A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

by Betty Smith

Johnny danced with his girl, Hildy. Katie refused to dance with the feller provided for her, a vacuous vulgar boy given to remarks like: “I thought you musta fallen in,” when Katie returned from a trip to the ladies’ room.

“the child must have a valuable thing which is called imagination. The child must have a secret world in which live things that never were. It is necessary that she believe. She must start out by believing in things not of this world. Then when the world becomes too ugly for living in, the child can reach back and live in her imagination.

In teaching your child, do not forget that suffering is good too. It makes a person rich in character.”

Everything struggles to live. Look at that tree growing up there out of that grating. It gets no sun, and water only when it rains. It’s growing out of sour earth. And it’s strong because its hard struggle to live is making it strong. My children will be strong that way.”

A person who pulls himself up from a low environment via the bootstrap route has two choices. Having risen above his environment, he can forget it; or, he can rise above it and never forget it and keep compassion and understanding in his heart for those he has left behind him in the cruel upclimb.

They learned no compassion from their own anguish. Thus their suffering was wasted.

There had to be the dark and muddy waters so that the sun could have something to background its flashing glory.

It was a good thing that she got herself into this other school. It showed her that there were other worlds beside the world she had been born into and that these other worlds were not unattainable.

It was the best advice Francie ever got. Truth and fancy were so mixed up in her mind—as they are in the mind of every lonely child—that she didn’t know which was which.

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.”

He gradually grew indifferent about sleeping with her or with any other woman. Somehow, good talking had gotten tied up with good sex in his mind. He wanted a woman to talk to, one to whom he could tell all his thoughts; and he wanted her to talk to him, warmly, wisely and intimately. If he could find such a woman, he thought, his manhood would come back to him.

Several times that day, the name or thought of Papa had come up. And each time, Francie had felt a flash of tenderness instead of the old stab of pain. “Am I forgetting him?” she thought. “In time to come, will it be hard to remember anything about him?

“The difference between rich and poor,” said Francie, “is that the poor do everything with their own hands and the rich hire hands to do things.

“Whether you like it or not, you’ll get to be twenty-five in time no matter what you do. You might as well be getting educated while you’re going towards it.”

“Did you know they changed Hamburg Avenue to Wilson Avenue?” asked Francie. “War makes people do funny things,” sighed Katie.

“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.”