A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

by Betty Smith

“They think this is so good,” she thought. “They think it’s good—the tree they got for nothing and their father playing up to them and the singing and the way the neighbors are happy. They think they’re mighty lucky that they’re living and that it’s Christmas again. They can’t see that we live on a dirty street in a dirty house among people who aren’t much good. Johnny and the children can’t see how pitiful it is that our neighbors have to make happiness out of this filth and dirt. My children must get out of this. They must come to more than Johnny or me or all these people around us.

There is that difference between her and Mrs. McGarrity who has so much money but is too fat and acts in a dirty way with the truck drivers who deliver her husband’s beer. So what is this difference between her and this Miss Jackson who has no money?”

All she understands is that I don’t understand her.

Maybe when she gets education, she will be ashamed of me—the way I talk. But she will have too much character to show it. Instead she will try to make me different. She will come to see me and try to make me live in a better way and I will be mean to her because I’ll know she’s above me. She will figure out too much about things as she grows older; she’ll get to know too much for her own happiness. She’ll find out that I don’t love her as much as I love the boy. I cannot help it that this is so. But she won’t understand that. Sometimes I think she knows that now. Already she is growing away from me; she will fight to get away soon. Changing over to that far-away school was the first step in her getting away from me.

We’ll not have Johnny with us long. Dear God, I loved him so much once—and sometimes I still do. But he’s worthless…worthless. And God forgive me for ever finding it out.”

Those girls felt richer than Francie. They were as poor as she but they had something she lacked—pride. And Francie knew it.

Francie, who knew Mama was always right, found out that she was wrong once in a while.

“When explorers get hungry and suffer like that, it’s for a reason. Something big comes out of it. They discover the North Pole. But what big thing comes out of us being hungry like that?”

It takes a lot of doing to die.

“Yes, yes. I know. I saw it all coming. There’ll be more stories printed and you’ll get used to it. Now, don’t let it go to your head. There are dishes to be washed.”

Her baby was illegitimate—bastard was the word they used in the neighborhood—and these good women felt that Joanna had no right to act like a proud mother and bring her baby out into the light of day. They felt that she should have kept it hidden in some dark place.

It seemed like their great birth pains shrank their hearts and their souls. They stuck together for only one thing: to trample on some other woman…whether it was by throwing stones or by mean gossip.

JOHNNY DIED THREE DAYS LATER.

It was night when she came home. She decided not to tell the children until the morning. “Let them have a night’s sleep behind them,” she thought, “one more night of griefless sleep.”

“You’re not to cry for him,” ordered Mama. Her next words had no sense either. “He’s out of it now and maybe he’s luckier than we are.”

“We won’t need it any more. You see, we own a bit of land now.”

“Katie, Katie, don’t cry so. Don’t cry so, else the child you’ll soon be bringing into this world will be a sad child.”

Christmas had passed unnoticed since their father had died on Christmas day.

She had whispered to him that they were to have another child. Had he tried to be different when he knew? And knowing, did he die in the trying to be a better man? “Johnny…Johnny…”

“From now on,” she said, “I am your mother and your father.”

“Ghosts are not always those who pass through closed doors,” said Mary Rommely.

Francie thought deep thoughts during the ride. “If what Granma Mary Rommely said is true, then it must be that no one ever dies, really. Papa is gone, but he’s still here in many ways. He’s here in Neeley who looks just like him and in Mama who knew him so long. He’s here in his mother who began him and who is still living. Maybe I will have a boy some day who looks like Papa and has all of Papa’s good without the drinking. And that boy will have a boy. And that boy will have a boy. It might be there is no real death.”

“Drunkenness is neither truth nor beauty. It’s a vice. Drunkards belong in jail, not in stories. And poverty. There is no excuse for that. There’s work enough for all who want it. People are poor because they’re too lazy to work. There’s nothing beautiful about laziness. (Imagine Mama lazy!) “Hunger is not beautiful. It is also unnecessary. We have well-organized charities. No one need go hungry.”

Someday you’ll remember what I said and you’ll thank me for it.” Francie wished adults would stop telling her that. Already the load of thanks in the future was weighing her down. She figured she’d have to spend the best years of her womanhood hunting up people to tell them that they were right and to thank them.

She began to understand that her life might seem revolting to some educated people.

I guess being needed is almost as good as being loved. Maybe better.”

“I don’t know,” Miss Lizzie said. “Sometimes I think it’s better to suffer bitter unhappiness and to fight and to scream out, and even to suffer that terrible pain, than just to be…safe.” She waited until the next scream died away. “At least she knows she’s living.”

And all the women in the house tensed each time Katie cried out, and they suffered with her. It was the only thing the women held in common—the sure knowledge of the pain of giving birth.

Katie couldn’t go to both graduations so it was decided that she go to Neeley’s.

Papa would have gone to see her graduate if he were living.

The card said: For Francie on graduation day. Love from Papa.

“Neeley, if you had to die, wouldn’t it be wonderful to die now—while you believed that everything was perfect, the way this night is perfect?”

“Dear God,” she prayed, “let me be something every minute of every hour of my life. Let me be gay; let me be sad. Let me be cold; let me be warm. Let me be hungry…have too much to eat. Let me be ragged or well dressed. Let me be sincere—be deceitful. Let me be truthful; let me be a liar. Let me be honorable and let me sin. Only let me be something every blessed minute. And when I sleep, let me dream all the time so that not one little piece of living is ever lost.”

“People always think that happiness is a faraway thing,” thought Francie, “something complicated and hard to get. Yet, what little things can make it up; a place of shelter when it rains—a cup of strong hot coffee when you’re blue; for a man, a cigarette for contentment; a book to read when you’re alone—just to be with someone you love. Those things make happiness.”

And he asked for her whole life as simply as he’d ask for a date. And she promised away her whole life as simply as she’d offer a hand in greeting or farewell.

“It’s come at last,” she thought, “the time when you can no longer stand between your children and heartache. When there wasn’t enough food in the house you pretended that you weren’t hungry so they could have more. In the cold of a winter’s night you got up and put your blanket on their bed so they wouldn’t be cold. You’d kill anyone who tried to harm them—I tried my best to kill that man in the hallway. Then one sunny day, they walk out in all innocence and they walk right into the grief that you’d give your life to spare them.”

The last time of anything has the poignancy of death itself. This that I see now, she thought, to see no more this way. Oh, the last time how clearly you see everything; as though a magnifying light had been turned on it. And you grieve because you hadn’t held it tighter when you had it every day.

Papa dead. For a long time that had been a dream but now Papa was like someone who had never been.

Oh Time, Great Healer, pass over me and let me forget.