A Tree Grows in Brooklyn 997escape on a typical summer Saturday afternoon,
looking for a word to describe Brooklyn, New York.
Contrasting her neighborhood with the “forest pri-
meval” of Longfellow’s Evangeline, Francie focuses
on the “one tree” in her yard. Growing in “boarded-
up lots and out of neglected rubbish heaps,” this
scrappy tree “like[s] poor people.”
So we know, from the start, that Francie is poor.
In the following pages, we learn just what that
means. Francie’s Saturday mornings begin with a
“trip to the junkie.” After spending the week gath-
ering “rags, paper, metal, rubber, and other junk,”
she and her brother, Neeley, sell their treasures for
a few pennies. On this occasion, they earn 17 cents:
eight to save and 11 to spend on candy. Later in the
day, Francie’s mother sends her out to buy meat,
bread, milk, and vegetables for the week. She gives
Francie careful instructions on how to negotiate
with each vendor, calculating the transactions to
the penny.
The Nolans must watch every cent; the children
are skinny, almost always hungry, and dressed in
ragged clothing. Francie’s alcoholic father, Johnny,
works as a singing waiter and drinks up his tips, a
defeated man whose dreams will never be fulfilled.
Francie’s mother, Katie, works as a janitor, washing
floors in her tenement building. Francie, who loves
to read, does not even own a book. The novel shows
not just the physical deprivation the poor must
endure, but also the social humiliation that accom-
panies their economic status: The neighborhood
children, who themselves go to the junk man, none-
theless taunt Francie and Neeley by calling them
“rag picker[s]”; later, the Harvard-educated doctor
at a public health clinic looks at Francie’s dirty
arm with “distaste.” Even the Brooklyn-bred nurse
refers to the clinic’s poor clientele as “these people.”
Francie is deeply wounded by the doctor’s openly
expressed contempt, but she stands up for herself,
demanding that he remain silent when he examines
her brother. And the narrator judges the nurse who,
having pulled herself “up from a low environment
via the bootstrap route” chooses to “forget” her ori-
gins in her effort to keep anyone from knowing “she
had come from the slums.”
Betty Smith, who herself grew up in sur-
roundings similar to those of her protagonists,
demonstrates her commitment to never forget-
ting, to keeping “compassion and understanding
in [her] heart for those [she] has left behind.”
Francie makes a similar commitment. When a
teacher condemns her autobiographical writing
as “sordid,” Francie vows that when she grows up
and becomes educated, she will not be “ashamed
of her people.”
The novel thus reveals the integrity and dignity
of the poor while also showing the difficulty of
escaping from poverty. Employers and those with
greater knowledge and power exploit and prey
upon them. For example, Francie’s father explains
the importance of the Waiters’ Union: “Before I
joined the Union, the bosses paid me what they
felt like. Sometimes they paid me nothing.” And,
obeying the instructions of her immigrant peasant
mother, Francie’s mother, Katie, saves pennies so
that she can one day buy a plot of land. “Once one
has owned land, there is no going back to being a
serf,” Grandmother Rommely declares. She herself
has been cheated out of her savings by a swindler.
But Katie never gets to buy real property with the
money she has saved; in the end, she must use it
all to pay the unscrupulous undertaker for her hus-
band’s burial plot.
The only way out of poverty, Betty Smith
suggests, is education. Yet even education for
the poor is substandard: The schools are over-
crowded, “ugly,” and “brutalizing.” Badly trained,
cruel teachers routinely beat students and ignore
their responsibilities, favoring the well-dressed
wealthy children over the “unwashed” poor. Francie
is lucky, though, to have her father scheme to have
her admitted into school in a richer neighborhood,
a school that shows her “that there were other
worlds beside the world she had been born into,”
and—most important—that “these other worlds
were not unattainable.”
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, then, is ultimately
optimistic about the possibility of transcending one’s
original social class. It is perhaps unrealistic in this
optimism, but it certainly shows the intense class
division in American society and demonstrates the
suffering—and yearning for something better—
caused by that division.
Joyce Zonana