Classics Bookclub – A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

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 from 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 tenements district.

The October read for 5 Minutes for Books‘ Classics Bookclub was Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.  For me, this one, like September’s Jane Eyre, is one of those “always meant to read but never got around to it” books.  It was definitely worth the wait.  There are no extremes, no brilliant prose, nothing that screams, “Classic!”  Instead it gently guides the reader through the childhood of Francie Nolan and leaves that reader changed.

Francie’s story is one of poverty, but not of want. She and her brother, Neeley, collect junk to sell to the local junk dealer every Saturday.  Her mother, Katie Rommely Nolan, works as a cleaning lady and saves money in a tin-can bank with the dream of owning a home.  Her father, Johnny, is a singing Irish waiter whose alcohol addiction prevents him from ever fulfilling Katie’s dream. Katie’s mother, Mary, an immigrant from Austria, could not read or write but instilled in her daughters the importance of education.  So, even though she herself never went past sixth grade, Katie read a page of Shakespeare and a page of the Bible to Francie and Neeley every day of their childhood. This planted in Francie a love of reading and writing that would eventually lead her out of the tenements and out of Brooklyn.

This is a book about strong women.

Those were the Rommely women: Mary, the mother, Evy, Sissy, and Katie, her daughters, and Francie, who would grow up to be a Rommely woman even though her name was Nolan. They were all slender, frail creatures with wondering eyes and soft fluttery voices.

But they were made out of thin invisible steel.

The relationships between the Rommely women make up a large important part of the novel.  Sissy’s “marital” escapades and determination to have a family provide sweet comic relief to the story.  She doesn’t live an exemplary life, but she loves with a love as strong as one can imagine.  I loved her. 

Strength is, in fact, the main theme of the story.  Strength of character, strength of relationships, strength in the face of poverty, adversity and loss.  The tree, which grows only where other trees can not, is Francie herself.

I grew up as a middle-class kid in a small West Texas farming town, a completely different planet from Francie’s Brooklyn tenements, but I see a little bit of that West Texas girl in her. In her own review of Tree, my daughter said, “I feel like I’m reading a story about myself in a life that I never lived.”  Maybe this is the greatest strength of the story, that we all see a little bit of ourselves in Francie.

Until later,