A tree grows in Brooklyn - Betty Smith [50]
The fall came again, winter, spring and summer. Francie and Neeley kept getting bigger, Katie kept working harder and Johnny worked a little less and drank a little more with each season. The reading went on. Sometimes Katie skipped a page when she was tired at night, but most of the time she stuck with it. They were in Julius Caesar now and the stage direction “Alarum” confused Katie. She thought it had something to do with fire engines and whenever she came to that word, she shouted out “clang-clang.” The children thought it was wonderful.
Pennies accumulated in the tin-can bank. Once it had to be ripped open and two dollars taken out to pay the druggist the time Francie ran a rusty nail into her knee. A dozen times one prong was unfastened and a nickel fished out with a knife to provide Johnny with car-fare to get to a job. But the rule was that he had to put ten cents back out of his tip money. So the bank profited.
On the warm days, Francie played alone on the streets or on the stoop. She yearned for playmates but did not know how to make friends with the other little girls. The other youngsters avoided her because she talked funny. Owing to Katie’s nightly reading, Francie had a queer way of saying things. Once, when taunted by a youngster, she had retorted, “Aw, you don’t know what you’re saying. You’re jus’ full of soun’ ’n’ furry siggaflying nothing.”
Once, trying to make friends with a little girl, she said,
“Wait here and I’ll go in and begat my rope and we’ll play jumping.”
“You mean you’ll git your rope,” the little girl corrected.
“No. I’ll begat my rope. You don’t git things. You begat things.”
“What’s that—begat?” asked the little girl who was just five years old.
“Begat. Like Eve begat Cain.”
“You’re buggy. Ladies don’t git canes. Only men git canes when they can’t walk good.”
“Eve begat. She begat Abel too.”
“She gits or she don’t git. You know what?”
“What.”
“You talk just like a Wop.”
“I do not talk like no Wop,” cried Francie. “I talk like…like…God talks.”
“You’ll be struck down dead saying a thing like that.”
“I won’t neither.”
“Nobody home upstairs in your house.” The little girl tapped her forehead.
“There is so.”
“Why do you talk like that then?”
“My mother reads those things to me.”
“Nobody home upstairs in your mother’s house,” corrected the little girl.
“Well, anyhow, my mother ain’t a dirty slob like your mother.” That was the only reply Francie could think of.
The little girl had heard this many times. She was shrewd enough not to debate it. “Well, I’d sooner have a dirty slob for a mother than a crazy woman. And I’d rather have no father than a drunken man for my father.”
“Slob! Slob! Slob!” shouted Francie passionately.
“Crazy, crazy, crazy,” chanted the little girl.
“Slob! Dirty slob,” screamed Francie sobbing in her impotence.
The little girl skipped away, her fat curls bouncing in the sun and sang in a clear high voice: “Sticks and stones will break my bones but names will never hurt me. When I die, you will cry for all the names you called me.”
And Francie did cry. Not for all the names called but because she was lonesome and nobody wanted to play with her. The rougher children found Francie too quiet and the better behaved ones seemed to shun her. Dimly, Francie felt that it wasn’t all her fault. It had something to do with Aunt Sissy who came to the house so often, the way Sissy looked and the way the men in the neighborhood looked after Sissy when she passed. It had something to do with the way Papa couldn’t walk straight sometimes and walked sideways down the street when he came home. It had something to do with the way neighbor women asked her questions about Papa and Mama and Sissy. Their wheedling offhand questions did not deceive Francie. Had not Mama warned her: “Don’t let the neighbors pick on you.”
So in the warm summer days the lonesome child sat on her stoop and pretended disdain for the group of children playing