A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

by Betty Smith

Francie does not say “good-bye” to the tenements or the tragedies but to the girl she once was, the illusions she once had, the life she once led.

She was richer because she had something to waste.

While Francie was admiring the costumes, she began to grow uneasy. While looking at the brilliant frothing colors, cerise, orange, bright blue, red and yellow, she had a feeling that something was stealthily concealed behind those costumes. It was something wrapped in a long somber cloak with a grinning skull, and bones for hands. And it was hiding behind these brilliant colors waiting for Henny.

Is this metaphorical or literal?

“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.

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.”

“If there was only one tree like that in the world, you would think it was beautiful,” said Katie. “But because there are so many, you just can’t see how beautiful it really is.

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.

The cruelest teachers were those who had come from homes similar to those of the poor children. It seemed that in their bitterness towards those unfortunate little ones, they were somehow exorcizing their own fearful background.

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.

And always, there was the magic of learning things.

“There are very few bad people. There are just a lot of people that are unlucky.”

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.

“I work so hard, sometimes I forget that I’m a woman.”

“Why can’t they,” she thought bitterly, “just give the doll away without saying I am poor and she is rich? Why couldn’t they just give it away without all the talking about it?”

It takes a lot of doing to die.

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.

It doesn’t take long to write things of which you know nothing. When you write of actual things, it takes longer, because you have to live them first.

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

“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.”

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.

“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.”