A Tree Grows in Brooklyn — by Betty Smith

26

 

MOST CHILDREN BROUGHT UP IN BROOKLYN BEFORE THE FIRST World War remember Thanksgiving Day there with a peculiar tenderness. It was the day children went around “ragamuffin” or “slamming gates,” wearing costumes topped off by a penny mask.

Francie chose her mask with great care. She bought a yellow Chinaman one with sleazy rope mandarin mustache. Neeley bought a chalk-white death head with grinning black teeth. Papa came through at the last minute with a penny tin horn for each, red for Francie, green for Neeley.

What a time Francie had getting Neeley into his costume! He wore one of mama’s discarded dresses hacked off ankle-length in the front to enable him to walk. The uncut back made a dirty dragging train. He stuffed wadded newspapers in the front to make an enormous bust. His broken-out brass-tipped shoes stuck out in front of the dress. Lest he freeze, he wore a ragged sweater over the ensemble. With this costume, he wore the death mask and one of papa’s discarded derbies cocked on his head. Only it was too big and wouldn’t cock, and rested on his ears.

Francie wore one of Mama’s yellow waists, a bright blue skirt and a red sash. She held the Chinaman mask on by a red bandana over her head and tied under her chin. Mama made her wear her zitful cap (Katie’s own name for a wool stocking cap) over her headgear because it was a cold day. Francie put two walnuts for decoys in her last year’s Easter basket and the children set out.

The street was jammed with masked and costumed children making a deafening din with their penny tin horns. Some kids were too poor to buy a penny mask. They had blackened their faces with burnt cork. Other children with more prosperous parents had store costumes: sleazy Indian suits, cowboy suits and cheesecloth Dutch maiden dresses. A few indifferent ones simply draped a dirty sheet over themselves and called it a costume.

Francie got pushed in with a compact group of children and went the rounds with them. Some storekeepers locked their doors against them but most of them had something for the children. The candy-store man had hoarded all broken bits of candy for weeks and now passed it out in little bags for all who came begging. He had to do this because he lived on the pennies of the youngsters and he didn’t want to be boycotted. The bakery stores obliged by baking up batches of soft doughy cookies which they gave away. Children were the marketers of the neighborhood and they would only patronize those stores that treated them well. The bakery people were aware of this. The green grocer obliged with decaying bananas and half-rotted apples. Some stores which had nothing to gain from the children neither locked them out nor gave them anything save a profane lecture on the evils of begging. These people were rewarded by terrific and repeated bangings of the front door by the children. Hence the term, slamming gates.

By noon, it was all over. Francie was tired of her unwieldy costume. Her mask had crumpled. (It was made of cheap gauze, heavily starched and dried in shape over a mold.) A boy had taken her tin horn and broken it in two across his knee. She met Neeley coming along with a bloody nose. He had been in a fight with another boy who wanted to take his basket. Neeley wouldn’t say who won but he had the other boy’s basket besides his own. They went home to a good Thanksgiving dinner of pot roast and home-made noodles and spent the afternoon listening to Papa reminisce how he had gone around Thanksgiving Day as a boy.

It was at a Thanksgiving time that Francie told her first organized lie, was found out and determined to become a writer.

The day before Thanksgiving, there were exercises in Francie’s room. Each of four chosen girls recited a Thanksgiving poem and held in her hand a symbol of the day. One held an ear of dried-up corn, another a turkey’s foot, meant to stand for the whole turkey. A third girl held a basket of apples and the fourth held a five-cent pumpkin pie which was the size of a small saucer.

After the exercises, the turkey foot and corn were thrown into the wastebasket. Teacher set aside the apples to take home. She asked if anyone wanted the little pumpkin pie. Thirty mouths watered; thirty hands itched to go up into the air but no one moved. Some were poor, many were hungry and all were too proud to accept charitable food. When no one responded, Teacher ordered the pie thrown away.

Francie couldn’t stand it; that beautiful pie thrown away and she had never tasted pumpkin pie. To her it was the food of covered wagon people, of Indian fighters. She was dying to taste it. In a flash she invented a lie and up went her hand.

“I’m glad someone wants it,” said Teacher.

“I don’t want it for myself,” lied Francie proudly. “I know a very poor family I’d like to give it to.”

“Good,” said Teacher. “That’s the real Thanksgiving spirit.”

Francie ate the pie while walking home that afternoon. Whether it was her conscience or the unfamiliar flavor, she didn’t enjoy the pie. It tasted like soap. The Monday following, Teacher saw her in the hall before class and asked her how the poor family had enjoyed the pie.

“They liked it a whole lot,” Francie told her. Then when she saw Teacher there looking so interested, she embellished the story. “This family has two little girls with golden curls and big blue eyes.”

“And?” prompted Teacher.

“And…and…they’re twins.”

 

“How interesting.”

Francie was inspired. “One of them has the name Pamela and the other Camilla.” (These were names that Francie had once chosen for her non-existent dolls.)

“And they are very, very poor,” suggested Teacher.

“Oh, very poor. They didn’t have anything to eat for three days and just would have died, the doctor said, if I didn’t bring them that pie.”

“That was such a tiny pie,” commented Teacher gently, “to save two lives.”

Francie knew then that she had gone too far. She hated whatever that thing was inside her that made her invent such whoppers. Teacher bent down and put her arms around Francie. Francie saw that there were tears in her eyes. Francie went to pieces and remorse rose in her like bitter flood waters.

“That’s all a big lie,” she confessed. “I ate the pie myself.”

“I know you did.”

“Don’t send a letter home,” begged Francie, thinking of the address she didn’t own. “I’ll stay after school every day for…”

“I’ll not punish you for having an imagination.”

Gently, Teacher explained the difference between a lie and a story. A lie was something you told because you were mean or a coward. A story was something you made up out of something that might have happened. Only you didn’t tell it like it was; you told it like you thought it should have been.

As Teacher talked, a great trouble left Francie. Lately, she had been given to exaggerating things. She did not report happenings truthfully, but gave them color, excitement and dramatic twists. Katie was annoyed at this tendency and kept warning Francie to tell the plain truth and to stop romancing. But Francie just couldn’t tell the plain undecorated truth. She had to put something to it.

Although Katie had this same flair for coloring an incident and Johnny himself lived in a half-dream world, yet they tried to squelch these things in their child. Maybe they had a good reason. Maybe they knew their own gift of imagination colored too rosily the poverty and brutality of their lives and made them able to endure it. Perhaps Katie thought that if they did not have this faculty, they would be clearer-minded; see things as they really were, and seeing them loathe them and somehow find a way to make them better.

Francie always remembered what that kind teacher told her. “You know, Francie, a lot of people would think that these stories that you’re making up all the time were terrible lies because they are not the truth as people see the truth. In the future, when something comes up, you tell exactly how it happened but write down for yourself the way you think it should have happened. Tell the truth and write the story. Then you won’t get mixed up.”

It was the best advice Francie ever got. Truth and fancy were so mixed up in her mind—as they are in the mind of every lonely child—that she didn’t know which was which. But Teacher made these two things clear to her. From that time on, she wrote little stories about things she saw and felt and did. In time, she got so that she was able to speak the truth with but a slight and instinctive coloring of the facts.

Francie was ten years old when she first found an outlet in writing. What she wrote was of little consequence. What was important was that the attempt to write stories kept her straight on the dividing line between truth and fiction.

If she had not found this outlet in writing, she might have grown up to be a tremendous liar.