Jailbird - Kurt Vonnegut [75]
“I wish to forgive some people for what they are now doing to me,” he said. The lights of the prison dimmed three times.
The story yet again:
Sacco and Vanzetti never killed anybody. They arrived in America from Italy, not knowing each other, in Nineteen-hundred and Eight. It was the same year in which my parents arrived.
Father was nineteen. Mother was twenty-one.
Sacco was seventeen. Vanzetti was twenty. American employers at that time wanted the country to be flooded with labor that was cheap and easily cowed, so that they could keep wages down.
Vanzetti would say later, “In the immigration station, I had my first surprise. I saw the steerage passengers handled by the officials like so many animals. Not a word of kindness, of encouragement, to lighten the burden of tears that rest heavily upon the newly arrived on American shores.”
Father and Mother used to tell me much the same thing. They, too, were made to feel like fools who had somehow gone to great pains to deliver themselves to a slaughterhouse.
My parents were recruited at once by an agent of the Cuyahoga Bridge and Iron Company in Cleveland. He was instructed to hire only blond Slavs, Mr. McCone once told me, on his father’s theory that blonds would have the mechanical ingenuity and robustness of Germans, but tempered with the passivity of Slavs. The agent was to pick up factory workers, and a few presentable domestic servants for the various McCone households, as well. Thus did my parents enter the servant class.
Sacco and Vanzetti were not so lucky. There was no broker in human machinery who had a requisition for shapes like theirs. “Where was I to go? What was I to do?” wrote Vanzetti. “Here was the promised land. The elevated rattled by and did not answer. The automobiles and the trolleys sped by heedless of me.” So he and Sacco, still separately and in order not to starve to death, had to begin at once to beg in broken English for any sort of work at any wage—going from door to door.
Time passed.
Sacco, who had been a shoemaker in Italy, found himself welcome in a shoe factory in Milford, Massachusetts, a town where, as chance would have it, Mary Kathleen O’Looney’s mother was born. Sacco got himself a wife and a house with a garden. They had a son named Dante and a daughter named Inez. Sacco worked six days a week, ten hours each day. He also found time to speak out and give money and take part in demonstrations for workers on strike for better wages and more humane treatment at work and so on. He was arrested for such activities in Nineteen-hundred and Sixteen.
Vanzetti had no trade and so went from job to job—in restaurants, in a quarry, in a steel mill, in a rope factory. He was an ardent reader. He studied Marx and Darwin and Hugo and Gorki and Tolstoi and Zola and Dante. That much he had in common with Harvard men. In Nineteen-hundred and Sixteen he led a strike against the rope factory, which was The Plymouth Cordage Company in Plymouth, Massachusetts, now a subsidiary of RAMJAC. He was blacklisted by places of work far and wide after that, and became a self-employed peddler of fish to survive.
And it was in Nineteen-hundred and Sixteen that Sacco and Vanzetti came to know each other well. It became evident to both of them, thinking independently, but thinking always of the brutality of business practices, that the battlefields of World War One were simply additional places of hideously dangerous work, where a few men could supervise the wasting of millions of lives in the hopes of making money. It was clear to them, too, that America would soon become involved. They did not wish to be compelled to work in such factories in Europe, so they both joined the same small group of Italian-American anarchists that went to Mexico until the war was over.
Anarchists are persons who believe with all their hearts that governments are enemies