A tree grows in Brooklyn - Betty Smith [111]
“Say the big words and see if we understand them.”
“If you understood them, I wouldn’t have to tell you.”
“Say it in some kind of words. Tell us how babies get here.”
“No, you’re too little yet. If I told you, you’d go around telling all the other children what you know and their mothers would come up here and say I was a dirty lady and there would be fights.”
“Well, tell us why girls are different from boys.”
Mama thought for a while. “The main difference is that a little girl sits down when she goes to the bathroom and a little boy stands up.”
“But Mama,” said Francie. “I stand up when I’m afraid in that dark toilet.”
“And I,” confessed little Neeley, “sit down when…”
Mama interrupted. “Well, there’s a little bit of man in every woman and a little bit of woman in every man.”
That ended the discussion because it was so puzzling to the children that they decided to go no further with it.
When Francie, as she wrote in her diary, started to change into a woman, she went to Mama about her sex curiosity. And Katie told her simply and plainly all that she herself knew. There were times in the telling when Katie had to use words which were considered dirty but she used them bravely and unflinchingly because she knew no other words. No one had ever told her about the things she told her daughter. And in those days, there were no books available for people like Katie from which they could learn about sex in the right way. In spite of the blunt words and homely phrasing, there was nothing revolting in Katie’s explanations.
Francie was luckier than most children of the neighborhood. She found out all she needed to know at the time she had to know about it. She never needed to slink into dark hallways with other girls and exchange guilty confidences. She never had to learn things in a distorted way.
If normal sex was a great mystery in the neighborhood, criminal sex was an open book. In all poor and congested city areas, the prowling sex fiend is a nightmarish horror that haunts parents. There seems to be one in every neighborhood. There was one in Williamsburg in that year when Francie turned fourteen. For a long time, he had been molesting little girls, and although the police were on a continual lookout for him, he was never caught. One of the reasons was that when a little girl was attacked, the parents kept it secret so that no one would know and discriminate against the child and look on her as a thing apart and make it impossible for her to resume a normal childhood with her playmates.
One day, a little girl on Francie’s block was killed and it had to come out in the open. She had been a quiet little thing of seven, well behaved and obedient. When she didn’t come home from school, her mother didn’t worry; she thought the child had stopped somewhere to play. After supper, they went looking for her; they questioned her playmates. No one had seen the child since school let out.
A fear wave swept over the neighborhood. Children were called in off the streets and kept behind locked doors. McShane came over with half a dozen policemen and they began combing the roofs and cellars.
The child was found at last, by her loutish seventeen-year-old brother. Her little body was lying across a busted-down doll carriage in the cellar of a nearby house. Her torn dress and undergarments, her shoes and her little red socks were thrown on an ash heap. The brother was questioned. He was excited and stuttered when he answered. They arrested him on suspicion. McShane wasn’t stupid. The arrest was a blind to put the killer off guard. McShane knew the killer would feel safe and strike again; and this time, the police would be waiting for him.
Parents went into action. The children were told (and to hell with finding the right words) about the fiend and the horrible things he did. Little girls were warned not to take candy from strangers, not to speak to strange men. Mothers took to waiting in the doorways for their children when school let out. The streets were deserted. It was as if the Pied Piper had led all the children