On the varied hand, we find in O'Connor's story a exclusively different situation and a completely different society. The civil rights work has obviously been under mien for some time in this story, and the old racial arrangements are coming apart at the seams. The racial tensity in this story, then, is much greater than in the Welty story. Julian's come in "E rattlingthing That Rises Must Converge" can be seen as the counterpart of Phoenix in "A have on Path." The mother is undergoing a tremendous crisis as the result of the changes which are going on in locomote relations. She does not wish well these changes at all, because the growing liberation of dispiriteds is causing her to even respect who she is. Her identity is tied up with the past, with her childhood house, with her mostly-dead family, and with the comfort she raise in those old race relations.
"A Worn Path," then, tells a much more(prenominal) simple story of race relations than does O'Connor's story. Phoenix is a product of racism so completely that she would not even think of questioning it or onerous to change it. For the most part in this story, Phoenix is by herself walking across the countryside on the pronounceive style to a strange town to get medicine for her sick grandson. She encounters a sinlessness hunter and two leapers, and then talks with a char woman on the street, and then two white good deal at the medical clinic. Aside from those encounters, she is alone with
nature and with her thoughts. She expresses many fears, including fear of a scarecrow which she imagines to be a ghost, as she makes her slow but steady way on the journey to town. In every case, even by herself, miles from anybody else, she shows the same good-natured sense of acceptance of her position that she has well-read as a part of her racist education and socialization. She is an ex-slave who remembers that the best policy for a black person is to keep a smile on one's face at all time if at all possible.
She takes the same attitude toward people, toward scarecrows, toward nature, toward a dog who knocks her into a ditch: "'Old woman,' she said to herself, `that black dog get under one's skin up out of the weeds to stall you off, and now in that location he sitting on his fine tail, smiling at you'" (1654).
Again, the tension in the O'Connor story is greater because the old race relations have broken down and nobody is rather certain of what the results will be. Both black and white people were trying to figure out how to act and what was going to pass along between the races. The more the result of a situation is unknown, the more tension thither will be. When one race controlled another, as was still the case in Welty's story, there was less tension because everybody knew how to behave. In O'Connor's story, however, every encounter between a black person and a white person could be explosive.
Of course, Julian's mother is not the only important character in O'Connor's story. In Welty's story, Phoenix is the only important character. In O'Connor's story there are two other important characters---Julian, and the black woman who confronts Julian's mother at the end of the story. The black woman is very angry, but there is no doubt that she knows "who she is." She knows she has hated the way she and her black race have been oppressed, and she knows she loves that she is now able to express herself and refuse to be treated as a second class citizen any longer. Julian's mother and Julia
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