A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

by Betty Smith

There were two dozen tightly rolled, never-used silk umbrellas in that closet; prizes she had won. Flossie collected them for display the way an athlete collects cups. Francie felt happy looking at all the umbrellas. Poor people have a great passion for huge quantities of things.

Mama and Papa sat in the kitchen. They would sit there and talk until daybreak. Papa was telling about the night’s work; the people he had seen, what they had looked like and how they spoke. The Nolans just couldn’t get enough of life. They lived their own lives up to the hilt but that wasn’t enough. They had to fill in on the lives of all the people they made contact with.

She grieved when her children had to leave school after the sixth grade and go out working. She grieved when they married no-account men. She wept when they gave birth to daughters, knowing that to be born a woman meant a life of humble hardship.

Katie had married Johnny because she liked the way he sang and danced and dressed. Womanlike, she set about changing all those things in him after marriage. She persuaded him to give up the singing-waiter business. He did so, since he was in love and anxious to please her.

“If you could expect nothing better, why did you come to America?” “For the sake of my children whom I wished to be born in a free land.” “Your children haven’t done so well, Mother.” Katie smiled bitterly. “There is here, what is not in the old country. In spite of hard unfamiliar things, there is here—hope. In the old country, a man can be no more than his father, providing he works hard. If his father was a carpenter, he may be a carpenter. He may not be a teacher or a priest. He may rise—but only to his father’s state. In the old country, a man is given to the past. Here he belongs to the future. In this land, he may be what he will, if he has the good heart and the way of working honestly at the right things.” “That is not so. Your children have not done better than you.” Mary Rommely sighed. “That may be my fault. I knew not how to teach my daughters because I have nothing behind me excepting that for hundreds of years, my family has worked on the land of some overlord. I did not send my first child to the school. I was ignorant and did not know at first that the children of folk like us were allowed the free education of this land. Thus, Sissy had no chance to do better than me. But the other three…you went to school.” “I finished the sixth grade, if that is what is called education.” “And your Yohnny”—she could not pronounce “j”—“did too. Don’t you see?” Excitement came into her voice. “Already, it is starting—the getting better.” She picked up the baby and held it...

“Mother, I know there are no ghosts or fairies. I would be teaching the child foolish lies.” Mary spoke sharply. “You do not know whether there are not ghosts on earth or angels in heaven.” “I know there is no Santa Claus.” “Yet you must teach the child that these things are so.” “Why? When I, myself, do not believe?” “Because,” explained Mary Rommely simply, “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. I, myself, even in this day and at my age, have great need of recalling the miraculous lives of the Saints and the great miracles that have come to pass on earth. Only by having these things in my mind can I live beyond what I have to live for.” “The child will grow up and find out things for herself. She will know that I lied. She will be disappointed.” “That is what is called learning the truth. It is a good thing to learn the truth one’s self. To first believe with all your heart, and then not to believe, is good too. It fattens the emotions and makes them to stretch. When as a woman life and people disappoint her, she will have had practice in disappointment and it will not come so hard. In teaching your child, do not forget that suffering is good too. It makes a person rich in c...

All of us are what we have to be and everyone lives the kind of life it’s in him to live.

into the horn which made the cornet player very angry. If provoked enough, he’d let out a string of oaths in German ending up with something that sounded like Gott verdammte Ehrlandiger Jude. Most Brooklyn Germans had a habit of calling everyone who annoyed them a Jew.

It was the first of many disillusionments that were to come as her capacity to feel things grew.

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.

Of course, corporal punishment was forbidden in the schools. But who, outside, knew? Who would tell? Not the whipped children, certainly. It was a tradition in the neighborhood that if a child reported that he had been whipped in school, he would receive a second home-whipping because he had not behaved in school. So the child took his punishment and kept quiet, leaving well enough alone. The ugliest thing about these stories was that they were all sordidly true.

“Forgiveness,” said Mary Rommely, “is a gift of high value. Yet its cost is nothing.”

But it was just as well. There had to be the dark and muddy waters so that the sun could have something to background its flashing glory.

A woman came from around the corner. She was rouged heavily and wore a feather boa. She smiled at Johnny and said, “Lonesome, Mister?” Johnny looked at her a moment before he answered gently, “No, Sister.” “Sure?” she inquired archly. “Sure,” he answered quietly. She went her way. Francie skipped back and took Papa’s hand. “Was that a bad lady, Papa?” she asked eagerly. “No.” “But she looked bad.” “There are very few bad people. There are just a lot of people that are unlucky.” “But she was all painted and…” “She was one who had seen better days.” He liked the phrase. “Yes, she may have seen better days.”

But that would be a long, long time away. Now the long time had come. The something which had been a future was now a present and would become a past.