A Year Down Yonder

Grandma Dowdel, Mary Alice’s grandmother, is an elderly widow who lives by herself in a small rural town, where she supports herself throughout the Great Depression with various unusual undertakings, such as trapping foxes for their pelts. Seen by her granddaughter, at first, as stern and intimidating, she reveals herself over the course of the story to be a complex character: compassionate, wry, resourceful, and a shrewd judge of character. 

Grandma’s height and her work-toughened hands and arms make her physically imposing from the start. She also appears intimidating at first as she eschews physical shows of affection: As Mary Alice notes when she gets off the train, “there [i]sn’t a hug in her” (5). However, she shows her love for her granddaughter in other ways, such as when she saves her from extortion by Mildred Burdick, a bullying older girl. Around Halloween, she gives her granddaughter another lesson in the same vein, showing her how to use homespun tactics to repel a gang of teenage vandals.

Grandma fights battles for others as well, carrying out her own form of social justice for people like the Abernathys, Effie Wilcox, and Mae Griswold. For Mrs. Abernathy, she uses the traditional “turkey shoot” to squeeze exorbitant sums out of the town’s leading citizens, and for Effie and Mae, she destroys the patrician airs of Wilhelmina Weidenbach and the other DAR ladies who look down on them. She also enforces a sly redistribution of local wealth, appropriating pecans and pumpkins from the uncharitable to make pies for civic events. Though one of the least “social” people in town, in that she has little use for the niceties of small talk or social calls, she shows herself to be a pillar of the community in her volunteer work. She also keeps well up on town gossip, knowing something about everyone in town, which helps her in her various endeavors, such as helping out acquaintances and putting local menaces in their place.

Though seemingly standoffish and unsentimental, Grandma also takes an active interest in her fellow citizens’ love lives. She assists Mary Alice in her wooing of Royce McNabb and steers the young painter Arnold Green toward schoolteacher Miss Butler. Always hiding how much she cares, Grandma risks her life to rescue Mary Alice’s pet cat and kitten from a tornado. Around Christmastime, Grandma spends her “last skin” to buy train tickets for Mary Alice and her brother so that they can celebrate the holidays with their family in Chicago. 

With her final decision not to let Mary Alice stay on past her year, Grandma reveals selfless love as well as shrewd insight into her granddaughter. By the time Mary Alice boards her train back to Chicago, Grandma is, to her, a far more complex, nurturing, and bighearted person than she had expected: She is no longer the roughneck loner of family lore but a person whose love, dedication, and courage—both tough minded and playful—help glue her community together.

An antagonist who bullies the narrator on her first day of class in her new school, Mildred comes from a family notorious for their squalor and thievery. As Grandma asserts, “They’d steal a hot stove and come back for the smoke” (17). Portrayed as rough looking and unintelligent, Mildred takes instant umbrage to Mary Alice’s neat, citified appearance, calling her a “rich Chicago girl” and demanding a dollar from her (12). 

Mildred is boastful and proud of her outlaw family and thinks that boldness, threats, and brute force are all that one needs to get by in life. Mildred’s father, Grandma reveals, steals more than horses: He has recently gone to prison for stealing his neighbor’s sheep. Mildred shows every sign of following in his footsteps, but she has little experience with guile and misdirection, making her easy prey for Grandma, who distracts her with hospitality and then leaves her stranded without her horse or boots. As Grandma notes, Mary Alice won’t have to worry about running into Mildred in school for a while since she’s not the type to walk “five miles” to get an education.

Mildred does disappear from school, and the narrative, after that scene; however, her disappearance is explained months later at the nativity pageant. When a baby is found in Jesus’ manger, Grandma recognizes from its heterochromia that it must be a member of the Burdick family. The town concludes that the child must be Mildred’s and that she has abandoned it in the manger. Mildred is a static character who is only present at the beginning and end of the novel, but her influence is deeply felt by Mary Alice, as her bullying sets Mary Alice up as an outsider early on.

Wilhelmina, another antagonist, rubs Grandma Dowdel the wrong way by pressuring her to make cherry tarts for a DAR function as if it’s her patriotic duty. Wilhemina, as she never ceases to remind others, is president of the local chapter of the DAR, as well as the wife of the miserly town banker. She is snobbish and entitled, claiming that she helps keep alive “a proud tradition of American aristocracy in even as humble a town as [their] own” (78). 

A flashy dresser who (in Grandma’s opinion) shows too much leg, Wilhemina’s entitlement is illustrated by the way she shoves her way into Grandma’s home. She is also an inveterate gossip, gratuitously spilling the news of Mrs. Vottsmeier’s menopause in an attempt to shame Grandma into making tarts for the DAR party. Priding herself on her alleged Revolutionary War lineage, Wilhemina makes no mention of inviting Grandma to the exclusive party or even of paying her for the tarts. As Grandma tells Mary Alice, “There’s different kinds of people in the world. […] There’s them who’ll invite you to join their bunch. Then there’s them who’ll pay you for your work. Then there’s Wilhelmina Weidenbach” (79). Grandma, who despises snobbery, bullying, and selfishness, detects in Wilhemina a combination of all three.

Wilhemina is also a foil for Grandma. Although she considers herself to be far above Grandma, Wilhemina shows herself to be a much poorer tactician than Mary Alice’s grandmother. When she is revealed to be a Burdick, Wilhemina quickly crumbles. Her dependence on her place in the social hierarchy contrasts with Grandma’s deliberate disdain for social class. Like Mildred Burdick, Wilhelmina is mostly a comic antagonist, whose menace soon evaporates into farce.