Room for the Weak Ones

You'll never raise that one; her color ain't good. If the good Lord takes her it'll be for the best. There's too many poor children on this earth already; and no room for the weak ones.

Don't say that. 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. Its hard struggle to live is making it strong. -Katie Nolan, from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

I'm about halfway through the audio book of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn - this blog's namesake. There's a relief in listening to it - an earnest, heartfelt tale of a young girl (whose color ain't good) growing up poor in Brooklyn in the early 1900s. Nothing ironic or clever about it, no metafictions or cynical self-awareness, no multimedia, no armoured satire. Just a story, about a girl and her family, trying to survive, seeing the world from the bottom up, and finding beauty - hard-earned - wherever she can.

Somerset Maugham's Willie Ashenden said it so well, so painfully well, in the quote from Cakes and Ale (see the sidebar on this page). Sincerity is surely a liability in a world governed and shaped by clever and powerful hustlers. We admire people for their savvy, almost as if savvy were the new good. I find myself, in considering the best man or woman for the Presidency of the United States, worried for my preferred candidate, Barack Obama - that he is too idealistic, not seasoned enough (i.e. can he play the game?). Poor fella, he is awfully, awfully sincere. In a current-day thesaurus (hey, someone should do this, now that would be marketable), it might say SINCERE: antonym ELECTABLE.

A tree grows in Brooklyn. Francie makes her way. Ella the orchid died. The red light just went on on the HEPA air filter in the apartment here in the Bronx; we took it apart and cleaned the filter (filthy!), but the light won't go off. Where is that owner's manual?

Baby Francie's color ain't good, but she survives, against the odds. Francie's mother Katie has her own ambitions: to raise her children for a different life, a life beyond the poor, dead-end life she's known. Katie's mother, a German immigrant and a kind of old-world sage, tells her the secret: books (Shakespeare and the Bible, specifically); learning, cultivating the mind, the imagination. Being able to see through and beyond the material facts of one's circumstances. A mind and a soul for beauty - this is the one thing that can raise a person up and out of circumstances which seem, to the physical eye, insurmountable.

Sincerely, I live this every day. Here in the Bronx, I see garbage, I see hustling and drug-dealing, I see the dirty poor, I see environmental injustice like you wouldn't believe. But what else? What else do I see? The pansies are weak and floppy. Lavendar and butterfly bush are holding on. Some people are recycling, some people are throwing banana peels and dog shit in with the mixed paper. J. from upstairs, who first took in the stray pup who now belongs to G., asked sincerely yesterday how she (the pup) is doing. K. the Bird Man came around the other night, sheepish but seemingly conciliatory. The backyard is taking shape, on the cheap, kind of ugly, but it's something. We are, as of this week, overrun with (small, black) mice.

If I am laughable, if I am absurd and ephemeral and a jest... then along with this struggle, I suppose I must learn to laugh at myself as well. Or else get thick-skinned. But like Francie, and like Ella, my temperament is ultimately more the delicate orchid than the steel magnolia. "Writers are missing a layer of skin," my poet-friend B. says. As many-a- hard-nosed-NewYorker might quip: it's the cost of doing business.