but I always get an array:
That is meant to happen. As you can read in this documentation, under ‘Result’ (almost at the bottom):
Please note, that the return value of jsonPath is an array, which is
also a valid JSON structure. So you might want to apply jsonPath to
the resulting structure again or use one of your favorite array
methods as sort with it.
So basically it will always return an array. If you need the data as an other type, e.g. a String in this case, you will have to do the conversion yourself I’m afraid.