Francie Nolan inA Tree Grows in Brooklyn,
by Betty Smith
We never understood each other, Mother. and I know I gave you a hard time…. It was because I wanted you to talk to me. I know now why I told you so many lies, Mother. I wanted you to notice me. And I didn’t mind it too much when you scolded me.I would rather have had you scold me, Mother, than ignore me.
BETTY SMITH
My dad grumbled as he grudgingly forked over the $100 overweight fee to an impatient airline attendant. I fidgeted with my carry-on, eager at the age of fifteen to be shipped off to unknown territory along with two bulky suitcases. Headed to an unknown country and armed with only two words in German (“thanks” and “potato”), I only had room for one work of fiction in my bag. I had a suspicion that I’d need something, anything, in English to sustain me over the year ahead, a year in which my expensive monthly call back home would become something to relish, in which I would be plunged into an awkward family dynamic and separated by more distance than had ever stood between me and my already-tortured family ties.
So what was the book that pushed my baggage over the edge? A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, by Betty Smith, a book that has helped me weather so many unfamiliar days and family storms that it shocked me to learn it was written by a woman with a highly ambiguous relationship to her own family.
Throughout her life, it seemed as if Betty Smith was doomed to run away from, parse through, and struggle against her family ties. The little we know for sure about her childhood seems sparse: daughter of immigrants, Elizabeth “Lizzie” Wehner grew up in tenement Brooklyn at the turn of the twentieth century, surrounded by harshness and poverty and denied the love that would later become her obsession. Lizzie was drawn to and cut off from her mother, Katie, a hard woman who passed her florid storytelling style, her bitter survival instinct, and her poverty to her daughter. Not much is known about John Wehner, who died when Lizzie was nineteen. Whatever the details, his life and death burned an irreparable hole through Lizzie’s heart, a hole she tried to fill with work, professional accomplishments, and the succession of alcoholic men she doted upon to the detriment of her own physical and mental health.
Faced with a painful home life, Lizzie was eager to create her own family. Her parents forced her to leave school and start working at age fourteen, and insecure, resentful Lizzie quickly moved to associate herself with education and upward mobility. Brooklyn’s settlement houses were her social center: there, she danced, debated, studied, and met George Smith, a driven young man who wanted to get out of Brooklyn as much as she did. When he moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, to study law, she followed. But life as a young wife was no easier than it was during the lean years of her childhood. As she recited her vows to George, Lizzie worried that his brutal schedule, his ambition, and their shared poverty would make it hard to enjoy marriage.
Her premonition was right. Five years later, she was no closer to happiness than she had been before. The intervening years had brought two daughters, Nancy and Mary. Now a young mother, Lizzie felt even more pressure to educate herself. She petitioned to attend the local high school, an unusual request for a married woman. But though she worked hard, life constantly interrupted her studies. Worse still, the man she had followed to this far-off place became more distant with each passing year. It seemed that George’s burgeoning legal practice and rising political career had no place for a naive, heavily accented wife. But Lizzie had aspirations of her own. She turned a blind eye to George’s affairs and focused instead on her new plan: to become a writer.
Soon, the ledger in which she recorded her literary submissions and sales read like a litany of her own family’s emotional and financial ups and downs. Lizzie the woman became Betty Smith the writer, fighting her way into college courses against school regulations that banned students without a high school diploma, writing plays that reflected the dreams of the poor and working classes, even winning the prestigious Avery Hopwood Award for dramatic writing in 1930.
But success couldn’t keep Betty’s family life from spinning quickly out of her control. Family crises prevailed, crowned by the deaths of Betty’s stepfather and George’s parents. The distant couple finally uprooted their family, moving east to Amherst, Massachusetts, and then to New Haven, Connecticut, in an uneasy and short-lived reconciliation. The stagnation and fear of her marriage were belied by her professional accomplishments: though she had never officially completed high school, Betty’s drama prize allowed her to enroll in graduate studies at Yale. And there she met the man who would puncture her family life for good: a man completely unlike her closed-off husband.
Bob Finch was an artist, an alcoholic, and most importantly, a needy man. He entered her life just as George was moving onward and upward. Left in the dust of her husband’s ambitions (he eventually went on to serve in the U.S. Senate and practice before the Supreme Court), Betty focused instead on Bob, a man whose desperation and dramatic nature mirrored her own. She separated from George in 1933.
Alone now with her daughters, Betty struggled as a single mother with no money, no time, and no emotional support. She left Yale and returned to New York, renting an apartment from her again-widowed mother in Queens. But the proximity to her stepfather’s memory was painful. Though she never gave details, Betty later hinted that he had sexually abused her. Hungry and concerned about her girls, Betty started selling confession stories to pulp magazines for a few cents a word. The income financed a move to her own apartment a few subway stops away from her mother. The girls came along, attending school and shoveling coal into the furnace while their mother wrote and worked as an actress in Manhattan.
Her children, bewildered by their uprooted life, had started skipping school and were often sick. Betty was able to scrape together enough for long summer trips to a beach cottage, but the girls had to stay there alone as she commuted back to odd jobs in the city. They concealed their misery from Betty, just as she hid hers from them. They had no way of knowing that she worried about them every waking moment, every second that her unrelenting scramble for enough money to survive kept her from them. The Great Depression had come, tearing strong families apart and leaving unprecedented poverty in its wake. But for Betty, this tumultuous era was a vehicle for career success. She had always had an affinity for the underdog, the poor man: now she would be paid to write about him. When federal arts jobs got funding, she was first in line at the employment office.
Betty quickly found her way to the job of her dreams, moving to North Carolina to pursue a federal theater project that sought to bring seasoned artistic professionals to the South. Was she following her literary ambitions or attempting to reconstruct the perfect family? Both: Bob Finch came with Betty to North Carolina.
To Betty and her girls, Chapel Hill was like another world, a place far removed from the gritty, ugly streets of New York. Like the tree she would write about a few years later, Betty was quick to take root. She settled into a small apartment with the girls, befriending the community’s most beloved citizens and writing plays as quickly as her ramshackle Smith-Corona could type them. But her financial troubles persisted. The $60 a month George sent for the girls was supplemented by the odd story sale or writing award, but it still wasn’t always enough for things like clothing and heat. Now that her daughters were in high school, Betty drew upon her own distant relationship with her mother and allowed them significant freedom. In later years she would learn that this sudden change in attitude had confused her daughters, who longed for their mother’s approval and love.
But Betty had other worries. Her ties to Bob had flourished along with her writing, and at first the house had been busy with the impassioned collaboration of two lovers. Bob visited often, filling the house with cheer and humor, but his alcoholism and his constant infidelity wore on Betty. In order to cling to the people she loved, she was constantly called upon to let them go. At one point in the late 1930s she had to ship Mary and Nancy back to their father in Connecticut because she simply didn’t have enough money to make ends meet. She herself could subsist on next to nothing, but the girls couldn’t. They wanted to lead normal lives. George grumbled about Betty’s failure to provide for her daughters; she, too, worried constantly about her inability to keep her family together. Still she persisted in her writing, sending the girls off to their father during the summers and even using money her daughters found on the ground to buy food for the family.
All along, something inside her compelled her to keep on writing. After making sure the girls had the bare essentials, Betty always turned back to the work that had become all-consuming: an autobiographical novel about her childhood. It took a lot to revisit Brooklyn in her mind, to return to that harsh place where families crowded three or even four generations into the same small apartment, a place rampant with disease, crime, and despair. As she started to spin the story of a skinny, dreamy girl and her hardened mother, she didn’t realize she had begun to exorcize childhood demons and communicate with her own daughters. The work that had kept Betty separate from her children’s lives for so long was now a conduit of sorts. She wrote while the girls were at school, leaving that day’s production in a box next to her desk. As soon as they returned home, her daughters would snatch up the typewritten pages and read more about Francie Nolan and her Brooklyn neighborhood. In its way, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was Betty’s gift to them, and to herself.
It’s not an easy book to describe or even to read. Grim, even desperate in parts, it takes a steady look at what it’s like to be a child whose existence depends on an undependable family in an unbearable state of poverty and want. Like Betty, Francie is obsessed with her dangerously incapable father and repulsed by her make-do mother. Betty’s many struggles with love and duty smash into one another in the form of Katie Nolan, a mother who ruins her once-beautiful hands and almost murders a man who would harm a daughter whose brother she favors, whose education she sacrifices to family finances, and whose success she painfully doubts. The book’s conflict between mother and child is unsettling and wildly sad. It’s also unflinching and real for any woman who has crossed the bridge between childhood and the adult world.
There are many heroines to be had in Francie’s Brooklyn, for again and again it is women who form an almost impenetrable circle of support and competence around the lives of their children and husbands. Betty writes her heroines as enemies and saviors at once; her women go through the motions even when the men in their lives are hurt, sick, tired, and incapacitated by drink. They starve for their children’s sakes, making a pathetic game out of poverty and starvation, whispering their secrets to one another in the few stolen moments of leisure they somehow manage to wring out of their lives. For Smith, a mother’s role is more than that of protector. She’s the creator and the destroyer of an entire world.
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn’s family ties are about inheritance, the ways in which people obtain weaknesses and peculiarities and beauty just by being born. Tied to each other by bonds they can’t explain or even see, Francie’s family is as much the head on the table, devastated by the weight of grief, as it is the brother and sister sticking together beneath a brutal neighborhood tradition and a crushing Christmas tree. As Francie loves and hates and fights for self-definition, she often finds that her family is all that stands between her and starvation, abuse, and death.
Luckily for us, Betty Smith doesn’t just do blood relations. No, she also gives Francie a chosen family in addition to the one she’s born into, a group of kids who clog up Brooklyn’s porches and stoops, girls who prepare themselves for their lovers, and shopkeepers whose harassment is as much a part of childhood as Santa Claus. Extended and nontraditional families are just as important as the ones Betty’s characters are bonded to genetically. The gentle, golden-hearted aunt whose actions threaten the social order but whose arms are full of love joins a standoffish librarian and gossiping factory workers as people who affect Francie just as much as Johnny Nolan’s sidewise singing or Katie’s rough-handed attempt at motherly affection. And as she learns to love books, Francie does what we do: assembles an even wider family of fictional characters, using books to help her escape and survive her own family life.
For Betty and Francie, there’s nothing clean or simple about family ties. But their very messiness is what makes them so real. When Katie kicks out her sister Sissy for humiliating the family, we can’t wait for her to soften and take Sissy back into the fold. The forces that cause a family to stray and fall apart are just as compelling as the ones that glue it back together again.
No matter how terrible the circumstances or crushing the poverty she must endure, Francie sticks to her family identity. It is, after all, the thing that brought her life. It’s the thing that keeps her going even when her mother must pretend they are on a polar expedition to help them get through days without any food. It’s the thing to which she clings when her teacher tells her to burn the stories she has penned about her father’s alcoholism and the “sordid” neighborhood in which she lives:
Francie went to the big dictionary and looked up the word. Sordid. Filthy. Filthy? She thought of her father wearing a fresh dicky and collar every day of his life and shining his worn shoes as often as twice a day…. Also mean and low. She remembered a hundred and one little tendernesses and acts of thoughtfulness on the part of her father. She remembered how everyone had loved him so. Her face got hot. She couldn’t see the next words because the page turned red under her eyes. She turned on Miss Garnder, her face twisted with fury.
“Don’t you ever use that word about us!”
When Francie burns the flowery essays she composed to please her teacher, the fantasies she has spun instead of facing the truth about her family, she is doing more than heating up the apartment: she’s exorcising herself of other people’s opinions of her family. It’s a declaration of her family’s worth and importance, even in a world that has no use for single mothers or drunken fathers. Francie pays the price in the short term—she falls out of favor with her teacher and loses the academic credit that has meant so much to her—but it’s a sacrifice she’s more than willing to make for the Nolan family name, even if nobody ever finds out.
Throughout it all, Francie bears witness to a family life that’s scarred with tragedy and veined through with fun. Favoritism, alcoholism, and endless poverty threaten to destroy the family unit, but in the end, they only manage to capsize Francie’s childhood. Like it or not, Francie is a Nolan, and it’s not for nothing that Betty constantly points out the ways in which her heroine combines the hardness of her mother and the weakness of her father, the steeliness of the Rommely women and the dreaminess of the Nolans. A peek into Francie’s family hurts and obligations seems to reveal Betty, confused and rebellious about her own unbreakable affinities, working out the tangled skein of her own lineage on the page.
It is exactly these inheritances that challenge a heroine tasked with understanding her family’s particular dynamic and creating her own. When Francie fights with her mother about going back to school, you can feel her anxiety about breaking up her already endangered family crawl down your own neck, a spiderlike specter that is guilt, fear, and boldness all tied up in one:
“Our family used to be like a strong cup,” thought Francie. “It was whole and sound and held things well. When Papa died, the first crack came. And this fight tonight made another crack. Soon there will be so many cracks that the cup will break and we’ll all be pieces instead of a whole thing together. I don’t want this to happen, yet I’m deliberately making a deep crack.” Her sharp sigh was just like Katie’s.
As women charged with creating our own families even as we leave the ones into which we were born, it can feel so wrong to instigate those cracks in the foundation of what we’ve learned to love. But even as she acknowledges the destructive power of adolescence and adulthood, Betty looks on those rifts with the kindness her mother lacked. Her words are painful, but the underlying message of unity despite the imperfections can help a heroine move through her own disruptions to the family unit.
Betty Smith offers complex solace to heroines called upon to negotiate their own treacherous family roads. In Betty’s world, the very man who heals you can be the one who breaks you in two and who sets your life up for a world of pain. The woman who forces you into a life you’re not sure you really want is also the person who cares for you most in the world. It’s a painful symmetry, one in which the message isn’t in the hurting, but in the cleaving to one another.
Francie and Betty both stick to their quest for an intact family. Some abandon their families altogether in favor of an assembled group of friends and fosters. Others, like me, take a clumsy stab at negotiating that gray area that falls between family and self, a mother’s love and disapproval, and a daughter’s struggle to define her own way. It took much more than my year abroad to teach me that I can allow myself to be part of my family on my own terms, terms we come to in a constant truce of sorts. Decades later, it’s slowly sinking in that nobody but me can define what I can contribute to my family, and that my challenge to reconcile myself to my people will be the work of a lifetime, not a day.
As modern heroines, we’re faced with an ever-changing definition of family. As things like same-sex marriage and changing female roles redefine the family unit, we are called upon to redefine ourselves as heroines and as humans, reassessing and rediscovering our place in relation to others. Whether we’re ready to take on the family roles that have been handed us is beside the point. A heroine can create her own familial destiny. Like Francie, we’re surrounded by a sloppy, vital, flawed, and abundant family of choice wherever we go. The shining world of childhood might look a bit dingier in the light of day, the librarian may never look up from her desk, even our mothers might falter and fail us on occasion. But as heroines, we can become our own mothers even as we become others'. We can, like Betty Smith, press our backs up against the chimney in our freezing apartment, smuggling the heat of a neighbor’s stove as we work on connecting our pasts with our presents.
READ THIS BOOK:
• When you have to make do with $5 until your next paycheck
• After unsettling phone calls with mothers or wild siblings
• On long solo vacations taken to figure out where things stand
FRANCIE’S LITERARY SISTERS:
• Esperanza Cordero in The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros
• Sarah Smolinsky in The Bread Givers, by Anzia Yezierska
• Astrid Magnusson in White Oleander, by Janet Fitch