A tree grows in Brooklyn - Betty Smith [38]
“What would I get if I mated a canary with a crow?” was his argument.
After Johnny had escorted his mother-in-law over to his house, he went out looking for work.
Katie was glad to see her mother. With the memory of her own birth pangs still lingering, she had knowledge now of what her mother had suffered when she, Katie, was born. She thought of her mother bearing seven children, bringing them up, watching three of them die, and knowing that those who lived were doomed to hunger and hardship. She had a vision that the same cycle was destined for her less than day-old child. She became frantic with worry.
“What do I know?” Katie asked her mother. “I can’t teach her anything more than I, myself, know and I know so little. You are poor, Mother. Johnny and I are poor. The baby will grow up to be poor. We can’t be any more than we are this day. Sometimes I think that the year past was the best we will ever know. As the years go by and Johnny and I get older, nothing will grow better. All we have now is that we are young and strong enough to work and that will go from us as time passes.”
Then the real truth came to her. “I mean,” she thought, “that I can work. I can’t count on Johnny. I’ll always have to look after him. Oh, God, don’t send me any more children or I won’t be able to look after Johnny and I’ve got to look after Johnny. He can’t look after himself.” Her mother interrupted her thoughts. Mary was saying:
“What did we have in the old country? Nothing. We were peasants. We starved. Well, then, we came over here. It wasn’t so much better except that they didn’t take your father for the military the way they would do in the old country. But otherwise, it’s been harder. I miss the home-land, the trees and broad fields, the familiar way of living, the old friends.”
“If you could expect nothing better, why did you come to America?”
“For the sake of my children whom I wished to be born in a free land.”
“Your children haven’t done so well, Mother.” Katie smiled bitterly.
“There is here, what is not in the old country. In spite of hard unfamiliar things, there is here—hope. In the old country, a man can be no more than his father, providing he works hard. If his father was a carpenter, he may be a carpenter. He may not be a teacher or a priest. He may rise—but only to his father’s state. In the old country, a man is given to the past. Here he belongs to the future. In this land, he may be what he will, if he has the good heart and the way of working honestly at the right things.”
“That is not so. Your children have not done better than you.”
Mary Rommely sighed. “That may be my fault. I knew not how to teach my daughters because I have nothing behind me excepting that for hundreds of years, my family has worked on the land of some overlord. I did not send my first child to the school. I was ignorant and did not know at first that the children of folk like us were allowed the free education of this land. Thus, Sissy had no chance to do better than me. But the other three…you went to school.”
“I finished the sixth grade, if that is what is called education.”
“And your Yohnny”—she could not pronounce “j”—“did too. Don’t you see?” Excitement came into her voice. “Already, it is starting—the getting better.” She picked up the baby and held it high in her arms.
“This child was born of parents who can read and write,” she said simply. “To me, this is a great wonder.”
“Mother, I am young. Mother, I am just eighteen. I am strong. I will work hard, Mother. But I do not want this child to grow up just to work hard. What must I do, Mother, what must I do to make a different world for her? How do I start?”
“The secret lies in the reading and the writing. You are able to read. Every day you must read one page from some good book to your child. Every day this must be until the child learns