Authors: Thomas Mallon
After Wei’s re-arrest in 1994, his health worsened and he was forbidden to write even his family. A letter from the European Parliament awarding him the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought was sent back, unopened, by his jailers. But when
The Courage to Stand Alone
, a collection of his letters, was published in May 1997, someone had the inspired idea to insert in each copy a postcard addressed to the White House that called for continued American pressure on the Chinese. The purchaser was invited to sign and mail it.
It can’t have hurt: Wei Jingsheng was released from prison six months later and sent to the United States.
WHEN THE NEWLY FREED
Wei held a press conference in New York, observers were struck by a certain merriment, even mischief—the same unlikely traits he had deployed in letters to his jailers. Putting this dissident into an American frame of reference made for some puzzlement, since the commanding demeanor of Martin Luther King remained the unerasable template for moral protest. And yet, if one returns to the long letter King wrote from the Birmingham city jail in April 1963—a document still much less well known than the speech he would give four months later—one finds him carrying out a sly, subversive strategy that had room for at least one bit of Wei’s antic disposition.
King’s words are addressed not to his jailers but to a group of eight clergymen whose published “Appeal for Law and Order and Common Sense” has just criticized the civil rights movement’s illegal, if peaceful, provocations. As King rehearses historical precedent for his tactics and constructs an unhurried anatomy of just versus unjust laws, the stately pace of his letter rebuts the clergymen’s call for patience—he’s displaying it right now—more effectively than any particular point he makes about the movement’s behavior toward the Birmingham city administration.
Begun in the margins of some newsprint and finished on stationery brought by his attorney, King’s letter deploys its crucial word in the tenth paragraph. The word is “tension.” It covers the creative sort that King has been putting into the streets and the stylistic kind he is now putting on paper. Tension is the medium in which he works. Outside jail, he stands “in the middle of two opposing forces in the Negro community”—middle-class complacency and the new Muslim militancy. He is similarly caught between “outright” white oppressors like Sheriff Bull Connor and the self-professed “white moderates,” among whom his recipients no doubt count themselves. To King in his cell, they now appear as possibly a greater impediment than his fire-hosing foes; in fact, as the letter moves on, it becomes clear that King
is
, in the broad sense of things, writing to his jailers.
The letter’s own rhetorical tension manifests itself as a series of
one-two punches. Courtesy precedes attack; praise introduces complaint. King moves deliberately from the legalistic (“I am here because I have basic organizational ties here”) to the transcendent: “Beyond this, I am in Birmingham because injustice is here.” In the course of one sentence, he shifts from sounding like a social theorist to sounding like a prophet, exchanging jargon for poetry at the turn of a comma: “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” In one more tense rhetorical pair, this time of poetic genres, King summarizes the transformation he seeks: the “pending national elegy” must become “a creative psalm of brotherhood.”
The letter’s essential warning—“Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever”—enacts itself in a drama of syntax, a single sentence hundreds of words long, a chain of semicoloned clauses, parallel instances of oppression that each begin with the word “when”:
… when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored;” when your first name becomes “nigger” and your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and when your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.” …
All the “whens”—what grammar calls subordinate clauses—combine into one of King’s marches, a swelling crowd of phrases determined to reach the predicate that will allow the sentence to breathe and be whole. After twenty-nine lines the grammar releases itself, by saying simply: “then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.”
And after more than fifteen pages, the letter, reaching its end, chooses not to explode but subside. It disarms itself—and its recipients—with quietness and a touch of self-mockery. “I must close now,” King says, as if finishing up a casual note to his parents
or a cousin, instead of concluding several thousand words that have just embodied his life’s work. “Never before,” he adds, “have I written a letter this long (or should I say a book?)” But even here, this teasing of himself only sets up some last purposeful taunting of his correspondents: “I’m afraid that [this letter] is much too long to take your precious time. I can assure you that it would have been much shorter if I had been writing from a comfortable desk …”
YEARS BEFORE THE TRIAL
of Alger Hiss or the confirmation of Clarence Thomas turned Americans’ ideological litmus paper one gaudy shade or the other, the case of Sacco and Vanzetti gave them a prolonged chance to put personal politics ahead of forensics. “In our side,” wrote one of the immigrant defendants, “are the high-class professional[s] together with the labor unions, the humble, the Italians …” Across the divide, continued Bartolomeo Vanzetti, quoting the
New York World
in a letter to a supporter, “are business, money and power: business-men, small property owners, salesmen, butchers, bakers, storekeepers, the candle-stick makers, the members of the newest country club …”
Convicted of murdering the security guard and paymaster of a Massachusetts shoe factory, the fish peddler Vanzetti and his anarchist comrade Nicola Sacco spent seven years inside both prison and an emotional hurricane of protest, the movement that finally failed to halt their execution in the summer of 1927. Their “consciousness of guilt” (more likely, argues Richard Polenberg, about other radical activity than the murders) made up the soft legal center of an unconvincing case against them, but nothing—not the hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on their behalf, nor the later discovery of significant evidence that the murders may have been committed by a gang of career criminals—succeeded in getting them a new trial.
“That last moment belongs to us,” Vanzetti told a newspaper reporter not long before his electrocution. “That agony is our triumph.” It flung him into a long, haunting afterlife, plaguing his captors with doubt and his supporters with regret. Vanzetti’s letters,
along with a much smaller selection of Sacco’s, were published fifteen months after the execution. They show the prison walls squeezing a crowd of personalities and voices, from the servile to the apocalyptic, out of the convict and onto the paper. “This enclosure affects my mind a great deal,” he writes. “I feel dizzy and I am never in a good discreet mood to write.” In the jumble of accumulating correspondence, a reader can witness all the different portions of Vanzetti’s brain, as if it’s already been sectioned by a coroner.
A week after his conviction, Vanzetti distinguishes between wanting “that the social wealth would belong to every umane
[sic]
creatures” and committing “robbery for a insurrection.” His innocence, it should be noted, has been conceded even by some students of the case who conclude that Sacco was involved. Still, for all his professions of humility, Vanzetti admits to finding his righteousness “supremely sweet,” and the letters occasionally burst open with messianic references to “two poor Christs” and his own “ascension to the Golgotha.”
His correspondents are most often privileged women who have taken up his cause, and the underlying sexual tension—a sort of chained-up virility, the captured noble savage addressing his ladies bountiful—never leaves a reader’s awareness for very long. Vanzetti explains, almost apologetically, that he cannot temper his radical views for Mrs. Hillsmith, lest he “repay your love, benefits, and sincerity with deceiveness and villancy;” and he cannot send Mrs. Blackwell the reminiscences of his mother that she’s requested, not while “homicide impulses are hammering into my very heart and skull.” The women send him fruit, books, flowers and Valentines, but nothing excites Vanzetti to gratitude like their color postcards, which he fixes to the walls of his cell: “Thank you for the picture of the road. I would walk it barefoot and light as a butterfly in spring days.” When he sympathizes with Mrs. Evans’s broken ankle or says he’s glad to hear of another woman’s salubrious surroundings, the effect will seem heroically kind—or Uriah Heepish—depending on what a reader believes about the author’s innocence or guilt. “It was good of you to write me such a good and beautiful letter as yours
of last,” he replies to Mrs. Evans, “amid the troubles and botherings of a begining at a summer house.”
Unable to share the false hopes of his supporters, he can’t even hide expectations of doom from his mentor and inspiration, the socialist leader Eugene V. Debs: “I came near tearing the letter to pieces,” he tells Alice Stone Blackwell, “when I thought of the sorrow that my words will cause to the Teacher’s heart.” But his letters have to rage and excoriate; they are the safety valve for Vanzetti’s internal blast furnace, which always puts a formidable heat onto the page until it’s time to sign off and “let go this raveing.” From Judge Webster Thayer he expects nothing “other than some ten thousand volts divided in few times; some meters of cheap board and 4x7x8 feet hole in the ground;” and when he thinks of the axe with which he used to chop down trees, “a lust seizes [him] to get a mad delight and exaltation by using them on the necks and trunks of the men-eaters.”
His reading includes Dante and Lincoln and Tagore (“Not a word in all these … beautiful poetries about social problems”), and he presents an unforgettable picture of himself with the two-volume
Rise of American Civilization
“at the light of one lamp, managing to avoid the window’s bars shadows.” With politics less analytic than lyrical (“my beautiful anarchy”), “bliss” remains a favorite word, and through much of his imprisonment, he’s almost as likely to explode in praise of nature as in defiance of his tormentors.
For his loyal correspondents he fashions bits of black humor, as well as a gentler self-mockery about his difficulties with English, which still don’t keep him from stretches of vivid, natural eloquence in these days when “life’s oil is far from my lamp.” Just as often, though, it’s speechifying—the dull blade of any political movement—that enforces a phony rule over the page. During a transfer from Charlestown to Dedham for a court appearance, Vanzetti avidly looks out of the car, making at first a clear-eyed distinction between the employed and the out-of-work “by their way of walking;” but when it comes to a pair of young working-class women, perhaps sisters, he feels obliged to orate instead of depict: “Poor plebian girls, where are the roses of your springtime?” Similarly, he
must “confess” to Mrs. Jack that he’s given some of the surfeit of peaches she sent “to some unfortunate youths” in the prison.
As the half-dozen years of his confinement add up, Vanzetti’s handwriting grows stiffer, less vital. But in the last six months of his life, while his and Sacco’s convictions are reviewed and upheld, the letters come out of him at a frantic rate, sheet after sheet, as if they are all that can keep him alive. “Today I have written, written and written all the time,” he informs Mary Donovan, a labor organizer on his Defense Committee. “Now it is late and I am tired. Yet I cannot help to write to you.” Hours before his death, on August 22, 1927, he is still at it, composing a last apologia, knowing letter writing to be, in the absence of an ability to pray, the only meaningful activity left to him. Two years before, he had pronounced himself unable to see “how our stupid contingence shall inspire and fortify future revolutionists and prisoners.” Now, in a last postscript, not so sure it must all be in vain, he asks the law professor H. W. L. Dana to help “in inserting our tragedy in the history under its real aspect and being.”
A year later, when Sacco and Vanzetti were long dead, the letters took their impassioning place there. When one of the editors presented the published volume to the Massachusetts governor who had allowed the executions to proceed, the governor, upon realizing what he’d been handed, threw the book to the ground. Its falling pages contained Vanzetti’s assertion to Mrs. Jessica Henderson that he “would not trust a feather of an anarchist sparrow to the
bon plesir”
of Governor Alvan T. Fuller.
THE EXECUTION-EVE LETTER
is a genre unto itself: Dead Man Writing, to his loved ones or the world.
In 1603, James I put Sir Walter Raleigh in the Tower of London for plotting with the Spanish to pry James from his brand-new throne. In the letter that Raleigh is thought to have written his wife while waiting for his trial to begin, stoicism is nowhere to be found. “O intolerable infamy!” he cries, gnashing his teeth from paragraph to paragraph. “All my good turns forgotten, all my errors revived and expounded to all extremity of ill.” Expecting the worst, he urges
a posthumous practicality upon Besse, instructing her to forgive his enemies but only for the sake of their son’s welfare. Any second marriage she makes should be “not to please sense, but to avoid poverty and to preserve thy child.” She must regard a new spouse as only her “politic” husband; “let thy son be thy beloved, for he is part of me.”
Once sentence has been passed, Raleigh writes again, “with the dying hand of sometimes thy Husband,” calmly listing instructions on how he should be buried. Without actually retracting his advice about remarriage, he now proposes a less “politic” and more ethereal successor to himself: “Teach your son also to love and feare God whilst he is yet young, that the feare of God may grow with him, and then God will be a husband to you, and a father to him; a husband and a father which cannot be taken from you.” He makes one request of his wife on his own behalf—that she attempt to retrieve letters he sent the Lords “wherein I sued for my life.” He did so only for her sake, not his, and in language that now fills him with shame.