Jailbird - Kurt Vonnegut [74]
Kenneth Whistler promised us that the time was at hand for workers to take over their factories and to run them for the benefit of mankind. Profits that now went to drones and corrupt politicians would go to those who worked, and to the old and the sick and the orphaned. All people who could work would work. There would be only one social class—the working class. Everyone would take turns doing the most unpleasant work, so that a doctor, for example, might be expected to spend a week out of each year as a garbage man. The production of luxury goods would stop until the basic needs of every citizen were met. Health care would be free. Food would be cheap and nourishing and plentiful. Mansions and hotels and office buildings would be turned into small apartments, until everyone was decently housed. Dwellings would be assigned by means of a lottery. There would be no more wars and eventually no more national boundaries, since everyone in the world would belong to the same class with identical interests—the interests of the working class.
And on and on.
What a spellbinder he was!
Mary Kathleen whispered in my ear. “You’re going to be just like him, Walter.”
“I’ll try,” I said. I had no intention of trying.
The most embarrassing thing to me about this autobiography, surely, is its unbroken chain of proofs that I was never a serious man. I have been in a lot of trouble over the years, but that was all accidental. Never have I risked my life, or even my comfort, in the service of mankind. Shame on me.
People who had heard Kenneth Whistler speak before begged him to tell again about leading the pickets outside Charlestown Prison when Sacco and Vanzetti were executed. And it seems, strange to me now that I have to explain who Sacco and Vanzetti were. I recently asked young Israel Edel at RAMJAC, the former night clerk at the Arapahoe, what he knew about Sacco and Vanzetti, and he told me confidently that they were rich, brilliant thrill-killers from Chicago. He had them confused with Leopold and Loeb.
Why should I find this unsettling? When I was a young man, I expected the story of Sacco and Vanzetti to be retold as often and as movingly, to be as irresistible, as the story of Jesus Christ some day. Weren’t modern people, if they were to marvel creatively at their own lifetimes, I thought, entitled to a Passion like Sacco and Vanzetti’s, which ended in an electric chair?
As for the last days of Sacco and Vanzetti as a modern Passion: As on Golgotha, three lower-class men were executed at the same time by a state. This time, though, not just one of the three was innocent. This time two of the three were innocent.
The guilty man was a notorious thief and killer named Celestino Madeiros, convicted of a separate crime. As the end drew near, he confessed to the murders for which Sacco and Vanzetti had been convicted, too.
Why?
“I seen Sacco’s wife come here with the kids, and I felt sorry for the kids,” he said.
Imagine those lines spoken by a good actor in a modern Passion Play.
Madeiros died first. The lights of the prison dimmed three times.
Sacco died next. Of the three, he was the only family man. The actor portraying him would have to project a highly intelligent man who, since English was his second language and since he was not clever with languages, would not trust himself to say anything complicated to the witnesses as he was strapped into the electric chair.
“Long live anarchy,” he said. “Farewell, my wife, and child, and all my friends,” he said. “Good evening, gentlemen,” he said. “Farewell, Mother,” he said. This was a shoemaker. The lights of the prison dimmed three times.
Vanzetti was the last. He sat down in the chair in which Madeiros and Sacco had died before anyone could indicate that this was what he was expected to do. He began to speak to the witnesses before anyone could tell him that he was free to do this. English was his second language, too, but he could make it do whatever he pleased.
Listen to this:
“I wish to tell you,” he said, “that