by Kornbluh, Joyce L. , Rosemont, Franklin, Thompson, Fred, Gross, Daniel
At Giovannitti’s death, an obituary appeared in the New York Times (January 1, 1960). It said: “Until the end of World War II when his health failed, he wrote and spoke extensively in the struggle to establish organized labor. At various times he was a close associate of Max Eastman, Norman Thomas, David Dubinsky, and many others. At the fiery labor rallies of the Nineteen Twenties and Thirties, Mr. Giovannitti was in great demand as a speaker. A colorful figure, with a Van Dyke beard, a Lord Byron collar and flowing tie, he addressed Italian and English-speaking audiences with an equally flowery fluency.”
“The Walker” was published in Ettor and Giovannitti Before the Jury at Salem, Massachusetts, a pamphlet issued by the I.W.W. about 1913, and frequently reprinted in the I.W.W. and the national press. It is included in The Collected Poems of Arturo Giovannitti, which has recently been published (Chicago, 1962) with a foreword by Norman Thomas.
THE WALKER
By ARTURO GIOVANNITTI
I HEAR footsteps over my head all night.
They come and they go. Again they come and they go all night.
They come one eternity in four paces and they go one eternity in four paces, and between the coming and the going there is Silence and the Night and the Infinite.
For infinite are the nine feet of a prison cell, and endless is the march of him who walks between the yellow brick wall and the red iron gate, thinking things that cannot be chained and cannot be locked, but that wander far away in the sunlit world, each in a wild pilgrimage after a destined goal.
* * *
Throughout the restless night I hear the footsteps over my head.
Who walks? I know not. It is the phantom of the jail, the sleepless brain, a man, the man, the Walker.
One-two-three-four: four paces and the wall.
One-two-three-four: four paces and the iron gate.
He has measured his space, he has measured it accurately, scrupulously, minutely, as the hangman measures the rope and the grave-digger the coffin—so many feet, so many inches, so many fractions of an inch for each of the four paces.
One-two-three-four. Each step sounds heavy and hollow over my head, and the echo of each step sounds hollow within my head as I count them in suspense and in dread that once, perhaps, in the endless walk, there may be five steps instead of four between the yellow brick wall and the red iron gate.
But he has measured the space so accurately, so scrupulously, so minutely that nothing breaks the grave rhythm of the slow, fantastic march.
* * *
When all are asleep (and who knows but I when all sleep?) three things are still awake in the night: the Walker, my heart and the old clock which has the soul of a fiend—for never, since a coarse hand with red hair on its fingers swung for the first time the pendulum in the jail, has the old clock tick-tocked a full hour of joy.
Yet the old clock which marks everything, and records everything, and to everything tolls the death knell, the wise old clock that knows everything, does not know the number of the footsteps of the Walker, nor the throbs of my heart.
For not for the Walker, nor for my heart is there a second, a minute, an hour or anything that is in the old clock—there is nothing but the night, the sleepless night, the watchful, wistful night, and footsteps that go, and footsteps that come and the wild, tumultuous beatings that trail after them forever.
* * *
All the sounds of the living beings and inanimate things, and all the voices and all the noises of the night I have heard in my wistful vigil.
I have heard the moans of him who bewails a thing that is dead and the sighs of him who tries to smother a thing that will not die;
I have heard the stifled sobs of the one who weeps with his head under the coarse blanket, and the whisperings of the one who prays with his forehead on the hard, cold stone of the floor;
I have heard him who laughs the shrill, sinister laugh of folly at the horror rampant on the yellow wall and at the red eyes of the nightmare glaring through the iron bars;
I have heard in the sudden icy silence him who coughs a dry, ringing cough, and wished madly that his throat would not rattle so and that he would not spit on the floor, for no sound was more atrocious than that of his sputum upon the floor.
I have heard him who swears fearsome oaths which I listen to in reverence and awe, for they are holier than the virgin’s prayer;
And I have heard, most terrible of all, the silence of two hundred brains all possessed by one single, relentless, unforgiving, desperate thought.
All this have I heard in the watchful night, And the murmur of the wind beyond the walls, And the tolls of a distant bell, And the woeful dirge of the rain,
And the remotest echoes of the sorrowful city
And the terrible beatings, wild beatings, mad beatings of the One Heart which is nearest to my heart.
All this have I heard in the still night;
But nothing is louder, harder, drearier, mightier, more awful than the footsteps I hear over my head all night.
* * *
Arturo Giovannitti.
Brown Brothers photo.
Yet fearsome and terrible are all the footsteps of men upon the earth, for they either descend or climb.
They descend from little mounds and high peaks and lofty altitudes, through wide roads and narrow paths, down noble marble stairs and creaky stairs of wood—and some go down to the cellar, and some to the grave, and some down to the pits of shame and infamy, and still some to the glory of an unfathomable abyss where there is nothing but the staring white, stony eyeballs of Destiny.
And again other footsteps climb. They climb to life and to love, to fame, to power, to vanity, to truth, to glory and to the scaffold—to everything but Freedom and the Ideal.
And they all climb the same roads and the same stairs others go down; for never, since man began to think how to overcome and over-pass man, have other roads and other stairs been found.
They descend and they climb, the fearful footsteps of men, and some limp, some drag, some speed, some trot, some run—they are quiet, slow, noisy, brisk, quick, feverish, mad, and most awful is their cadence to the ears of the one who stands still.
But of all the footsteps of men that either descend or climb, no footsteps are so fearsome and terrible as those that go straight on the dead level of a prison floor, from a yellow stone wall to a red iron gate.
* * *
All through the night he walks and he thinks. Is it more frightful because he walks and his footsteps sound hollow over my head, or because he thinks and speaks not his thoughts?
But does he think? Why should he think? Do I think. I only hear the footsteps and count them. Four steps and the wall. Four steps and the gate. But beyond? Beyond? Where goes he beyond the gate and the wall?
He goes not beyond. His thought breaks there on the iron gate. Perhaps it breaks like a wave of rage, perhaps like a sudden flow of hope, but it always returns to beat the wall like a billow of helplessness and despair.
He walks to and fro within the narrow whirlpit of this ever storming and furious thought. Only one thought—constant, fixed, immovable, sinister, without power and without voice.
A thought of madness, frenzy, agony and despair, a hell-brewed thought, for it is a natural thought. All things natural are things impossible while there are jails in the world—bread, work, happiness, peace, love.
But he thinks not of this. As he walks he thinks of the most superhuman, the most unattainable, the most impossible thing in the world:
He thinks of a small brass key that turns just half around and throws open the red iron gate.
* * *
That is all the Walker thinks, as he walks throughout the night.
And that is what two hundred minds drowned in the darkness and the silence of the night think, and that is also what I think.
Wonderful is the supreme wisdom of the jail that makes all think the same thought. Marvelous is the providence of the law that equalizes all, even in mind
and sentiment. Fallen is the last barrier of privilege, the aristocracy of the intellect. The democracy of reason has leveled all the two hundred minds to the common surface of the same thought.
I, who have never killed, think like the murderer!
I, who have never stolen, reason like the thief;
I think, reason, wish, hope, doubt, wait like the hired assassin, the embezzler, the forger, the counterfeiter, the incestuous, the raper, the drunkard, the prostitute, the pimp, I, I who used to think of love and life and flowers and song and beauty and the ideal.
A little key, a little key as little as my little finger, a little key of shining brass.
All my ideas, my thoughts, my dreams are congealed in a little key of shiny brass.
All my brain, all my soul, all the suddenly surging latent powers of my deepest life are in the pocket of a white-haired man dressed in blue.
He is great, powerful, formidable, the man with the white hair, for he has in his pocket the mighty talisman which makes one man cry, and one man pray, and one laugh, and one cough, and one walk, and all keep awake and listen and think the same maddening thought.
Greater than all men is the man with the white hair and the small brass key, for no other man in the world could compel two hundred men to think for so long the same thought. Surely when the light breaks I will write a hymn unto him which shall hail him greater than Mohammed and Arbues and Torquemada and Mesmer, and all the other masters of other men’s thoughts. I shall call him Almighty, for he holds everything of all and of me in a little brass key in his pocket.
Everything of me he holds but the branding iron of contempt and the claymore of hatred for the monstrous cabala that can make the apostle and the murderer, the poet and the procurer, think of the same gate, the same key and the same exit on the different sunlit highways of life.
* * *
My brother, do not walk any more.
It is wrong to walk on a grave. It is a sacrilege to walk four steps from the headstone to the foot and four steps from the foot to the headstone.
If you stop walking, my brother, no longer will this be a grave, for you will give me back my mind that is chained to your feet and the right to think my own thoughts.
I implore you, my brother, for I am weary of the long vigil, weary of counting your steps, and heavy with sleep.
Stop, rest, sleep, my brother, for the dawn is well nigh and it is not the key alone that can throw open the gate.
12
During the trial of Ettor and Giovannitti in Salem, Massachusetts, Bill Haywood asked Giovannitti to write a poem about “Sixteenth Century courts trying to solve Twentieth Century problems.” Giovannitti wrote “The Cage,” which was first published in the Atlantic (January 1913).
An editorial comment in the Atlantic stated: “‘The Cage’ will call out plenty of literary criticism, plenty of expressions of social sympathy or lack of it, but the simple point which needs emphasis is that whether the poem repels or attracts the reader, he will find in it, if he cares to look, more of the heart and soul of the syndicalist movement than all the papers of all the economists can teach him. It is ever wise to listen to the serious voices of mankind …”
THE CAGE
By ARTURO M. GIOVANNITTI
Salem Jail, Sunday, October 20, 1912
I
IN the middle of the great greenish room stood the green iron cage.
All was old and cold and mournful, ancient with the double antiquity of heart and brain in the great greenish room.
Old and hoary was the man who sat upon the faldstool, upon the fireless and godless altar.
Old were the tomes that mouldered behind him on the dusty shelves.
Old was the painting of an old man that hung above him.
Old the man upon his left, who awoke with his cracked voice the dead echoes of dead centuries; old the man upon his right who wielded a wand; and old all those who spoke to him and listened to him before and around the green iron cage.
Old were the words they spoke, and their faces were drawn and white and lifeless, without expression or solemnity; like the ikons of old cathedrals.
For of naught they knew, but of what was written in the old yellow books. And all the joys and pains and loves and hatreds and furies and labors and strifes of man, all the fierce and divine passions that battle and rage in the heart of man, never entered into the great greenish room but to sit in the green iron cage.
Senility, dullness and dissolution were all around the green iron cage, and nothing was new and young and alive in the great room, except the three men who were in the cage.
11
Throbbed and thundered and clamored and roared outside of the great greenish room the terrible whirl of life, and most pleasant was the hymn of its mighty polyphony to the listening ears of the gods.
Whirred the wheels of the puissant machines, rattled and clanked the chains of the giant cranes, crashed the falling rocks; the riveters crepitated; and glad and sonorous was the rhythm of the bouncing hammers upon the loud-throated anvils.
Like the chests of wrathfully toiling Titans, heaved and sniffed and panted the sweaty boilers, like the hissing of dragons sibilated the white jets of steam, and the sirens of the workshops shrieked like angry hawks, flapping above the crags of a dark and fathomless chasm.
The files screeched and the trains thundered, the wires hummed, the dynamos buzzed, the fires crackled; and like a thunderclap from the Cyclopean forge roared the blasts of the mines.
Wonderful and fierce was the mighty symphony of the world, as the terrible voices of metal and fire and water cried out into the listening ears of the gods the furious song of human toil.
Out of the chaos of sound, welded in the unison of one will to sing, rose clear and nimble the divine accord of the hymn:—
Out of the canons of the mountains,
Out of the whirlpools of the lakes,
Out of the entrails of the earth,
Out of the yawning gorges of hell,
From the land and the sea and the sky,
From wherever comes bread and wealth and joy,
And from the peaceful abodes of men, rose majestic and fierce, louder than the roar of the volcano and the bellow of the typhoon, the anthem of human labor to the fatherly justice of the Sun.
But in the great greenish room there was nothing but the silence of dead centuries and of ears that listen no more; and none heard the mighty call of life that roared outside, save the three men who were in the cage.
III
All the good smells, the wholesome smells, the healthy smells of life and labor were outside the great room.
The smell of rain upon the grass and of the flowers consumed by their love for the stars.
The heavy smell of smoke that coiled out of myriads of chimneys of ships and factories and homes.
The dry smell of sawdust and the salty smell of the iron filings.
The odor of magazines and granaries and warehouses, the kingly smell of argosies and the rich scent of market-places, so dear to the women of the race.
The smell of new cloth and new linen, the smell of soap and water and the smell of newly printed paper.
The smell of grains and hay and the smell of stables, the warm smell of cattle and sheep that Virgil loved.
The smell of milk and wine and plants and metals,
And all the good odors of the earth and of the sea and of the sky, and the fragrance of fresh bread, sweetest aroma of the world, and the smell of human sweat, most holy incense to the divine nostrils of the gods, and all the olympian perfumes of the heart and the brain and the passions of men, were outside of the great greenish room.
But within the old room there was nothing but the smell of old books and the dust of things decayed, and the suffocated exhalation of old graves, and the ashen odor of dissolution and death.
Yet all the sweetness of all the wholesome odors of the world outside were redolent in the breath of the three men in the cage.
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Like crippled eagles fallen were the three men in the cage, and like little children who look into a well to behold the sky were the men that looked down upon them.
No more would they rise to their lofty eyries, no more would they soar above the snow-capped mountains—yet, tho’ their pinions were broken, nothing could dim the fierce glow of their eyes, which knew all the altitudes of heaven.
Strange it was to behold the men in the cage while life clamored outside, and strange it seemed to them that they should be there because of what dead men had written in old books.
So of naught did they think but of the old books and the green cage.
Thought they: All things are born, grow, decay, and die and are forgotten.
Surely all that is in this great room will pass away. But what will endure the longer, the folly that was written into the old books or the madness that was beaten into the bands of this cage?
Which of these two powers has enthralled us, the thought of dead men who wrote the old books, or the labor of living men who have wrought this cage?
Long and intently they thought, but they found no answer.
V
But one of the three men in the cage, whose soul was tormented by the fiercest fire of hell, which is the yearning after the Supreme Truth, spoke and said unto his comrades:—
‘Aye, brothers, all things die and pass away, yet nothing is truly and forever dead until each one of the living has thrown a regretless handful of soil into its grave.
‘Many a book has been written since these old books were written, and many a proverb of the sage has become the jest of the fool, yet this cage still stands as it stood for numberless ages.
‘What is it then that made it of metal more enduring than the printed word?