A Year Down Yonder

These chapters again highlight The Challenges of Feeling Out of Place as Halloween approaches. The difference between the way it is celebrated in Chicago and how this small town celebrates illustrates the vast gap between Mary Alice’s past experiences and her current reality. In Grandma’s town, Halloween is more a season than a holiday, a time for neighbors to vent their boredom and grievances in anonymous vandalism and other pranks. To her horror, Bootsie, her cat, has been cruelly targeted—a can tied to her tail—which never happened in Chicago. Again, however, Grandma shows Mary Alice the benefit of her decades of knowledge, setting devious traps for the vandals and taking glee in punishing them. In this scene, the Halloween atmosphere is richly evoked, with a “ring” around the moon, a dry rattling of weeds, and a moonlit figure (Grandma), seemingly eight feet tall, “lung[ing]” at her victims. As in her introductory scene, Grandma is described almost as a supernatural being, a “restless spirit” who becomes “one with the darkness” (26). Halloween, Mary Alice says, is Grandma’s favorite holiday, and she celebrates it to the hilt: If the vandals had left her privy alone, she’d probably have been disappointed.

These chapters also show, however, that Mary Alice isn’t always interpreting her Grandma’s actions correctly, lacking the context to understand what she is doing. After Grandma ambushes the vandals who have targeted her privy, she “borrows” pumpkins and pecans from a couple of her well-provisioned neighbors. As with the later burgoo charity, Grandma enforces a sort of ad hoc redistribution of wealth, funneling goods to the rest of the community while feigning bewilderment at Mary Alice’s accusations of theft. Grandma’s efforts, which result in pies for the whole community, bring the larger social context of the Great Depression back to the fore, showing The Effect of Societal Upheaval on Families through events like the Halloween celebration.

The novel also continues to develop Grandma’s character through the use of supernatural imagery and allusions. Grandma’s singsong “chants” while baking, like the midnight potion she dumps on vandals, raise allusions to witches, as do her boundless energy and her ability to get away with the most brazen mischief. After the Halloween party, she compares the pies that she and Mary Alice have baked and served to the Bible’s “fishes and loaves,” highlighting how they somehow fed the entire crowd. Throughout the narrative, Grandma’s acts of selfless altruism are featured; though she has no use for small talk and counts few people (if any) as “friends,” she shows up for every local event, usually contributing something essential. At the Halloween party, she also takes time to teach Augie Fluke a valuable lesson, cutting him a slice of pie with his own knife in full view of his principal father. In the end, her “vengeance,” like her pie baking, serves the common good, and Grandma is established as an almost Robin Hood-like figure, a dedicated enemy of bullies, snobs, and the selfish. 

This trait is again illustrated at the turkey shoot on Armistice Day. Grandma’s sliding fee scale, an act that Mary Alice doesn’t understand until later, ensures that Mrs. Abernathy and her son get the help they need. Grandma emerges as a local hero afterward, as the ladies of the Legion Auxiliary bless her for her ruthlessness. This chapter returns to the theme of the effect of societal upheaval on families with Mary Alice’s introduction to Mrs. Abernathy and her son, whose circumstances remind Mary Alice of the difficulties faced by some families. As the girl visits the Abernathys, suddenly the human sacrifices of World War I become real for her. When she leaves the Abernathy house, she remarks, “Outside, I was surprised it was still daylight, surprised the world was still there” (52). Only a decade before the Great Depression, families just like her own were torn apart by war, some forever; as Grandma says, “[T]he boys are still dying” (53). Now, she understands why Grandma takes Armistice Day so seriously. Above all, the visit puts Mary Alice’s own situation into perspective, making her own sacrifice—her yearlong separation from her family—seem small by comparison. These scenes continue to push Mary Alice along her character arc toward maturation, resilience, and acceptance as she comes to understand Grandma better and gains a new understanding of her situation.