by Howard Fast
With that and more argument, the Professor of Criminal Law finally agreed, and they walked in the summer evening past the State House, where the picket line still moved. As they came alongside of it, they were greeted by many of the people who marched, and the greeting was full of sadness. The tall young woman poet, whose name and verse were known all over the world, grasped the Defense Attorney’s hand, begging him,
“You will do something? It’s not too late, is it?”
“My dear, I will do what I can,” he said.
Six women, walking together two by two, and weeping, carried signs which said, “We are textile workers from Fall River, Massachusetts. God help the mighty in New England if Sacco and Vanzetti die.” On the sidewalk nearby, an old, gray-haired man held by hand a little boy, his grandchild, likely enough, and he whispered to the little boy, explaining and motioning; but when the child began to cry, the old man said worriedly, “No, no—it will not help for you to weep.”
“We must not linger,” the Attorney said, drawing the Professor along. “I have this appointment, and I must not be late.”
“No, tonight is not a night to be late. You know, there never was anything like this before. Why? Why? I don’t think that even when Jesus Christ carried his heavy cross to its destination, there was such grief from mankind. What will perish in us when these two go?”
“I don’t know,” said the Attorney somberly.
“Hope, perhaps?”
“I don’t know. Shall I ask Vanzetti?”
“It would be too cruel.”
“No, I don’t think it would be cruel at all.”
They took a cab to Charlestown. In a very plain tone of voice, the Attorney said to the Professor, “There, a block or two over on our right, is Winthrop Square—Austin Street, Lawrence Street, Rutherford Avenue, the persistence of names, so as to speak. Warren going into Henley—I’ve wondered if that is the same Warren, do you remember, ‘Fear ye foes who kill for hire? Will ye to your homes retire—look behind you, they’re on fire!’ Am I quoting correctly? It must be thirty or forty years since I’ve seen that. And over that way, the monument—”
Only part of the Professor’s attention was held by the words of the other. Both his thoughts and his emotions had responded to the serene quality of the early evening, the pastel beauty of the clouds in the sky acting as prisms for the light of the descending sun, the boats on the water, and all the many sounds and smells, the smell of the clean summer evening air, tinted and textured with smoke from the puffing locomotives, the sounds of train and boat whistles and the mercilessly free passage of birds across the sky. All of it was so beautiful that it created a framework within which death was impossible and vile, and thus, for the moment, he lost all touch with the reality toward which they were moving. He was returned by the dry recollection of the Attorney, who spoke of monuments:
“You would have caught a glimpse of it a moment ago, but in the wrong place. Isn’t that so? I’ve always been under the impression that the monument stands on Bunker Hill, but the battle was fought on Breed’s Hill. That’s where they dug their trenches and crawled into them, poor farmers and laborers facing the best regiments of Europe—”
“Men like Vanzetti?” the Professor asked.
“That doesn’t disturb me, sir. No, really, no. The past is dead. I don’t know what they were like—no one does now, I suppose. One thing I know, they were not people all alone like Sacco and Vanzetti—”
“Alone? Surely they are not alone—no.” The Professor smiled slightly for the first time in hours. “They aren’t alone.”
“I know what you mean—I meant something else. You mean all the millions who weep for them. I’ve discovered that an ocean of tears will not move a small rock. A quarter of a million sign a petition, but what difference does it make?”
“I don’t know,” answered the Professor.
“There you have it. Up there on Bunker Hill, they had their guns in their hands. They underwrote their statement, sir.”
“Don’t you think they wept when Nathan Hale was hanged?”
“I feel like a schoolboy,” the Attorney said to himself. “What old bones we are trying to rattle! Here is this Jew—they seem to recognize suffering, or maybe there’s a bitter smell it leaves in the air—trying to find consolation somewhere. But the past is dead. He put his finger on it, and Sacco and Vanzetti are dying in a world they never made. We come as observers, but what else can we do?”
“There’s the prison,” the Professor said. The evening was golden, but he was filled with fears, and this portent of the beauty of the world, overlaid with a shimmering wash like a George Innes painting, only made the fears he carried with him sharper. There should have been thunder and lightning instead of this, but like a lady of infinite vanity, the world had arrayed herself in sheer perfection. They came up to the grim, octagonal walls of the prison, and for the first time, the Professor caught a glimpse of a further reality, and had insight into the profound meaning of John Donne’s somber warning, “—never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” He was going to his own death, for he was connected with the doomed men, his soul tied to theirs, his memory collective with theirs, his needs as theirs; and though in the years to come, he would forget this night and how he had died, for time does strange things, he would always have a touch of remembrance when he saw golden sunlight or felt the cold shadow of the angel of death passing by.
The Warden greeted them now with the professionally long countenance of a funeral parlor director, and within the prison the good light of day ended. They marched through crypt and catacomb toward the death house.
“I guess you understand that we don’t welcome these days,” the Warden said. “These are bad days for a prison. Let me say that the whole population dies a little with the condemned, and that’s not as fanciful as it might sound. There are little threads tying people together when they live in a jail.”
“Howsoever you see the jail,” thought the Professor.
“And how—how have they been?”
“Good,” the Warden answered. “Within the situation, of course, but how good can anyone be at the end? They are two brave men, believe me, mister.”
The Professor thought this came strangely from a warden, and peered at him uncertainly. The other lawyer had wrapped himself in his own defenses, and his slow steps paced with his memories of this case, a game at first, the way any complex legal case is a game, a puzzle, a problem and a challenge—and then finally, the focus of his life. Well, he had shaken loose from that. When all was said and done, people like Sacco and Vanzetti had always perished under one violence or another. They defied the great shibboleth and rose up to smash images. All other crimes might be forgiven, but the lord and master could not forgive him who cast doubt on lordliness and mastery. That was inevitable; therefore, why did the world protest so?
These thoughts were invaded by the advice of the Warden, who made it plain that to enter the death house on this day was not the least privilege extended by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Few people did it, and perhaps not for anyone else except these very two men.
“Do you know,” the Professor of Criminal Law said wonderingly, “I have never seen either of them. I am going to see them for the first time now.
“You will find them two plain people,” the Warden answered defensively.
“Yes—I’m sure. But you see, to me they have a legendary quality.”
“I can understand that,” said the Attorney for the Defense.
As they came to the wing which contained the death house, the Warden explained, “There are only three cells in the death house, and as you know, they are all three occupied. This is an unusual situation for us—but all three of these men are scheduled to die tonight. Unless, of course, there is a reprieve. Do you think there will be a reprieve?” he asked the Attorney for the Defense.
“I devoutly hope so.”
“I tell them that they should hope, but I don’t
imagine there is too much hope,” the Warden said. “When it has gone this far, it usually rolls on to the end. Now, as you see—I won’t go in there with you; I don’t go in there if I can help it—the three death cells are side by side, and then there is a passage into the room where the electric chair is. You wouldn’t think that there would be protocol in such things, but if you have to do unpleasant things, you might as well do them systematically. If more than one man is going to die, they are placed in cells nearest to the chair in order of their scheduled death. It has been decided that if tonight we must go through with it, Madeiros will be executed first, then Saccb, and then Vanzetti. You will find them in the cells in that order. Please don’t talk to anyone but Sacco or Vanzetti. The permission has been requested and granted for Sacco and Vanzetti, and I will have to hold you to that.”
At first, the Professor of Criminal Law listened to this with cold horror, for it had not seemed possible that men should talk about these things in such a manner, so coldly and calmly, using the words they used in terms of the events they expected. It had seemed to him that such matters, this insane taking of human life, must be so vile that of necessity they were unspeakable and unmentionable, like unspeakable filth of the dirty underlife of some areas of mankind. At first, this was his reaction, but after a moment he realized that if such things take place, then there must needs be words to describe them; and that men who take part in such actions must use those words for want of others. The world was not monstrous secretly with a code language to describe its conditions; what was monstrous was openly monstrous, and the ordinary spoken language calmly fitted all such events. Nor did it stop with language; men, too, fitted into such events, even as he and his companion and colleague, both honorable men, had fitted into this ghastly world of granite walls and iron bars, walking calmly through it toward a house that had been constructed for only one reason—to take life legally. And for this purpose, this Christian and democratic civilization had devised a chair of metal and wood, into which a man could be strapped and held, while electric current of tremendous strength was directed through his body. Yet neither he nor his companion cried aloud with horror or grief; quite to the contrary—they behaved calmly and rationally, his friend saying,
“You may be quite at ease, Warden. I shall observe your rules scrupulously.”
Then the Warden left them, and a prison guard took them into the death house. They walked past the three cells, and as they passed each door, the Professor of Criminal Law looked in curiously—for a man must remain curious, even as he must breathe and sleep. First, he saw Madeiros, who stood in the center of his cell, motionless, thief and murderer waiting for death a few hours away. Then Sacco’s cell. Sacco lay upon his bed, stretched out on his back, his eyes open and fixed on the ceiling. Then Vanzetti’s cell, and Vanzetti waiting for them. He stood at the door of his cell, and he smiled and greeted them warmly and graciously—with a calm more terrible to the Professor than anything else that had happened in all that trying day.
The guard pointed to two wooden chairs which were set a little distance from the door of the cell. “Please sit there, gentlemen,” he said. They sat down, but the Professor realized that by turning his head just a little, he could see the execution chamber and a corner of the chair itself. And no matter how hard he tried not to look that way, it drew his eyes.
It drew him away. The electric chair fixed him and held him to a point where he listened without hearing, and afterwards he could not, for his life, recall the details of the beginning conversation, except to remember that it concerned the release of all attorneys from the privilege of silence, so that no one of them might say that he reserved to himself any secret of the Sacco-Vanzetti case. All would be open and known to all men. This general thing, he recalled, but no more; he was held and obsessed by a prying wonder about the instrument of death, and the whys and wherefores of it and others like it. When it was so simple to open a vein or drink a cup of poison, as Socrates had, why must man’s ingenuity endlessly devise machines, a guillotine, an automatic gallows, a gas chamber, an electric chair?
“In all my life, as I remember, my friend, I do not think I do a crime which a man is ashamed of, or even a small action which is dastardly,” Vanzetti was saying. “It is not that I am a more good man than others, but a plain man, and this is true about plain men. So you need not worry about my innocence. I am innocent.”
Now the words of the Attorney came back to the Professor. He had put it more or less in this fashion—that though he was fully convinced of the innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti, he desired now, in this last hour, a statement to that effect, so that he might utterly refute those who destroyed two innocent men.
“Oh, the horror, the damned, callous ego of such a question!” the Professor thought; nevertheless, Vanzetti had answered it as gently and kindly as if this philosophical conversation were taking place before the warm hearth of a man with many good decades before him.
It was with curious if sorrowful eyes that the Professor observed Bartolomeo Vanzetti, the high, balding forehead, majestic and commanding, the fine brows, the deep-set eyes, the long, straight nose, the full, drooping mustache, and just visible beneath it, the wide and sensitive mouth and the gently-shaped chin. “What a handsome man!” the Professor thought. “What a splendor in his poise and features! He stands there like a king, but the pride is utterly without aloofness. What makes such a man? Where does he come from, standing with such damned dignity and waiting for death?”
And as if in answer to his thoughts, Vanzetti addressed him, saying how glad he was to meet him, and thanking him for what he had done on the case.
“What I did was nothing.”
“Nothing—no, much. When I think how men like you come and join with Sacco and me, my heart overflows. Believe me.
“Believe me,” he repeated, now speaking to the Attorney, “I wish I can say what gratitude I have for all you do for me. I cannot express it fully. You want me to hope now, but I know better. Sacco knows better. Tonight we will die. I am afraid to die, but I am also prepare to die. Not once, but a thousand time, Sacco and myself already die—we are prepare. This is for the cause of mankind, to make an end of man’s oppression of other men. I am filled with sadness, for I never again see sister or family or anyone I love; but not sadness alone. There is also triumph, for men will remember what we suffer—and fight better for a just world.”
“I wish I could believe what you believe, Bartolomeo,” the Attorney said.
“Why should you? How could you? You see here Vanzetti who awaits death. The man is finish—but what went into making the man before he is finish? I call myself now a class conscious man, but I was not born that way. I am born like you, and then when I grow to man, I know little enough. All my years in America, I work like three men, and always I have nothing. But in my heart become a great love for the people who labor beside me. I stop being just Italian. I think, these are my people. Then I work in brickyard in Connecticut and then at stone pit in Meriden. Two years, I work pick and shovel and crowbar in stone pit, and there I learn beautiful dialect of Tuscany because Tuscans work there—but the boss hate, no matter what speech we talk, just work, you damn wops. American man work next to me, and he say to me one day, Hey, Barto, there are two languages, one for boss, one for you and me, and he smile at me and my whole heart go out to him. So I learn that class consciousness not a phrase invented by propagandists, but a real vital force. It comes inside of me, and I stop being animal, a work beast, and I become human being. Then this American talk, always saying, Look at your hands, Barto. All the world is make with your hands, but always someone else take. Even the gun you make to kill your brother with, but he who take the bread you bake, he make nothing, nothing, Barto, nothing. Just look at your hands, Barto—he say. Oh, what a strength in them hands. But not all at once do I understand, but little by little. Now they kill me because I understand that men will some day live like brothers—well, I am not only one must die for that under
standing. But you are out there, my friend. Why should you believe what I believe? I am a worker—always.”
“I am not against you,” the Attorney said. “Bartolomeo, you must understand that I am not against you. But I don’t see any solution to all this with bitterness and hatred.”
“You don’t want me to be bitter,” Vanzetti said. “Should my heart be filled with love for enemy who bring me to moment of my death?”
“After this, there could be violence and hatred, and death piled upon death. Do you want that, Bartolomeo?”
“Did I ever want that?” Vanzetti now asked, with just a slight smile. “We were brought into the courtroom, and there Judge speak that we are people of violence. The District Attorney—he tell the jury, these are terrible, bad and violent men. But where is one little bit of violence that Sacco and me ever lift his hand to? Have we ever hurt man? Is it violence to go to our brothers who are workers and say to them, Maybe for him you bake the whole bread, it is not fair you should eat only the crust? No—look, the violence is done to me. For seven year locked up in prison, tortured, treated like criminal—seven long year in dungeon. That is violence. No such terrible violence was ever done to any human being than you do to gentle Sacco and to me. We are selected and told we have committed terrible crimes in a place where we never go and never even see with our eyes. Then we are tried and cursed and slandered, and for years and years locked away in prison cell. This is violence. For every other human being, one death is enough—but for Sacco and me, a thousand death, and still it is not enough. But day after day we must die again and again. You I respect as good man and friend, but how can you come here and beg me against violence? I never make violence. Is there ever a time in the whole world when some man stand up for brotherhood and a better life, when he is not accused of violence? So with Jesus Christ. I do not compare Sacco and myself with Jesus Christ, and I am also not religious man. But you people who take Christ’s name and call yourself Christian, you never stop crucifying.”