Reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith inspired me to wander around the Williamsburg area of Brooklyn and search for Francie Nolan's spirit. As I walked around on a cold January morning, I was embraced by the serenity of the protagonist's home town, wrapped in layers of the literary landscape of Smith's first novel. The story begins in 1912, when Francie is eleven, and ends in 1918. Exactly 100 years since the end of the story, I search for ways to connect to Francie's character and her world.
While not exactly part of Francie's neighborhood, I started out in Greenpoint. I walked around the quiet Historic District with quaint brick row houses, bicycles locked on black iron fences, bare trees growing from small sidewalk spaces. From the gusty winds, I found refuge in Word Bookstore, a community store on Franklin St. This seemed like an appropriate start to my wanderings since both Francie and I are booklovers. In large letters on the window of the store is an Audre Lorde quote: "I am deliberate and afraid of nothing." Inside the sunlit store, an array of contemporary and local writers to browse. If Francie were alive today, I imagine her as the owner, walking around the store and giving recommendations to all of her customers.
After purchasing an illustrated paperback about The Great Wall of China for my son, I returned to the cold and admired the quintessential Brooklyn blocks. Across the street was American Playground with a tall water tower in the background. On the corner of Milton and Franklin St., a colorful bodega with a Puerto Rican flag painted outside. It is interesting that there are no Puerto Ricans or Latinos in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn since the people in Francie's neighborhood were from Ireland, Italy, and Eastern Europe. While there were some Puerto Ricans in the area in the 1920's, it wasn't until the 1960's that thousands came from the island to work in nearby factories. As the daughter of immigrants, I love the rich, immigrant history of this city. Francie, a 2nd-generation American, whose paternal grandparents were from Ireland and maternal grandparents were from Austria, would appreciate the evolution of immigrant history in this area.
Word Bookstore at 126 Franklin St.
I left Greenpoint and went a mile south to East Williamsburg to visit page 7 of the book. In this part, the narrator describes a typical Saturday morning when all the kids are in the streets, collecting trash to sell and help feed their families:
"Soon after nine o'clock of a Saturday morning, kids began spraying out of all the side streets on to Manhattan Avenue, the main thoroughfare. They made their slow way up the Avenue to Scholes Streets. Some carried their junk in their arms. Others had wagons made of a wooden soap box with solid wooden wheels. A few pushed loaded baby buggies.
Francie and Neeley put all their junk into a burlap bag and each grabbed an end and dragged it along the street; up Manhattan Avenue, past Maujer, Ten Eyck, Stagg to Scholes Street. Beautiful names for ugly streets."
Now, on this Friday, all the children are in school. There are construction workers drilling and banging in the street, a few people walking their dogs, young professionals heading to work from home. There are early 20th-century walkups aside glossy condominiums from the beginning of the 21st century. There are public housing apartments which replaced many of the tenements from Francie's time. While most of the people living near her were impoverished, there is more economic diversity in this area, and it is a hip, desirable neighborhood to live in with ample cafes, restaurants, and independent stores. These street names are now beautiful names for beautiful streets.
I continued on Manhattan Avenue, looking for older buildings that may have been there in the early 1900's. I came across a large brick building with boarded windows that could have been a factory. I turned onto Montrose to see the church mentioned in the text, the Most Holy Trinity Church which I learned from the blog Literary Traveler is where Betty Smith was baptized. It has a gothic facade and tall spires. It has an interesting history (see Brownstoner) and ghostly presence on this wide avenue of mostly residential buildings. It is the church Francie goes to for confession and mass. In the following passage near the end of the book, Francie and her family are attending mass on Christmas morning: "Francie was wearing her lace pants and freezing"; she had made her brother Neeley buy this for her for the holiday, and she regretted wearing them instead of her flannel bloomers. Sitting in the front pew,
"Francie thought it was the most beautiful church in Brooklyn. It was made of old gray stone and had twin spires that rose cleanly into the sky, high above the tallest tenements. Inside, the high vaulted ceilings, narrow deepset stained-glass windows and elaborately carved altars made it a miniature cathedral" (396).
The next few pages capture her rapture for her religion. She is absorbed in the physical beauty of the altar and crucifix and muses on the mysteries of God. She declares, "Of course, I didn't ask to be born a Catholic, no more that I asked to be born an American. But I'm glad it turned out that I'm both these things" (398). Growing up, I too was raised in the doctrines and rituals of the Catholic religion but never felt a spiritual connection to; I marveled at the architecture and was most interested in talking to my friends after mass. Nonetheless, the church I went to with my family, Immaculate Conception, will always arouse vivid memories of my childhood.
Around noon, I concluded my brief wanderings with lunch at a cafe I passed on Manhattan Ave. The name of the place is Bearcat, an ideal setting to read, muse, and feed. It has a modern yet rustic atmosphere with tall ceilings and wide aisles, a communal feeling with the bar in the center and kitchen in the back. Customers worked on laptops or chatted with friends, sipping warm beverages. I had a delightful meal: quinoa salad with cauliflower, beets, and a hard-boiled egg and a chai tea with oat milk. This food dramatically contrasts with Francie's meals: "The Nolans practically lived on that stale bread and what amazing things Katie could make from it! She'd take a loaf of stale bread, pour boiling water over it, work it up into a paste, flavor it with salt, pepper, thyme, minced onion and an egg (if eggs were cheap), and bake it in the oven... Mama [also] made a very fine bread pudding from slices of stale bread, sugar, cinnamon and a penny apple sliced thin..." (44). The narrator goes on for another page to describe all the other delicious meals Katie made from that core ingredient and the other few items she had in her kitchen. So as I ate, I appreciated every palatable bite and morsel, relished in my ability to sit and be served, and reread favorite parts in the text, thinking of all the other street names and landmarks I want to visit on a warmer day, on the sequel to my Finding Francie walk.
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