A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

by Betty Smith

I bet your husband spits on you—afterwards. I bet that’s just what he does.” “Bitch! You bitch!” screamed the stringy one hysterically.

From that time on, remembering the stoning women, she hated women. She feared them for their devious ways, she mistrusted their instincts. She began to hate them for this disloyalty and their cruelty to each other. Of all the stone-throwers, not one had dared to speak a word for the girl for fear that she would be tarred with Joanna’s brush. The passing man had been the only one who spoke with kindness in his voice. Most women had the one thing in common: they had great pain when they gave birth to their children. This should make a bond that held them all together; it should make them love and protect each other against the man-world. But it was not so. 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. It was the only kind of loyalty they seemed to have. Men were different. They might hate each other but they stuck together against the world and against any woman who would ensnare one of them. Francie opened the copybook which she used for a diary. She skipped a line under the paragraph that she had written about intolerance and wrote: “As long as I live, I will never have a woman for a friend. I will never trust any woman again, except maybe Mama and sometimes Aunt Evy and Aunt Sissy.”

Two men got into a fight over who should wash the wagon. Evy settled it by saying one could wash it one day and the other, the next day.

She had been prompted to start a diary because fictional heroines kept them and filled them with lush sighing thoughts. Francie thought her diary would be like that, but excepting for some romantic observations on Harold Clarence, actor, the entries were prosaic.

“Well, tell us why girls are different from boys.” Mama thought for a while. “The main difference is that a little girl sits down when she goes to the bathroom and a little boy stands up.” “But Mama,” said Francie. “I stand up when I’m afraid in that dark toilet.” “And I,” confessed little Neeley, “sit down when…” Mama interrupted. “Well, there’s a little bit of man in every woman and a little bit of woman in every man.”

“I don’t think you should talk about God like that,” said Neeley uneasily. “He might strike you down dead.” “Then let Him,” cried Francie fiercely. “Let Him strike me down dead right here in the gutter where I sit!”

If being educated would make her ashamed of what she was, then she wanted none of it.

“They’re nice,” Francie thought. “I could have been friends with them all the time. I thought they didn’t want to be friends. It must have been me that was wrong.”

Oh, I wish I was young again when everything seemed so wonderful!”

“Oh, I want to hold it all!” she cried. “I want to hold the way the night is—cold without wind. And the way the stars are so near and shiny. I want to hold all of it tight until it hollers out, ‘Let me go! Let me go!’”

“Then I’ve been drunk, too,” admitted Francie. “On beer?” “No. Last spring, in McCarren’s Park, I saw a tulip for the first time in my life.”

“If she never had any lovers, she kicks herself around when the change comes, thinking of all the fun she could have had, didn’t have, and now can’t have. If she had a lot of lovers, she argues herself into believing that she did wrong and she’s sorry now. She carries on that way because she knows that soon all her woman-ness will be lost…lost. And if she makes believe being with a man was never any good in the first place, she can get comfort out of her change.”

“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.”

“No! I don’t want to need anybody. I want someone to need me…I want someone to need me.”

“To look at everything always as though you were seeing it either for the first or last time: Thus is your time on earth filled with glory.”

Let the wind blow warm, let the days be heat hazy;