She wants to appear dignified before she enters the big building. Before entering the building she stops to ask a woman carrying Christmas presents to tie her shoes. Reaching Natchez, Phoenix is overwhelmed by all the lights but allows her muscle memory to take her to the big building where she needs to go. Phoenix responds that she isn’t scared, that she’s seen people killed for less than she’s ever done, and he tells her he would give her a dime if he had any money. When the hunter returns, he casually points his gun at Phoenix and asks if she’s scared. Noticing that a nickel has fallen out of the hunter’s pocket, Phoenix goads the hunter to get rid of the black dog that knocked her down by claiming that “the big black dog” isn’t “scare of nobody.” While the hunter chases after it, Phoenix picks up the nickel. When she tells him she is going to town, he condescendingly suggests that she won’t get anything from her journey, and he assumes she’s going to see Santa Claus as it’s Christmastime. As she can’t help herself, she waits until someone comes to help her.Ī white hunter pulls her out of the ditch and asks her about where she comes from and where she lives. But a black dog appears, and though she strikes at it with her cane, it ends up knocking her into a ditch. She finally makes it to a wagon track and thinks the journey will now be easier for her. When she realizes it is in fact just a scarecrow she is happy and dances with it for a moment.
Phoenix mistakes a black scarecrow for a man or a ghost. Seeing a buzzard and wondering what it is looking at, she muses on the difficulty of her task and the help God grants her. Her skirt gets tangled on thorns and she crosses a log over a river with her eyes closed. She carries a cane and switches it at imagined animals in the bushes. A very old and frail black woman named Phoenix Jackson makes a long and difficult journey on a path from the country into the town.
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