In calling attention to a book “worth getting excited about,” Orville Prescott in The New York Times (August 18, 1943) pointed to Betty Smith’s ability to consider the effects of the “many faceted” aspects of poverty on the lives of children and their families. Nowhere is her talent more apparent than in the vivid and forceful account of Francie Nolan’s first days at school. At the outset, Smith makes clear that “…brutalizing is the only adjective for the public schools of that district around 1908 and ’09.” Three thousand children were crammed into a school built for a thousand, and with ten “lavatories” for every five hundred kids, boys and girls struggled to keep from wetting themselves. Only the girls sitting in the front row “… with [their] freshly curled hair, crisp clean pinafores, and new silk hairbows…” were allowed free access to the bathrooms. Francie temporarily joins the privileged only after her dear and quite disreputable aunt, Sissy, pretending to be Francie’s mother, advises her teacher that Francie, suffering from a potentially fatal kidney disease, must be free to go to the lavatory. (And if Francie were allowed to sit up front with the nice girls, then teacher might expect a substantial gift at Christmas.) In coming to understand that teachers spoke gently to the girls in pinafores and “snarled” at everyone else, Francie “learned more that first day than she realized.”
Betty Smith’s account of a corrupt and abusive system is the backdrop to what in other ways is her tempered appreciation of schooling. “Francie liked school,” she explains, “because in spite of the meanness, cruelty and unhappiness…the regimented routine of many children all doing the same thing at once, gave her a feeling of safety. Although it was a cruel and ugly routine, it had a purpose and a progression.” And for children like Francie whose family struggled to buy enough food and pay the rent, that sense of security and order was all the more important.
Francie’s best day at school comes when she discovers that she can read a whole page and then an entire book. “[She]…would never be lonely again or miss the lack of intimate friends,” writes Smith. “Books became her friends and there was one for every mood.” Francie later is recognized by her teacher for an ability to write pleasing essays about truth, beauty and love of country. But when she tries to explain in her writing why Johnny, her beloved dad who drank himself to death, was really a fine man, the teacher advises Francie “…to stop writing those sordid little stories.” Francie refuses and nearly flunks her best subject.
But the issue here is less about doing well in school than about being able to continue at all. Following Johnny’s death, it is understood that either Francie or her brother Neeley will go to work, and since their mother, Katie, presumes that her gifted daughter might better handle a break in schooling and still find a way to earn a high school diploma, it is Francie who is sent to work in a factory. Here, for the first time, she comes to enjoy the comraderie of a group, and it is the boisterous talk of the factory girls that allows her to endure the deadening tedium of assembling artificial flowers. After getting laid off and then passing herself off as sixteen, she gets an office job at the Model Press Clipping Bureau in Manhattan. In learning to quickly read, digest and collate news stories, Francie gains a broad understanding of current affairs. And because she takes pride in helping support the family, she begins to wonder whether she should return to a high school where students now appear as “baby kids.”
