Katherine Anne Porter (123 page)

I remember small, slender Mrs. Sacco with her fine copper-colored hair and dark brown, soft, dazed eyes moving from face to face but still smiling uncertainly, surrounded in our offices by women pitying and cuddling her, sympathetic with her as if she were a pretty little girl; they spoke to her as if she were five years old or did not understand—this Italian peasant
wife who, for seven long years, had shown moral stamina and emotional stability enough to furnish half a dozen women amply. I was humiliated for them, for their apparent insensibility. But I was mistaken in my anxiety—their wish to help, to show her their concern, was real, their feelings were true and lasting, no matter how awkwardly expressed; their love and tenderness and wish to help were from the heart. All through those last days in Boston, those strangely innocent women enlisted their altar societies, their card clubs, their literary round tables, their music circles, and their various charities in the campaign to save Sacco and Vanzetti. On their rounds, they came now and then to the office of my outfit in their smart thin frocks, stylish hats, and their indefinable air of eager sweetness and light, bringing money they had collected in the endless, wittily devious ways of women’s organizations. They would talk among themselves and to her about how they felt, with tears in their eyes, promising to come again soon with more help. They were known as “sob sisters” by the cynics and the hangers-on of the committee I belonged to who took their money and described their activities as “sentimental orgies,” of course with sexual overtones, and they jeered at “bourgeois morality.” “Morality” was a word along with “charitable” and “humanitarian” and “liberal,” all, at one time, in the odor of sanctity but now despoiled and rotting in the gutter where suddenly it seemed they belonged. I found myself on the side of the women; I resented the nasty things said about them by these self-appointed world reformers and I thought again, as I had more than once in Mexico, that yes, the world was a frightening enough place as it was, but think what a hell it would be if such people really got the power to do the things they planned.
*

A last, huge rally took place the night before the execution, with Rosa Sacco and Luigia Vanzetti, Vanzetti’s sister, on the platform. Luigia had been brought from Italy and taken through Paris, where she had been photographed as she was marched through the streets at the head of an enormous crowd—the gaunt, striding figure of a middle-aged, plain woman who looked more like a prisoner herself than the leader of a
public protest. Now they brought her forward with Mrs. Sacco and the two timid women faced the raging crowd, mostly Italians, who rose at them in savage sympathy, shouting, tears pouring down their faces, shaking their fists and calling childish phrases, their promises of revenge for their wrongs. “Never you mind, Rosina! You wait, Luigia! They’ll pay, they’ll pay! Don’t be afraid. . .!” Rosa Sacco spread her hands over her face, but Luigia Vanzetti stared stonily down into their distorted faces with a pure horror in her own. They screamed their violence at her in her own language, trying to hearten her, but she was not consoled. She was led away like a corpse walking. The crowd roared and cursed and wept and threatened. It was the most awesome, the most bitter scene I had ever witnessed.

As we crowded out to the street, a great mass of police all around us, one of the enterprising young reporters who had helped to get up the “little party” for the girls seized my wrist, calling out, “Was this a swell show, I ask you? Did it come off like a house afire? It was all my idea; I got the whole thing up!”
His
face was savage too, wild with his triumph. “I got Luigia out of bed to come here. She said she was too sick, but I got her up! I said, ‘Don’t you want to help your brother?’”

“She speaks English?” I asked in wonder at him. “What did she say?” I had rather liked him before. I have forgotten his name.

“Hell no!” he said. “She’s got an interpreter. She didn’t say anything; she just got up and came along.”

The most terrible irony of this incident of Luigia Vanzetti I learned later: that Mussolini wrote a personal letter to Governor Fuller of Massachusetts asking for mercy for the two Italians. I had known and talked with a number of the earlier refugees from Mussolini’s Italy of 1922 and onward in Mexico, and I knew well what his mercy was like toward anyone unlucky enough to displease him. But at that time, Mussolini had many admirers and defenders in this country—he was more than respectable; he was getting enormous flattering publicity. There was a group of Mussolini enthusiasts in Boston, picketing and working and going to jail and being let out, then putting their heads together in the evening to sing “Giovinezza.” No harm done. The Communists thought them beneath contempt,
and the liberals, the true democrats as they believed themselves to be, were then in the heyday of practicing what they preached, and were ready to fight and die for anybody’s right to his own beliefs, no matter what—religious, social, or political. I thought wryly of Voltaire’s impassioned defense of an individual’s right to say what he believed, but all I could salvage at that time was that
I
disagreed with most of what some of these “liberals” were saying and
I
would defend to the death my right to disagree. “Ha,” said my little publicity inventor, listening a split second to the sweating, howling, cheering crowd—“Talk about free speech! How’s that? Their heads will be the first to roll.” This phrase was one of the Communist crowd’s favorites, and the very thought of rolling heads would bring a mean, relishing smile to even the dourest face.

After Mr. James had bailed us out for the last time, we returned to the hotel and got ready to go to the Charlestown Prison where the execution was to take place at midnight. It seems odd, perhaps, but I joined with a group of persons to go in a taxi to the prison and I cannot remember a name or a face among them. It is possible that they were all strangers to me. There were several hundred of us who had been picketing in relays all day, every day from the 21st and for four days, and their faces and names, perhaps known at that moment, have vanished; and yet, when the thing was done, I remember returning with persons well known to me and several incidents which happened later. The driver of our cab did not want us to go to the Charlestown Prison. Neither did the police stationed at regular distances along the whole route. They stopped our cab and turned us back half a dozen times. We would direct the driver to go a roundabout way, or to take a less traveled street. But at last, he refused to drive farther. We left him then, after making up the fare among ourselves. I was nearly penniless and I know now that a good many others among us were too. We walked on toward the prison, coming as near as we could, for the crowd was enormous and in the dim light silent, almost motionless, like crowds seen in a dream. I was never in that place but once, but I seem to remember it was a great open square with the crowd massed back from a center the police worked constantly to keep clear. They were all mounted
on fine horses and loaded with pistols and hand grenades and tear gas bombs. They galloped about, bearing down upon anybody who ventured out beyond the edge of the crowd, charging and then pulling their horses up short violently so that they reared and their forehoofs beat in the air over a human head, but always swerving sharply and coming down on one side. They were trained, probably, to this spectacular, dangerous-looking performance, but still, I know it is very hard to force a good horse to step on any living thing. I have seen them in their stalls at home shudder all over at stepping on a stray, newly hatched chicken. I do not believe the police meant for the hoofs to strike and crush heads—it possibly was just a very showy technique for intimidating and controlling a mob.

This was not a mob, however. It was a silent, intent assembly of citizens—of anxious people come to bear witness and to protest against the terrible wrong about to be committed, not only against the two men about to die, but against all of us, against our common humanity and our shared will to avert what we believed to be not merely a failure in the use of the instrument of the law, an injustice committed through mere human weakness and misunderstanding, but a blindly arrogant, self-righteous determination not to be moved by any arguments, the obstinate assumption of the infallibility of a handful of men intoxicated with the vanity of power and gone mad with wounded self-importance.

A few foolish persons played a kind of game with the police, waiting until they had turned to charge in the other direction, stepping out defiantly into the center, rushing with raucous yells of glee back to safety when the police turned their horses and came on again. But these were only the lunatic fringe that follows excitement—anything will do. Most of the people moved back passively before the police, almost as if they ignored their presence; yet there were faces fixed in agonized disbelief, their eyes followed the rushing horses as if this was not a sight they had expected to see in their lives. One tall, thin figure of a woman stepped out alone, a good distance into the empty square, and when the police came down at her and the horse’s hoofs beat over her head, she did not move, but stood with her shoulders slightly bowed, entirely still. The charge was repeated again and again, but she was not to be driven
away. A man near me said in horror, suddenly recognizing her, “That’s Lola Ridge!” and dashed into the empty space toward her. Without any words or a moment’s pause, he simply seized her by the shoulders and walked her in front of him back to the edge of the crowd, where she stood as if she were halfconscious. I came near her and said, “Oh no, don’t let them hurt you! They’ve done enough damage already.” And she said, “This is the beginning of the end—we have lost something we shan’t find again.” I remember her bitter hot breath and her deathlike face. She had not long to live.

For an endless dreary time we had stood there, massed in a measureless darkness, waiting, watching the light in the tower of the prison. At midnight, this light winked off, winked on and off again, and my blood chills remembering it even now—I do not remember how often, but we were told that the extinction of this light corresponded to the number of charges of electricity sent through the bodies of Sacco and Vanzetti. This was not true, as the newspapers informed us in the morning. It was only one of many senseless rumors and inventions added to the smothering air. It was reported later that Sacco was harder to kill than Vanzetti—two or three shocks for that tough body. Almost at once, in small groups, the orderly, subdued people began to scatter, in a sound of voices that was deep, mournful, vast, and wavering. They walked slowly toward the center of Boston. Life felt very grubby and mean, as if we were all of us soiled and disgraced and would never in this world live it down. I said something like this to the man walking near me, whose name or face I never knew, but I remember his words—“What are you talking about?” he asked bitterly, and answered himself: “There’s no such thing as disgrace anymore.”

I don’t remember where we left Lola Ridge, nor how it came about that a certain number of us gathered in one of the hotel rooms, among them, Grace Lumpkin, Willie Gropper the cartoonist, Helen O’Lochlainn Crowe, Michael Gold, a man or two whose names I never knew—yet I recall that one of them said, “Damn it, I’m through. I’d like to leave this country!” Someone asked bitterly, “Well, where would you go?” and half a dozen voices called as one, “Russia!” in their infatuated ignorance, but it was touching because of its sincerity; there was
a fervor like an old-fashioned American revival meeting in them and there was a bond between them. Some of them were the children of the oldest governing families and founders of this nation, and an astonishing number were children of country preachers or teachers or doctors—the “salt of the earth”—besides the first-born generation of emigrants who had braved the escape, the steerages, the awful exile, to reach this land where the streets, they had heard, were paved with gold. I felt somewhat alien from this company because of my experience with would-be Communists in Mexico and because of my recent exposure to the view of a genuine Party official; yet in those days, I was still illusioned to the extent that I half accepted the entirely immoral doctrine that one
should
go along with the Devil if he worked on your side; but my few days in the same office with Rosa Baron and her crowd had shaken this theory too, as it proved, to the foundation. Two truisms: The end does
not
justify the means and one I discovered for myself then and there, The Devil is
never
on your side except for his own purposes.

Does all of this sound very old-fashioned, like the Communist vocabulary or the early Freudian theories? Well, it was fifty years ago and I am not trying to bring anything up-to-date. I am trying to sink back into the past and recreate a certain series of events recorded in scraps at the time which have haunted me painfully for life.

Somebody suggested that he would like a drink. Michael Gold said he knew where to find it and went out and bought a bottle of bootleg gin; and then, nobody wanted to drink after all except one girl I have not named—an Irish Catholic girl I had never known to be anything but tender and gentle, now strode up and down the room in pure hysteria, swinging the open bottle of gin and singing in a loud flat voice a comic old song about an Irish wake: “They took the ice from off the corpse and put it in the beer—your feyther was a grand old man—give us a drink!” and she would upend the bottle and take a swig with a terrible tragic face and try to hand it around. Somebody shouted the first line of the Internationale; someone else began
“Giovinezza, giovinezza! Primavera di bellezza!”
drowning each other out and the hysterical striding girl
too—I was ashamed of it, for it was no moment for a low sense of humor to assert itself, or so it seemed to me, but I thought, “Suppose I started singing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’? I bet I’d get thrown out of a window!” I felt a chill of distrust or estrangement—I was far from home, a stranger in a strange land indeed, for the first time in my life.