“Serene was a word you could put to Brooklyn, New York.”
It is the summer of 1912 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Eleven-year-old Mary Frances “Francie” Nolan is on the precipice of becoming a young woman. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn offers the loving episodic story of her upbringing. Taking place across several years, the book depicts Francie and Irish immigrant community as she is raised into a world of poverty and hardship. Her mother Katie Nolan works as a janitress to support the family while her father Jonathon “Johnny” is a free-lance singing waiter (and also an alcoholic). This sprawling novel offers readers a myriad portraits of people around Brooklyn –we learn about the lives of Johnny and Katie, their courtship, and even Johnny’s former girlfriend Hildy O’Dair, before Johnny and Katie were married in 1901. Their children followed soon after –Francie is a sickly child who grows up to become a bibliophile: “She read everything she could find: trash, classics, time tables and the grocer’s price list” (22). And her brother, Cornelius “Neeley,” is secretly her mother’s favorite child.
While the Nolans are a loving family, the Irish working-class struggle presents an unending wellspring of troubles. Jobs are rough and money is always scarce, yet these immigrants remain proud and patriotic. The new “free land” of America represents a more hopeful country than the old world in Europe. Katie’s superstitious German mother reminds her: “What did we have in the old country? Nothing. We were peasants. We starved. Well, then, we came over here. It wasn’t so much better except that they didn’t take your father for the military the way they would do in the old country. But otherwise, it’s been harder. I miss the homeland, the trees, and broad fields, the familiar way of living, the old friends… 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 a good heart and the way of working honestly at the right things” (82). Her advice is to save money so she can buy property, because buying a home is the most important thing she can invest in; she also says reading, literacy, and education should be their primary concern –it is essential that children learn to grow an imagination.
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a wonderfully autobiographical novel. Author Betty Smith’s upbringing closely mirrored that of Francie’s in the book. Here, Smith invites us into the Irish-Catholic world of her youth, a bustling community of butchers, candy shops, and bakers, shanty towns, working-class pride and resentment, casual antisemitism, the consumption, hard drinking and gambling, stillbirths, illiteracy, prostitutes, and a unique blending of the old and the new world. All the Irish workers seem to support the Democratic Party, as “the ground-down poor” despise “the wasteful rich,” and they praise all the ‘tough guy’ bosses running Tammany Hall. “Tammany owed much of its power to the fact that it got the children young and educated them in the party ways. The dumbest ward heeler was smart enough to know that time, no matter what else it did, passed, and that the school boy of today was the voter of tomorrow. They got the boys on their side and the girls, too. A woman couldn’t vote in those days but the politician 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” (181).
“There was always the music. There were songs and dancing on the Brooklyn streets in those long ago summers and the days should have been joyous. But there was something sad about those summers, something sad about the children, thin in body but with the baby curves still lingering in their faces, singing in sad monotony as they went through the figures of a ring game. It was sad the way they were babies of four and five years of age but so precious about taking care of themselves. ‘The Blue Danube’ that the band played was sad as well as bad. The organ grinder’s tune was sad under lilting shrillness. Even the minstrels who came in the back yards and sang ‘If I had my way, You would never grow old’ were sad, too. They were bums and they were hungry and they didn’t have talent for song-making. All they had in the world was the nerve to stand in a back yard with a cap in hand and sing loudly. The sad thing was in the knowing that their nerve would get them nowhere in the world and that they were lost as all people in Brooklyn seem lost when the day is nearly over and even though the sun is still bright, it is thin and doesn’t give you warmth it shines on you” (116).
Early twentieth century Brooklyn is shown to be a tough place to be a parent. Many women fear the burden of children as many women die in childbirth (the birth of Francie, for example, is described in brutal detail). Sometimes another child becomes a tragedy. Yet some women are desperate to have children, like Katie’s sister “Sissy” who seduces many men (making her a “bad woman”), is married several times, and gives birth to numerous babies, all of whom are stillborn. Sissy “gets” a baby when a neighborhood Italian girl becomes a “disgrace” to her family. While pregnant, her father tries to starve her to death to avoid the shame, but Sissy secretly takes care of the girl and then adopts the baby girl, named Sarah or “Little Sissy” (we later learn that the girl’s father is very likely Sissy’s own husband). By the end of the novel, Sissy is pregnant again and she makes the culturally radical decision to deliver her baby in a hospital via a Jewish doctor, which shocks many of the women around her, but the Jewish doctor winds up saving her baby in the end (many women in the community delivered via familiar midwives up until that point). Here, the American multicultural experiment is shown to be a grand success in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.
The central metaphor for Francie, her family, and her community, is a large tree growing in her yard:
“The one tree in Francie’s yard was neither a pine nor a hemlock. It had pointed leaves which grew along green switches which radiated the bough and made a tree which looked like a lot of opened green umbrellas. 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… You took a walk on a Sunday afternoon and came to a nice neighborhood, very refined. You saw a small one of these trees through the iron gate leading to someone’s yard and you knew that soon that section of Brooklyn would get to be a tenement district. The tree knew. It came there first. Afterwards, poor foreigners seeped in and the quiet old brownstone houses were hacked up into flats, feather beds were pushed out on the window sill to air and the Tree of Heaven flourished. That was the kind of tree it was. It liked poor people” (6).
Despite all of her resilience in the face of strife, Francie’s life is still filled with hope and promise. She is given the rare chance to attend a good school across town after her parents lie about their address (to do so, Francie must walk several dozen blocks, but she doesn’t mind). However, moral depravity comes to the neighborhood when a predator is found to be lurking, preying on young children, molesting little girls, striking fear into the hearts of mothers and fathers (one of the raped girls is ostracized by her parents who regard it as a moral disgrace in a show of typical old world antiquated prejudice). Out of an abundance of caution, Johnny Nolan borrows a revolver from a friend and hides it under his pillow. Then in a particularly horrid scene, when Francie is left alone in the hallway of their building, she is confronted by the pervert. He creeps upon Francie and exposes himself, his genitals touching her leg before Francie’s mother Katie grabs the revolver and shoots the man. He is then stomped on by all the neighbors (unfortunately the shot didn’t kill him). Francie receives a scar from carbolic acid put on the spot where the pervert’s exposed genitals touched her.
As Francie gradually recovers from this dark incident, we learn about more tragedy, this time with respect to her father. In her diaries, Francie is instructed by her mother to refer to Johnny as “sick” but we later learn this is intended to be a cover for “drunk.” Johnny has grown into a depressed alcoholic, stumbling home late at night with little money to show for his day’s work. Eventually, Johnny gets kicked out of the waiter’s union for being an unreliable drunk, and he is soon found unconscious huddled in a doorway, suffering from pneumonia. Katie is informed that Johnny has entered the ‘coma before death.’ She rushes to the hospital and waits with her husband until he dies on Christas Day 1915, having never woken up to say goodbye. Katie is then taken advantage of by a shady undertaker. She cashes in the family insurance policy to pay the bills, Francie and Neeley are forced to find work to help support the family, and they memorably retrieve Johnny’s cup at his barber shop (for some reason, this little scene stuck with me).
The death of Johnny continues to cast a dark pall over the novel as Francie and Neeley learn to live without a father. To make matters worse, before he died, Katie had told Johnny she was pregnant (he died shortly thereafter, seemingly aware that he was killing himself, perhaps distraught over the tragedy of bringing another life into this world). Katie tells her children: “From now… I am your mother and your father” (299). She serves as a source of stable and serious moral authority in the novel, her wisdom grounds Francie and Neeley. In time, while desperately trying to scrimp together money to carry the family forward, working right up until the end, Katie gives birth to a daughter, concealing the violent pain of childbirth from Francie so as not to frighten her. Katie names the girl Annie Laurie (simply called “Laurie”) after a song Johnny often sang. In time, Katie agrees to remarry Sergeant Michael McShane, a local policeman who has long been infatuated with her. He is now retired and wealthy; he doesn’t require Francie or Neeley to take his name, but he does ask to adopt Laurie and that she take his name.
As the book comes to a poignant, stirring conclusion, Francie skips high school and takes college preparatory courses where she meets a tall handsome boy in the bookstore named Ben Blake, an aspiring attorney and politician. Naturally she is immediately smitten, but Ben knows the time is not yet right for the two of them to fall in love. He is an extraordinarily mature young man who has his whole lfie planned out. He hands Francie his business card and asks her to call upon him should she ever need anything. As time passes, in a bout of loneliness, Francie has a brief romantic fling with a soldier named Lee Rhynor who confesses his undying love for her and pressures her for sex but she isn’t so sure. In the ensuing days, Francie receives a note from Lee’s mother explaining that Lee is now married, he followed through on his mother’s pre-arranged wishes. In this situation, Francie’s mother gives her some unique sage advice –as a mother, she tells Francie that she made the right decision not to sleep with Lee since it might have potentially ruined her life, but as a woman she says it would have been a magical night for her, one that only comes around once in a lifetime. At any rate, against the backdrop of World War I and debates over the women’s suffrage movement, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn comes to a close as Francie winds up with Ben Blake. At last, we are led to believe that Francie’s future looks bright as she heads off to Ann Arbor, Michigan for college. Even amidst the harsh, unforgiving, paved-over streets of the modern world, a tree can grow and flourish.
Smith, Betty. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Harper Perennial, Modern Classics, New York, NY, 1943 (republished in 2001).