A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

by Betty Smith

She wept when they gave birth to daughters, knowing that to be born a woman meant a life of humble hardship.

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

And when the picture was finished, you didn’t see the dirt or the meanness; you saw the glory of innocence and the poignancy of a baby growing up too soon.

From that time on, the world was hers for the reading. She would never be lonely again, never miss the lack of intimate friends. Books became her friends and there was one for every mood. There was poetry for quiet companionship.

Francie did the dishes. Then she had to go down to the candy store to get the Sunday paper; then to the cigar store to get Papa a nickel Corona. Johnny had to read the paper. He had to read every column of it including the society section in which he couldn’t possibly be interested.

Johnny was more than right because he had made up the whole story himself.

Francie, recalling something her mother had once read to her answered, “My cup runneth over.” And she meant it.

The parents were too American, too aware of the rights granted them by their Constitution to accept injustices meekly. They could not be bulldozed and exploited as could the immigrants and the second-generation Americans.

She was so happy in the new school that she was anxious to pay in some way for this joy.

woman couldn’t vote in those days but the politicians knew that the women of Brooklyn had a great influence on their men. Bring a little girl up in the party way and when she married, she’d see to it that her man voted the straight Democratic ticket.

She sighed. “I work so hard, sometimes I forget that I’m a woman.” Francie was startled. It was the nearest thing to a complaint she had ever heard from Mama. She wondered why Mama was ashamed of her hands all of a sudden.

Children were the marketers of the neighborhood and they would only patronize those stores that treated them well.

Gently, Teacher explained the difference between a lie and a story. A lie was something you told because you were mean or a coward. A story was something you made up out of something that might have happened. Only you didn’t tell it like it was; you told it like you thought it should have been. As

Although Katie had this same flair for coloring an incident and Johnny himself lived in a half-dream world, yet they tried to squelch these things in their child. Maybe they had a good reason. Maybe they knew their own gift of imagination colored too rosily the poverty and brutality of their lives and made them able to endure it. Perhaps Katie thought that if they did not have this faculty, they would be clearer-minded; see things as they really were, and seeing them loathe them and somehow find a way to make them better. Francie always remembered what that

In the future, when something comes up, you tell exactly how it happened but write down for yourself the way you think it should have happened. Tell the truth and write the story. Then you won’t get mixed up.”

What was important was that the attempt to write stories kept her straight on the dividing line between truth and fiction.

They were emotional expressions of inarticulate people with small vocabularies; they made a kind of dialect. The phrases could mean many things according to the expression and tone used in saying them. So now, when Francie heard themselves called lousy bastards, she smiled tremulously at the kind man. She knew that he was really saying, “Good-bye—God bless you.”

Francie, who knew Mama was always right, found out that she was wrong once in a while. She discovered that some of the things she loved so much in her father were considered very comical to other people. The scales at the tea store did not shine so brightly any more and she found the bins were chipped and shabby-looking.

She told Papa about it. He made her stick out her tongue and he felt her wrist. He shook his head sadly and said, “You have a bad case, a very bad case.” “Of what?” “Growing up.”