Growing Up Poor

Betty Smith's novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn simultaneously relates the childhood of a smart, resourceful girl and provides a snapshot of impoverished life in early 20th Century New York. It reads like a memoir, shining with the glowy protections of childhood, then seguing into the grittier, cooler light of approaching maturity and the adult responsibilities that accompany growing up.  

Francie is 11 in 1912, when the story opens. She's a dreamy, observant, mostly solitary child who likes reading but also participates in the life of the neighborhood, which includes activities like scavenging for rags, paper, deposit bottles, and other junk that she can sell to the junk man to earn a few pennies of spending money. Katie, her mother, earns their lodging as the janitor for the building. Her father, Johnny, is an alcoholic who occasionally works as a singing waiter and on his good days, retains his Irish charm and zest for living. It's a hard life for all of them and yet they bear up under it with determination and grace. They are Dickensian without the sentimentality: an American analog rather than a copy.

Also reminiscent of Dickens, Francie's world is populated by a host of secondary characters and their lives and choices. Sometimes their purpose is comic relief. Sometimes their purpose is providing contrast with Francie's family. Sometimes their purpose is demonstrating that there are many ways of coping with the challenges of Francie's world. Whatever their social or economic status, these characters demonstrate how to rise -- or fail to rise -- to the occasion.          

Katie, in particular, bears the responsibilities of the family, even more so after Johnny sickens and dies. Katie's insistence on principles and the better things for her family that come within her grasp set the stage for their progress. In her pragmatic way, she encourages Francie's desire for learning and talent for writing, and Francie progresses from a better school to a better job to pursuing her education: the family can't afford to send her to high school, but at age 17 Francie manages to pass the admissions exam and enroll in college. For Katie herself, her virtue leads to an advantageous marriage. Despite their poverty, each surviving member of the family has the grounding and the goodness to move ahead in the world. 

The particularly positive approach to the immigrant "American Dream" gives this novel a retro, burnished quality; it treats even shockingly bad events with a discretion that reflects the original publication date of 1943. There are real dangers: The junk man pays extra to the girls who let him pinch their cheek. A music teacher asks Francie, but not her brother, to play in bare feet. A rapist lurks in the stairwell and grabs Francie before Katie intervenes (with a gun!). Francie's first love almost talks her into bed, then abandons her when she refuses; her heart is broken, but things could have been worse. All these events are viewed from a distance, and they do not define Francie; they are only part of her story. By the end of the novel, Francie is leaving Brooklyn behind, heading for college and the rest of her life. Growing up poor is also only part of her story.   

Excerpt:

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 tenements districts.

You took a walk on a Sunday afternoon and came to a nice neighborhood, very refined. You saw a small one of those 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 sills to air and the Tree of Heaven flourished. That was the kind of tree it was. It liked poor people.

Photo: Annamarie Smith, bugwood.com

Note: This book counts toward the Color Coded Reading Challenge and the Mount TBR Reading Challenge.