A tree grows in Brooklyn - Betty Smith [44]
That fall in the false warmth of a Brooklyn Indian summer, Katie sat on the stoop and held her sickly baby against the bigness which was another child soon to be born. Pitying neighbors stopped to commiserate over Francie.
“You’ll never raise that one,” they told her. “Her color ain’t good. If the good Lord takes her, it will be for the best. What good is a sickly baby in a poor family? There is too many children on this earth already and no room for the weak ones.”
“Don’t say that,” Katie held her baby tightly. “It’s not better to die. Who wants to die? Everything struggles to live. Look at that tree growing up there out of that grating. It gets no sun, and water only when it rains. It’s growing out of sour earth. And it’s strong because its hard struggle to live is making it strong. My children will be strong that way.”
“Aw, somebody ought to cut that tree down, the homely thing.”
“If there was only one tree like that in the world, you would think it was beautiful,” said Katie. “But because there are so many, you just can’t see how beautiful it really is. Look at those children.” She pointed to a swarm of dirty children playing in the gutter. “You could take any one of them and wash him good and dress him up and sit him in a fine house and you would think he was beautiful.”
“You’ve got fine ideas but a very sick baby, Katie,” they told her. “This baby will live,” said Katie fiercely. “I’ll make it live.”
And Francie lived, choking and whimpering her way through that first year.
Francie’s brother was born a week after her first birthday.
This time Katie was not working when the pains came. This time she bit her lip and did not scream out in her agony. Helpless in her pain, she was capable still of laying the foundation for bitterness and capability.
When the strong healthy boy, howling at the indignity of the birth process, was put to her breast, she felt a wild tenderness for him. The other baby, Francie, in the crib next her bed, began to whimper. Katie had a flash of comtempt for the weak child she had borne a year ago, when she compared her to this new handsome son. She was quickly ashamed of her contempt. She knew it wasn’t the little girl’s fault. “I must watch myself carefully,” she thought. “I am going to love this boy more than the girl but I mustn’t ever let her know. It is wrong to love one child more than the other but this is something that I cannot help.”
Sissy begged her to call the boy after Johnny but Katie insisted that the boy had a right to a name all his own. Sissy got very angry and told Katie a thing or two. Finally Katie, more in anger than in truth, accused Sissy of being in love with Johnny. Sissy answered, “maybe,” and Katie shut up. She was a little afraid that if they quarreled further, she would find out that it was so about Sissy loving Johnny.
Katie called the boy Cornelius after a noble character she had seen a handsome actor represent on the stage. As the boy grew up, the name was changed into Brooklynese and he was known as Neeley.
Without devious reasoning or complicated emotional processes, the boy became Katie’s whole world. Johnny took second place and Francie went to the back of her mother’s heart. Katie loved the boy because he was more completely hers than either Johnny or Francie. Neeley looked exactly like Johnny. Katie would make him into the kind of man Johnny should have been. He would have everything that was good about Johnny; she would encourage that. She would stamp out all of the things that were bad about Johnny as they came up in the boy, Neeley. He would grow up and she would be proud of him and he would take care of her all of her days. He was the one that she had to see through. Francie and Johnny would get by somehow, but she would take no chances with the boy. She’d see to it that he more than got by.
Gradually, as the children grew up, Katie lost all of her tenderness although she gained in what people call character. She became capable, hard and far-seeing. She