by Howard Fast
This distinction and special treatment troubled him. He was one of almost thirty people who had been arrested, and among them were white shoe workers and white textile workers, housewives, a famous playwright from New York City, and a poet of international reputation; but all of them had been left together. Why, then, had he been separated from them and put by himself?
It was not long before his question was answered. Since this was the very last day before the execution, time was measured in hours or even in minutes, and therefore, whatever was going to happen, could not be too long delayed. He sensed this. He was in the cell only a little while before they came for him, and then they brought him into a room where a number of people awaited him. In this room were two policemen in uniform, two other policemen in plain clothes, and an agent of the Justice Department. Also in this room there was a male stenographer, who sat at one side of the room at a desk, his pad open in front of him, waiting for whatever might develop, for whatever sounds of agony or confession he might have to set down. The two policemen in plain clothes held, each of them, a length of rubber hose, twelve inches of hose an inch in diameter, and as he entered, he saw that they were bending the pieces of hose back and forth; and he had only to look at the hose, to look at the faces of the men in the room, to look at the drab bareness and ugliness of the room to which they had brought him, to know what awaited him. He was an ordinary and a rather simple man, this Negro worker, and when he understood what awaited him, his heart sank and he filled up with fear. His whole body tensed; he twisted himself from side to side, less in an attempt to escape than in involuntary and spasmodic protest of his physical being. Then the men in the room smiled at him, and he knew what their smiles meant.
The representative of the Justice Department explained to him why they had brought him there.
“You see,” he said to the Negro, “we don’t want to make any trouble for you. We certainly don’t want to cause you any pain or misery. We want to ask you some questions and we want you to answer them truthfully. If you do that, you have nothing at all to worry about, and you will be released in just a little while. That is why we have brought you here—to answer these questions. You are an honest man, aren’t you, and a good American?”
“I am a good American,” the Negro replied earnestly.
The two plain clothes men stopped bending the rubber hose, and they both smiled at him. Both of them had wide, thin-lipped mouths; it made them look almost like brothers. They smiled easily and without any difficulty, but also without any humor.
“If you are a good American,” said the man from the Justice Department, “then we won’t have any trouble at all, not one bit of trouble. What we want to know is one simple fact—who paid you to march on that picket line?”
“Nobody paid me,” the Negro answered.
Whereupon, the two plain clothes men stopped smiling, and the Justice Department man shrugged his shoulders rather regretfully. He stopped being as friendly as he had been before, but he was still not unfriendly.
“What’s your name?” he asked the Negro worker.
The Negro told him. The Justice Department man asked him to repeat what he had said a little louder, so that the stenographer could get it. The Negro did this.
“How old are you?” the Justice Department man asked.
The Negro replied that he was thirty-three years old.
“Where are you from?” the Justice Department man inquired.
The Negro told him he was from Providence, and he had come to Boston that same morning on the New York, New Haven and Hartford train.
“Do you work in Providence?” the Justice Department man asked.
With this question, the Negro knew that it was no use at all for him to hope. No matter what he did from here on, he could not change things materially. If he did not tell them where he worked, they would find it out in their own good time and in their own good way, and in the process of finding it out, the music would begin. He knew just what kind of melody the music would play, and he knew who would dance and who would pay the pipers. He was afraid, and not ashamed to admit the fact to himself; and now he put off the final reckoning for a moment; let the music play later. He told them where he worked and they noted it down. He knew he would never work there again. He knew he would never work anywhere in this part of the country again. He had a wife and a three year old daughter, and because of this, there was an added sadness and poignancy in his knowing that he would never work anywhere in this part of the country again. But still, it was happening, and there was nothing at all that he could do about it except to let it happen. It was happening, but it had only begun to happen; and it would go on happening now.
“Why did you come to Boston?” the Justice Department man asked pleasantly enough.
“I came because I don’t think Sacco and Vanzetti should just die like this, with no word or action of protest.”
“Do you think that by coming here you could prevent them from dying?”
“No, sir, I don’t think that.”
“Then if you don’t think that, you are just contradicting yourself, and nothing you say makes any sense. Does it make any sense to you?”
“Yes, sir, it does.”
“Suppose you tell me how it makes sense to you.”
“Well, sir, either I could do nothing, or I could come up here to Boston and see if maybe there wasn’t something to do, something that I might do about them two poor folks.”
“Like what?”
“Like marching in the picket line today.”
The Justice Department man said, his voice suddenly high-pitched and angry, “God damn it now, you are a liar! I sure don’t like to be lied to by a boy like you! It’s not doing yourself any good to lie.”
Then the Justice Department man sat down in a wooden chair, and the two plain clothes men sat down on an old table at one side of the room. The two policemen in uniform walked over to the closed door and stood, one on each side of it, leaning against the door frame. This made a little current of movement in the room, and the Negro worker was acutely aware of this current, and very sensitive to it, for he knew that this current meant that they were through with the first part of their intentions toward him, and would now begin with the second part. They left him standing alone for a while, but they all looked at him. He knew what it meant when many white men looked at you in just that way. Now he thought of his wife and child, and he was overcome with great sadness, just as if someone close to him had died. He realized that this was because death was in the air. They had intended him to understand that death was in the air.
“I just think you are lying,” the man from the Justice Department said. “We want you to tell the truth. If you lie to us, it’s going bad with you. If you tell the truth, we can all be good friends. Now, I think that someone organized you up here to Boston. I also think that someone paid you to walk on that picket line. That’s what we want you to tell us—who organized you up here, and who paid you to go out there and picket? Now, you might feel that whoever did that was a friend of yours, but you are pretty foolish if you feel that way. Just look around you now, and you can see that whoever got you into this was no friend of yours. He certainly wasn’t doing anything to do you any good, so you certainly have no obligation to him. The very best thing you can do is to tell us the truth about who he was and what he paid you.”
“Oh, Lord,” the Negro thought. “Oh, Lord God, this is going to be a trying thing.” And then he shook his head and said no, no one had paid him. He had just come here on his own, no one had told him to do it; he just did it because he knew about Sacco and Vanzetti, and felt very deeply what suffering they had been through. He also tried to explain that one of the reasons why he had come to Boston was that Sacco and Vanzetti were just plain and ordinary working people like himself; but when he began to explain this, they moved in on him and beat him, so that the words were lost and they never heard that part of his story.
They did not beat him very much now.
The two plain clothes men came up to him, one from the side and one from behind him. The one from behind him let him feel the hose back and forth across his kidneys, whipping it hard; and when he pulled away from him, crying out with the pain, the other plain clothes man hit him with the rubber hose across the face, the nose and the eyes, so that his eyes filled with tears and pain, and his nose began to bleed. He backed away, making little noises of pain, and they did not follow him. He saw the blood running down his shirt, and he took a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped the blood away, and then he pressed the handkerchief to his nose. His back, where they had beaten him over the kidneys, hurt a great deal, and his head hurt from the blow across the eyes. He saw everything through a haze, and his eyes were full of tears, nor did the tears stop coming.
“Let’s say this,” said the Justice Department man. “Let’s say that you will be cooperative with us, and then we won’t beat you? My goodness, that’s the last thing in the world we want. Did you know that someone tried to throw a bomb into the judge’s house? Can you imagine that! Here is a judge in a lawful court in this Commonwealth and these United States, and these two sons-of-bitches, Sacco and Vanzetti, come up before him and he does his honorable and Constitutional duty of hearing the evidence and weighing the evidence and then passing sentence. Why, such a man is the rock and the pillar of our lives, of your life as well as my life. You would think, wouldn’t you, that for such a man there would be hosannas of praise. But this is by no means the case. Instead of praise, people organize a bomb-throwing because he sentenced these two red bastards. Don’t you think that bomb-throwing is a terrible business?”
The Negro nodded, and agreed. Yes, he thought so. He thought people who threw bombs, who took life, who murdered and brutalized, were doing terrible things indeed.
“Well, now, I am glad that you feel that way,” the agent said. “It’s going to make everything a lot simpler, because you feel that way. You see, we think we know who threw that bomb. We also think you know. I am going to spell out what I know, and all you have to do is agree to what I know and put your name to it. That means you are bearing lawful witness for the State, and being a good American. Then we let you go. Then we don’t trouble you one bit.”
“But I don’t know,” the Negro worker said. “How can I sign anything if I don’t know? Then I would be signing a lie. I don’t want to lie about such a thing; it’s a serious thing.”
This last was evidently amusing to everyone except the Justice Department agent. The two plain clothes men smiled; the two policemen in uniform also smiled. Only the Justice Department man remained serious and somber, for there was work to be done.
When the work was finished, they carried the Negro to a cell and laid him down inside the cell on a cot. It was there that the Professor of Criminal Law saw him. The Professor of Criminal Law was one of a fairly large number of lawyers who were either attached to the case or had volunteered their services in the Sacco-Vanzetti case. But today, on August 22nd, every one of these lawyers was up to his ears in work, in last minute things, desperate things with shreds of hope, petitions, pleas for a stay of execution, various actions on behalf of people who had been arrested for picketing or arrested for other forms of protest.
The white people who were arrested on the picket line today were worried about what had happened to the Negro, and they informed the Defense Committee that a Negro on the picket line had been put away somewhere by the police, and the Defense Committee asked the Professor of Criminal Law whether he would see what he could do about the case. He said he would, and if the truth be told, he was grateful for the opportunity to do something even so peripherally; for he found waiting helplessly, or indeed any sort of inactivity on this day, absolutely unendurable. He got a writ of habeas corpus, and he went to the police station and demanded to see the Negro. They knew who he was, and they knew that his reputation was not inconsiderable, and therefore the captain of police himself sought out the Justice Department agent and spoke to him about what they should do. He said to him,
“It’s that Jew lawyer from the University, and he wants to see your black boy or make a stink about it. He’s got a writ.”
“I don’t think he ought to see him,” the Justice Department man answered.
A lieutenant of detectives standing by, said, “You cookies come here from Washington, and you come and you go just as free as birds on the wing. We have to live with this city. Tomorrow, the case of Sacco and Vanzetti is maybe over, but we are still earning our daily bread in Boston. What are you going to do with this black boy? Freeze him? Put him on ice for the rest of his natural life? Let the lawyer see him. What the hell is the difference? Nobody’s going to sound off over a jig being pushed around a little.”
“He don’t look very good,” the police captain protested mildly.
“Oh, what the hell! Maybe he didn’t look so good to start. Let this Jew-boy make a stink about it. Who gives a damn? Nobody’s going to wave any banner for no jig.”
So the lawyer was let in, and he stood in the cell where the Negro worker lay stretched out on the bed, his face all beaten to a bloody pulp, his eyes closed, his nose broken, and the blood welling from between cracked lips. He lay there moaning and groaning and whimpering, and the Professor of Criminal Law tried to comfort him in some way and reassure him and explain to him that now it was only a matter of an hour or two before he would be released.
“I am sure grateful to you for this, mister,” the Negro said. “It’s only because I got such awful pain that I can’t properly talk to you and express my gratitude. Also, they closed my eyes and I am just filled with fear that I won’t be able to see again.”
“You will be able to see again,” the Professor of Criminal Law said. “I am going to get you a doctor now. Don’t worry about that. Why did they do it?”
“I wouldn’t sign no confession about knowing a man who they say threw a bomb,” the Negro answered slowly and painfully. “I don’t know nobody who throws bombs, and I just don’t believe them. They’re framing somebody, arid I couldn’t just, in the sight of God and my own self, make a liar out of myself.”
“No, you couldn’t,” said the Professor of Criminal Law, his voice sad and bitter. “Now, take it easy. I am going to get a doctor for you, and as I said, in a few hours you will be out of here and it will all be over.”
Chapter 9
IT WAS about two o’clock in the afternoon of August 22, 1927, that the President of the United States was informed of a rather simple request made of him by the Dictator of Fascist Italy. The Dictator wondered whether clemency of a sort might not be found for two “wretched and unfortunate Italians, under sentence of death by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.” Time was running out, and the very imminence of their death had led the Dictator to approach the President directly. At the same time, the representatives of the State Department who discussed this matter with the President at his ranch house where he was vacationing, made it plain that this formality had been forced upon the Dictator of Italy by great mass pressure. It was common knowledge that among those least loved by the Dictator, were radicals of any sort, and that he would hardly shed tears over the death of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti.
The President had a reputation for thoughtfulness, and his tendency toward long and unbearable silences bolstered this reputation. Somehow or other, it is never accepted as a possibility that people who habitually say little, may take this course because the bleakness of their inner lives gives them very little to say. Silence is far more often the result of emptiness than fullness; but folklore has wrapped it in a mantle of wisdom. In any case, it makes sense that a man does not become President without varied virtues, and naturally this must have been the case with this President. He had thin lips, small eyes, and a long sharp nose; his pinched face was neither gentle nor winning, and his voice was as sharp and rasping as his personality. If he lacked other graces, he must of necessity have had wit. Some people looked in vain for it, but others cl
aimed to have found it, and they characterized him as gnome-like. The word was unfamiliar, and people who had at long last discovered why this man was President, pronounced the g. Whereupon, the newspapers, which had taken to calling the President gnomic, pointed out that the g was silent, and that the word rhymed with the name of the Alaskan town. It was gnomic when the President said,
“The left and the right hands move as the body moves, and if the body is threatened, they defend it together. So with the left and the right in politics.”
The press liked this kind of thing, but the President’s intimates heard him talk otherwise. He was a New Englander, born in Vermont, but raised up in Massachusetts, where he once broke a police strike. He was Governor of the State of Massachusetts at that time, a time when the Boston policemen had been driven beyond endurance by the hunger of their children and the prodding of their wives, who intimated that they were less than men, for even a dog will move against hunger and thirst. So that almost unheard-of thing took place, a police strike; and the country caught the drama of the practically unprecedented situation and blew it up all out of proportion. Into this situation, the man who was now President moved, doing a series of uninspired and obvious things—yet thereafter, it was remembered that he had broken the police strike.