The school is overcrowded, attended mostly by immigrant children who have difficulties with hygiene, and inhabited by cruel teachers and a sadistic principal. Though her first experiences there are harsh, they teach her about the inequalities in American society. When Francie is seven, she starts school. Katie fosters a love for literature in both of her children by reading them pages from Shakespeare and the Protestant Bible every night before bed. She relishes trips to the library, where she is enchanted by the brown bowl full of seasonal flora that sits on the librarian’s desk, and promises herself that she will read one book a day for as long as she lives.

Despite receiving little sustenance, the tree’s steady growth demonstrated a will to live, and Katie declared that Francie, too, would survive.įrom the age of three, Francie babysits her younger brother while her mother works menial jobs and her father waits for singing-waiter gigs or gets drunk to forget about the mounting pressures of his responsibilities. Whenever people made this prediction, however, Katie would point to a struggling tree growing out of a grating nearby. When Francie was born, she was so sickly and blue that people believed that she wouldn’t live. Francie and Neeley bring in additional household income by rag-picking, or collecting trash on the street and in their building, and turning in the materials to Carney’s junk business for cash. Francie Nolan, is an eleven-year-old girl living in Williamsburg, Brooklyn with her ten-year-old brother, Neeley, her mother, Katie, and her father, Johnny.

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