A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a coming-of-age novel about a young girl growing up in Brooklyn, New York, before America’s entry into World War I. When my family returned to my home town in Texas after my father’s tour of duty in Singapore, most of his books went into storage. The result was that for the two years we lived in that little town my younger sister and I had a limited selection of books: Anna and the King of Siam, Gone with the Wind, and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. We therefore read them over and over again.
It’s true there was a town library, a narrow, one-room building sandwiched between two larger buildings, that opened two afternoons a week. My grandmother, then in her sixties, served as the librarian. The books, old and musty-smelling, consisted of works by Gene Stratton Porter, almost the entire Elsie Dinsmore series, and the Hardy Boys. The Hardy Boys books did not appeal to me, although I read the others. In view of this dismal selection, it’s not hard to understand why we read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn over and over again.
The book opens on a peaceful scene, a Saturday. Francie Nolan’s mother Katie is out scrubbing floors to make a living for the four of them: herself; her husband Johnny, a freelance singing waiter; her daughter Francie, and her son Cornelius, always known as Neeley.
Serene was a word you could put to Brooklyn, New York [the book begins]. Especially in the summer of 1912. Somber, as a word, was better. But it did not apply to Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Prairie was lovely and Shenandoah had a beautiful sound, but you couldn’t fit those words into Brooklyn. Serene was the only word for it; especially on a Saturday afternoon in summer.
In the opening scene Francie Nolan, 11 years old, is having a blissful afternoon on the fire escape of the tenement where her family lives. She has a rug to sit on, a good book to read, and five cents’ worth of candy in a little bowl. As she reads she is shaded by the tree that grows next to the tenement:
Some people called it the Tree of Heaven. No matter where its seed fell, it made a tree which struggled to reach the sky. It grew in boarded-up lots and out of neglected rubbish heaps and it was the only tree that grew out of cement. It grew lushly, but only in the tenement districts …That was the kind of tree it was. It liked poor people.
How deeply I identified with the 11-year-old Francie who loved to read! I too was 11 when I first read the book. I didn’t have a fire escape and a little bowl of candy to hand, but I climbed the tree in our backyard and sat there with an apple and a book. As with Francie, books were my solace (I was the new girl in school, not popular at all), and my escape. Even in the mid-fifties in a small town, girls weren’t encouraged to wander around having adventures. My life was utterly circumscribed but through reading I could experience the Deep South of the 1860s, the Siamese court of the same era, and the Brooklyn of 1912.
Some aspects of Francie’s life were radically different from my own:
Most children brought up in Brooklyn before the First World War remember Thanksgiving Day with a peculiar tenderness It was the day children went around “ragamuffin” or “slamming gates,” wearing costumes topped off by a penny mask.
…Some storekeepers locked their doors…but most of them had something for the children. Some stores which had nothing to gain from the children neither locked them out nor gave them anything save a profane lecture on the evils of begging These people were rewarded by terrific and repeated bangings of the front door by the children. Hence the term, slamming gates.
By noon, it was all over.
In my home town Thanksgiving was a day spent with family and friends, eating turkey and pumpkin pie. It was on Halloween night, not Thanksgiving morning, that we children dressed up and went around trick-or-treating in groups. No adult went with us, but some high schoolers came along. In the 1950s no one inveighed against Halloween for being a “pagan” holiday—it was just a time of great fun and overconsumption of candy. Nor did we retaliate against people who didn’t give us anything: at least, my group didn’t.
One thing A Tree Grows in Brooklyn instilled in me was the habit of gratitude for small things. There’s a scene early in the novel in which Francie, in the kitchen with her handsome father Johnny Nolan, irons his shirt for an upcoming job as a waiter.
“A day like this is like somebody giving you a present,” he said.
“Yes, Papa.”
“Isn’t hot coffee a wonderful thing? How did people get along before it was invented?”
“I like the way it smells.”
“Where did you buy these buns?”
“Winkler’s. Why?”
“They make them better every day.”
The book contains many such instances. For example, in the scene previously mentioned when Francie was sitting on the fire escape on a Saturday afternoon, she was grateful for the absence of the boy who was usually there:
Nobody was in the yard and that was nice. Usually it was preempted by the boy whose father rented the store on the ground floor. The boy played an interminable game of graveyard. He dug miniature graves, put live captured caterpillars into little match boxes, buried them with informal ceremony, and erected little pebble headstones over the tiny earth mounds. The whole game was accompanied by fake sobbings and heavings of his chest. But today the dismal boy was away visiting an aunt in Bensonhurst. To know that he was away was almost as good as getting a birthday present.
Like Francie, I formed the habit of savoring special sights and moments—the delight of a cup of hot chocolate on a freezing winter night, the glory of red tulips flowering on a cool April morning, the wonder of clear night skies filled with stars.
But A Tree Grows in Brooklyn also provided me with a model of how I didn’t want to think and behave when I grew up. I found it strange that Katie preferred her son to her daughter, and how Katie’s mother-in-law, Ruthie, hated her, Katie. I resolved during my rereadings of the book never to be like that. Apart from normal teenaged rebellion, soon over, I adored my mother. We got along splendidly. Even though I had a sister rather than a brother, I couldn’t imagine my mother ever preferring my sibling to me, her elder daughter. She loved us both equally.
As for the horrific mother-in-law that is such a fictional staple, I never wanted to fit that stereotype either. My husband and I, although we often felt clueless as parents, somehow managed to bring up two sons who have turned out to be law-abiding, productive citizens. I respect their intelligence and judgment, so when they became serious about someone, my attitude was, “You’re the woman he’s chosen, so welcome to our family!” In my view, the more daughters I have, the better.
Mid-novel, there is a scene in which Francie watches Joanna, the unmarried mother in her neighborhood, take her baby out in its carriage for an airing. The young mother pushes the carriage up and down the street but the neighborhood women, unable to bear Joanna’s seeming indifference to social mores, decide to do something about it. They pick up stones and start throwing them at Joanna. As Francie watches in horror, one of the stones strikes the baby on the forehead, causing a thin trickle of blood to run down the baby’s face.
…Remember Joanna. Remember Joanna. Francie could never forget her. 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.
…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.”
Evil are the ways of patriarchy! I find this very sad. My sister is one of my closest friends, as was my mother when she was alive. Also dear to me are my Circle sisters and my other women friends here in Washington, DC, and around the United States and the world. Women are a sisterhood: there is no one who understands and sympathizes as much as one’s women friends. Were I to be deprived of them, I think I’d languish and die. I pity Betty Smith, creator of the fictional Francie, who hated women for most of her life.
When Women’s Lib began to flower into a national movement, I was 26 years old. I remember picking up my two-month-old baby boy and climbing onto a bus that carried me from Falls Church, Virginia to a Women’s Liberation rally in Washington, DC, in August 1970. To me, Women’s Lib was a revelation—all the dissatisfactions and questions and resentments I’d experienced in my life till then suddenly had an explanation: patriarchy. For example, a scene in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn I had glossed over at age 11 took on new significance.
Francie and her brother have gone to the junk seller Saturday morning to sell the junk they’ve collected during the week. Francie goes into the store alone because the junk seller, Carney, will give a girl an extra penny if she does not flinch when he pinches her cheek.
Francie went outside to report to her brother. “He gave me sixteen cents and a pinching penny.”
“That’s your penny,” he said, according to an old agreement.
She put the penny in her dress pocket and turned the rest of the money over to him. Neeley was ten, a year younger than Francie. But he was the boy; he handled the money.
Rereading this now, I feel nothing but outrage: first of all, the fact that Carney was allowed to pinch girls’ cheeks and get away with it is nothing less than criminal. Second, even at age 11, Francie’s intellect far exceeded that of her younger brother, a situation that would not change as they grew up. He was normal; she was extremely bright. Why, then, should he handle the money rather than she? Girls brought up in this fashion often grow into women who are devastated if their husbands die or divorce them. They have no idea how to handle money.
Another way in which A Tree Grows in Brooklyn changed my life concerns intolerance.
Besides the intolerance shown toward the unfortunate Joanna, there was the unfriendly attitude toward Francie’s Aunt Sissy. Sissy, the so-called “bad girl” because of her unladylike interest in sex, sometimes exposed the Nolan family to shame because of her behavior; once the Nolan family even had to move because of a minor scandal she caused. Nowadays Sissy would be regarded as perfectly normal; her many marriages and numerous lovers would make her no more notorious than the average movie star.
The novel consists of five sections called books. In Book Four, Francie has to leave school, where she excels, to work in a factory that makes artificial flowers. At lunchtime on the first day she wants to wash her hands, so she asks the other girls where the washroom is. Although they had been taunting Francie in English all morning, they suddenly pretend not to understand. This situation continues until Mark, the “pimply faced utility boy” who periodically collects boxes of completed flowers and takes them away, is moved to intercede on Francie’s behalf.
Mark was collecting boxes. He stood in the doorway, his arms laden, made his Adam’s apple go up and down twice, and Francie heard him speak for the first time.
“Jesus Christ died on the cross for people like you,” he announced passionately, “and now you won’t show a new girl where the terlet is.”
Francie stared at him, astonished. Then she couldn’t help it—it had sounded so funny—she burst out laughing. Mark gulped, turned and disappeared down the hall.
To this day, when my sister and I feel that one of us is getting a little too sarcastic or self-absorbed, the other will quote Mark’s remark verbatim. It was this particular passage that gave me a lifelong disdain for the pointless teasing of others, whether friends, family, or coworkers.
To what extent was A Tree Grows in Brooklyn autobiographical? Not surprisingly, a great deal of it. Carol Siri Johnson’s online biography
of Betty Smith begins:
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is about the youth of Francie Nolan, a heroine very much like Elizabeth Lillian Wehner, who later became Betty Smith. Smith often said that she wrote the novel “not as it was, but as it should have been.” This phrase is quoted in many articles, letters, and interviews with Smith's relatives and associates. It was her pat statement that she trotted out whenever anyone asked, as she knew they would, if A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was true. “Maybe it didn't happen that way. But that's the way it should have been!”
A bestseller in its day,
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is now considered a classic. When I looked for it in my bookshelves to refresh my memory of certain scenes, I realized I no longer own a copy--it probably fell apart years ago. The only copy I could find in my public library was a battered paperback in the Classics section.
Now that I’m rereading bits here and there, I’m astonished at how deeply this book has become part of my consciousness. It has certainly influenced my lifelong habit of appreciating the moment and being grateful for small things. Equally, it provided a model of attitudes that I have no desire to adopt, such as hating other women, accepting patriarchy simply because it has been imposed on us for the last 5,000 years, and showing favoritism to one child over another.
It was and is a great read. I heartily recommend this book to anyone who wants to be swept away to a different place and time, to live for a while in a world of characters that seem so real they might be living next door.