ything That Rises Must Converge" can be seen as the counterpart of Phoenix in "A Worn Path." The mother is undergoing a tremendous crisis as the result of the changes which are going on in race relations. She does not like these changes at all, because the growing liberation of blacks is causing her to even wonder 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 found in those old race relations.
"A Worn Path," then, tells a much more 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 trying to change it. For the most part in this story, Phoenix is by herself walking across the countryside on the way to a distant town to get medicine for her sick grandson. She encounters a white hunter and two dogs, and then talks with a woman on the street, and then two white people at the medical clinic. Aside from those encounters, she is alone w
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