I meant to read this book before I moved to Brooklyn, and then when I was living there, I fingered the book in my favorite book store, flipping through the pages casually and thinking, "well, maybe now." But instead I picked up the opus
Infinite Jest and went on my way.
Upon arriving back to my roots in Dallas, my dad handed me a copy of
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. He had read it when he was younger. He actually met Ms. Betty Smith on an occassion in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. One Halloween, he and my uncle and my aunt all dressed up as some creatures in the days before pre-fab costumes, they knocked on Ms. Smith's door and hollared "Trick or treat!" She handed out sweets to them and they took them into their pillowcases and skipped off. Unaware they had meet a great American writer, they just considered her a nice old lady who smiled and gave out treats.
By the time I started to read the book, I had little idea what it was going to be about. It's a coming of age story in a country that was coming of age. We follow Francie Nolan as she grows in the first two decades of the 1900s. We see her family of immigrant stock deal with tennantment living and a lack of land. We hear her wax poetically about The City--seeing Manhattan as some far off fairyland that she might, if she is lucky be able to visit (not as I viewed it, as a horrid chore that I had to force myself to go to each day). We are with her mother as she scraps and cleans and works every single day to keep their little family above water. There are parts that are hard to read, dense and such emotion-filled that you ache for the little girl sharing this story.
This section I'm sharing is, for me, the most poignant part of the book. It was the moment when she stops being a girl and becomes, well, a more grown-up girl. It is a moment always found in coming-of-age novels (or
Bildungsroman if you want to be pretentious). And Ms. Smith eloquently weaves that horrible moment when the fog of youth disappears and you can see all the ugly in the world.
I suppose we like to reflect on these moments so that we can choose to put those glasses on from time-to-time. So that we can not completely kill that little child inside. So that we can really find the amusement in the little things in life, the shine of a bright copper pot or the simplicity of a tree growing in an area that hinders abundance.
The second selection is also about growing up but also about travel dissappointment and building things up so much only to be let down. I also like this clip because of it's disinterested views on New York, but that's just me.
So, I hope you like this little snippets. If you haven't read the book,
please do.
And enjoy!
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Excerpt from
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
Italics are Ms. Smith’s.
Excerpt from Chapter XXVIII
The future was a near thing to Katie. She had a way of saying, “Christmas will be here before you know it.” Or, at the beginning of a vacation, “School will be starting up before you know it.”
In the spring when Francie discarded her long drawers and joyously flung them away, mama made her pick them up again saying, “You’ll need them soon enough again. Winter will be here before you know it.” What was mama talking about? Spring had just started. The winter would never come again.
A small child has little idea of the future. Next week is as far ahead as his future stretches and the year between Christmas and Christmas again is an eternity. So time was with Francie up until her eleventh year.
Between her eleventh and twelfth birthday, things changed. The future came along quicker; the days seemed shorter and the weeks seemed to have less days in them. Henny Gaddis died and this had something to do with it. She had always heard that Henny was going to die. She heard about it so much that she finally got to believe he would die. But that would be a long, long time away. Now the long time had come. The something which had been a future was now a present and would become a past. Francie wondered whether someone had to die to make that clear to a child. But no, Grandfather Rommely had died when she was nine, a week after she had made her first Communion and she remembered, Christmas still had seemed far away at that time.
Things were changing so fast for Francie now, that she got mixed up. Neeley who was a year younger than she, grew suddenly and got to be a head taller. Maudie Donavan moved away. When she returned on a visit three months later, Francie found her different. Maudie had developed in a womanly way during those three months.
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 brightly any more and she found the bins were chipped and shabby looking.
She stopped watching for Mr. Tomony to come home on Saturday nights from his New York jaunts. All of a sudden she thought it was silly that he lived so and went to New York and came home longing for where he had been. He had money. Why didn’t he just go over to New York and live there if he liked it so much?
Everything was changing. Francie was in a panic. Her world was slipping away from her and what would take its place? Still, what was different anyhow? She read a page in the Bible and Shakespeare every night the same as always. She practiced the piano every day for an hour. She put the pennies in the tin-can bank. The junk shop was still there; the stores were all the same. Nothing was changing. She was the one who was changing.
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.”
Growing up spoiled a lot of things. It spoiled the nice game they had when there was nothing to eat in the house. When money gave out and food ran low, Katie and the children pretended they were explorers discovering the North Pole and had been trapped by a blizzard in a cave with just a little food. They had to make it last till help came. Mama divided up what food there was in the cupboard and called its rations and when the children were still hungry after a meal, she’d say, “Courage, my men, help will come soon.” When some money came in and mama bought a lot of groceries, she bought a little cake as celebration, and she’s stick a penny flag in it and say, “We made it, men. We got to the North Pole.”
One day after one of those “rescues” Francie asked mama:
“When explorers get hungry and suffer like that, it’s for a reason. Something big comes out of it. They discover the North Pole. But what big thing comes out of us being hungry like that?”
Katie looked tired all of the sudden. She said something Francie didn’t understand at the time. She said, “You found the catch in it.”
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Excerpt from Chapter XLIV
[Francie has gotten a job in the City]
She had been excited about going to work in New York. Since such a tiny thing as a flower in a brown bowl at the library had thrilled her so, she expected that the great city of New York would thrill her a hundred times more. But it was not so.
The Bridge had been the first disappointment. Looking at it from the roof of her house, she had thought that crossing it would make me her feel like a gossamer-winged fairy flying though the air. But the actual ride over the Bridge was no different that the ride above the Brooklyn streets. The Bridge was paved in sidewalks and traffic roads like the streets of Broadway and the tracks were the same tracks. There was no different feeling about the train as it went over the Bridge. New York was disappointing. The buildings were higher and the crowds thicker; otherwise, it was a little different from Brooklyn. From now on, would all new things be disappointing she wondered?
She had often studied the map of the United States and crossed its plains, mountains, deserts, and rivers in her imagination. And it had seemed a wonderful thing. Now she wondered whether she wouldn’t be disappointed in that, too. Supposing, she thought, she was to walk across this great country. She’d start out at seven in the morning, say, and walk westward. She’d put one foot down in front of the other to cover distance, and, as she walked to the west, she’d be so busy with her feet and with the realization that her footsteps were part of a chain that had started in Brooklyn, that she might think nothing at all of the mountains, rivers, plains and deserts she came upon. All she’d notice was that some things were strange because they reminded her of Brooklyn and that other things were strange because they were so different from Brooklyn. “I guess there is nothing new, then, in the world,” decided Francie unhappily. “If there is anything new or different, some part of it must be in Brooklyn and I must be used to it and wouldn’t be able to notice it if I came across it.” Like Alexander the Great, Francis grieved, being convinced that there were no new worlds to conquer.
