A Year Down Yonder

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of bullying.

“The trunk, a small one, held every stitch of clothes I had and two or three things of Mother’s that fit me. ‘Try not to grow too fast,’ she murmured. ‘But anyway, skirts are shorter this year.’”

The novel’s first-person narrator lets the reader know, early on, that she is female by mentioning clothing—i.e., that she shares clothes with her mother and wears skirts. Her meager wardrobe, contained by a “small trunk,” also hints that her family is in financial straits. This point is further underscored by her mother’s comment about the length of her skirts—she is outgrowing them but will still be in style.

“And I could swear I heard her murmur, ‘Better you than me.’ […] She meant Grandma.”

Mary Alice, who will be living alone with her grandmother for a year, keeps the reader in suspense by not providing many clues about this relative. Her mother’s sardonic remark, however, hints that she anticipated difficulty for Mary Alice. This potentially adds to the difficulties that Mary Alice already faces, uprooted from her urban surroundings, friends, and relatives and forced to adjust to rural life among strangers, beginning the development of the theme of The Challenges of Feeling Out of Place early in the narrative.

“The recession of thirty-seven had hit Grandma’s town harder than it had hit Chicago. Grass grew in the main street.”

After several years of recovery from the lowest ebb of the Great Depression, the United States’ economy hit another rough patch in the late spring of 1937, when production went down nationwide and unemployment soared by almost 5%.