageal injuries from swallowing the caustic chemical known as lye occurred frequently among children, especially in rural areas...